Nielsen, Jakob

1957–

Web Usability Guru

Jakob Nielsen is a computer-interface engineer, an author, and a researcher in human-computer interaction, and is the best-known expert on Web-site usability. Usability is determined by “how well a Web site allows its users to navigate and transact business efficiently, and with a minimum of swearing, scowling and confusion,” as he once told BusinessWeek magazine. For Nielsen, that invariably means keeping Web design simple.

Nielsen is credited with forming the “discount usability engineering” movement, which aims to create fast and cheap improvements in user interfaces. He has invented several such methods, including one known as “heuristic evaluation,” the goal of which is to find usability problems within Web-page design so that they can be fixed in subsequent redesigns. He holds some 71 patents, mostly for technologies and methods intended to make the Internet easier to use.

As he has gained experience in the field of Web usability, Nielsen has grown ever more convinced that the strongest key to a usable Web site lies in its ability to convey content to users effectively and quickly. For Nielsen, issues such as effective site navigation and underlying interface technologies take a back seat to good content, a commodity he still considers hard to find.

The son of a Danish TV network executive and a psychologist, Nielsen was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1957, one day after the Sputnik satellite launched. While attending high school in 1974, he had his first computer experience with an already outdated Dutch GIER mainframe manufactured in 1961, which took up an entire room, had 5KB (kilo-bytes) of random-access memory, relied on punch-tape storage, and had no integrated circuits. However, it was a simple computer, and easy to use. Later, as a college student, he switched to his first “modern” time-shared mainframe. “It was a horrible computer and one of the reasons I work in usability,” he told the U.K.'s Guardian newspaper. “Personally speaking, that experience gave me the feeling that modern computers are alienating,” he told an interviewer for http://Webreference.com, “because when I made the switch, my computer didn't feel like my machine anymore. It felt like the computer was dominating me, as opposed to me dominating the computer.”

During those early years, Nielsen fell under the influence of hacker hero Ted Nelson and his 1974 book Computer Lib/Literary Machines, which discussed improving the ways that computers were designed and used, with the aim of bettering the human condition. Nielsen earned his undergraduate and master's degrees at Aarhus University in Denmark, and as early as 1983, he began to research usability issues relating to everything from the ergonomics of software to Videotex systems and the Macintosh interface. He was first exposed to hypertext in 1984, and first encountered the Internet the following year. He earned his Ph.D. in user-interface design and computer science from the Technical University of Denmark in 1988, and worked there as an assistant professor from 1986 to 1990. He began working on computer usability studies as an undergraduate student in the early 1980s.

In the early 1990s, Nielsen served on the research staff at Bell Communications Research (Bellcore), and was also affiliated with the IBM User Interface Institute at the T.J. Watson Research Center. During that period, he published his first book, Hypertext and Hypermedia (1990), although he had edited several others in previous years; he has since written eight more. He first encountered the early World Wide Web during this period, in 1991, using one of the earliest line-mode browsers.

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