Textbook of Usability

b. 1957, Copenhagen, Denmark · Web usability consultant and researcher; co-founder of NN/g

Also known as: Jacob Nielsen

Jakob Nielsen is the principal architect of heuristic evaluation as a practical inspection method. Trained at the Technical University of Denmark, he worked at Bellcore and Sun Microsystems before co-founding the Nielsen Norman Group with Donald Norman in 1998.

His 1990 paper with Rolf Molich introduced a short list of heuristics that a small team of evaluators could apply without users present, and his 1994 revision settled on the ten heuristics still in use today (visibility of system status, match with the real world, user control and freedom, consistency and standards, error prevention, recognition rather than recall, flexibility and efficiency, aesthetic and minimalist design, error recovery, and help and documentation). The same body of work showed empirically that three to five evaluators uncover most known usability problems, and that combining a handful of independent evaluators is more effective than relying on any single expert.

Nielsen has authored several widely-cited books, including Usability Engineering (1993) and Designing Web Usability (2000), and writes the long-running Alertbox column at NN/g. His work shaped the practice of low-cost, fast-feedback evaluation that any product team can run without a research lab.