About Jakob Nielsen

Jakob Nielsen has been called:

• "the king of usability" (Internet Magazine)
• number 6 of the Web's 10 most influential people (ZDNet)
• "" (USA Today)
• "the smartest person on the Web" (ZDNet AnchorDesk)
• "the world's leading expert on Web usability" (U.S. News & World Report)
• "" (Stuttgarter Zeitung, Germany)
• "knows more about what makes Web sites work than anyone else on the planet" (Chicago Tribune, March 6, 2000)
• "perhaps the best-known design and usability guru on the Internet" (Financial Times)
• "the usability Pope" (Wirtschaftswoche Magazine, Germany)
• "new-media pioneer" (Newsweek)
• "" (CONTENTIOUS Magazine)

Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D., is a User Advocate and principal of the Nielsen Norman Group which he co-founded with Dr. Donald A. Norman (former VP of research at Apple Computer). Until 1998 he was a Sun Microsystems Distinguished Engineer.

Dr. Nielsen founded the "discount usability engineering" movement for fast and cheap improvements of user interfaces and has invented several usability methods, including heuristic evaluation. He holds 76 United States patents, mainly on ways of making the Internet easier to use.

Column

Alertbox column on Web usability, published on the Internet since 1995 (current readership: 10 million page views per year).

Books

• Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed, 2001 (113 guidelines for homepage design)
• Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity, 2000: a quarter million copies in print; 22 languages
• Usability Engineering, 1994: textbook on the methods needed to make interfaces easier to use
• Multimedia and Hypertext: The Internet and Beyond, 1995: second edition of textbook on linked online information
• Usability Inspection Methods, 1994 (co-editor with Robert L. Mack): with chapters by each of the inventors of these methods
• International User Interfaces, 1996 (co-editor with with Elisa del Galdo)
• Advances in Human-Computer Interaction Vol. 5, 1995 (editor)
• Hypertext and Hypermedia, 1990: the first edition of classic textbook (no longer in print)
• Designing User Interfaces for International Use, 1990 (editor)
• Coordinating User Interfaces for Consistency, 1989 (editor): still the best book on how to get a standard look-and-feel (reprint edition published 2002)

Professional Background

Dr. Nielsen was usability lead for several design and redesign rounds of Sun's website and intranet (SunWeb), including the original SunWeb design in 1994.

His earlier affiliations include Bellcore (Bell Communications Research), the Technical University of Denmark, and the IBM User Interface Institute at the T.J. Watson Research Center. He holds a Ph.D. in user interface design/computer science from the Technical University of Denmark.

Nielsen is on the editorial board of Morgan Kaufmann Publishers' book series in Interactive Technologies; contact him if you are planning an advanced book on user interfaces.

In June 2000, Dr. Nielsen was inducted into the Scandinavian Interactive Media Hall of Fame.

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