Jakob Nielsen
Co-Founder & Retired PrincipalJakob Nielsen, Ph.D. is a usability pioneer who co-founded Nielsen Norman Group with Dr. Don Norman. Jakob retired from NN/g on April 1, 2023; and promoted Kara Pernice, then Sr. Vice President, to be President & CEO. Sarah Gibbons, Hoa Loranger, and Kate Moran round out the rest of the company’s talented senior leadership team.
Books
- Mobile Usability, 2012
- Eyetracking Web Usability, 2010
- Prioritizing Web Usability, 2006
- Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed, 2001 (113 guidelines for homepage design)
- Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity, 1999: a quarter million copies in print; 22 languages
- International User Interfaces, 1996 (co-editor with Elisa del Galdo)
- Multimedia and Hypertext: The Internet and Beyond, 1995: second edition of textbook on linked online information
- Advances in Human-Computer Interaction Vol. 5, 1995 (editor)
- Usability Inspection Methods, 1994 (co-editor with Robert L. Mack): with chapters by each of the inventors of these methods
- Usability Engineering, 1993: textbook on methods to make interfaces easier to use
- Hypertext and Hypermedia, 1990: first edition of the 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
Jakob Nielsen holds a Ph.D. in human–computer interaction (HCI) from the Technical University of Denmark in Copenhagen.
From 1994 to 1998 he was a Sun Microsystems Distinguished Engineer. He was hired to make heavy-duty enterprise software easier to use, since large-scale applications had been the focus of most of his projects at the phone company and IBM. But luckily the job definition of a Distinguished Engineer is "you're supposed to be the world's leading expert in your field, so you figure out what would be most important for the company for you to work on." Therefore, Dr. Nielsen ended up spending most of his time at Sun on defining the emerging field of Web usability. He was usability lead for several design rounds of Sun's website and intranet (SunWeb), including the original SunWeb design in 1994.
Dr. Nielsen's earlier affiliations include Bellcore (Bell Communications Research, Morristown, NJ), the IBM User Interface Institute at the T.J. Watson Research Center (Yorktown Heights, NY), the Technical University of Denmark (Copenhagen), and Aarhus University (Århus, Denmark).
Professional journal editorial board memberships: Behaviour & Information Technology, Foundations and Trends in Human-Computer Interaction, Interacting with Computers, Journal of Usability Studies (JUS), International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, The New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia. For each journal, contact the editor-in-chief to submit a manuscript.
In June 2000, Dr. Nielsen was inducted into the Scandinavian Interactive Media Hall of Fame and in April 2006, he was inducted into the ACM Computer-Human Interaction Academy. He was the 2013 recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award for Human–Computer Interaction Practice from SIGCHI, the premiere professional society in the HCI field.
Jakob retired from NN/g on April 1, 2024, and acted as a Board member until February 2024. While no longer working with NN/g, he continues to pursue knowledge and publish about UX today.
Profiles
Some profiles and interviews on other sites:
- Digital Web Magazine An interview with Dr. Jakob Nielsen, usability expert
- eLearningPost Jakob Nielsen on e-learning
- New York Times Making Web Sites More 'Usable'
- SitePoint Interview with Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D.
- BusinessWeek World's Most Influential Designers
- IT Conversations Jakob Nielsen podcast
- CIO Insight Time for a Redesign: Dr. Jakob Nielsen
- Webdesigner Depot Interview with Web Usability Guru, Jakob Nielsen
- UTest.com Testing the Limits With Jakob Nielsen
Standard Name Identifiers
- International Standard Name Identifier: ISNI 0000 0000 8407 9633
- Virtual International Authority File VIAF ID 110674979
- Library of Congress Control Number: LCCN n88177029
- Open Researcher and Contributor ID: ORCID 0000-0002-1554-3062
- WorldCat