Jakob Nielsen Biography

Jakob Nielsen is a well-known Web design consultant and is considered to be the world's leading expert on Web usability. He calls himself a guru of Web usability in his promotional material and is regarded as one of the Web's most influential people.

Jakob Nielsen was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1957 where he went to school. In 1973, at the age of 16, Nielsen owned his first computer. This computer was a Gier and it worked on a punch tape system and had four kilobytes of memory. This experience helped to reinforce the young Nielsen's interest in computers. When he went to university (Aarhus University, Denmark) it was to study computer science. Here he was awarded a B.Sc. and subsequently an M.Sc., both in computer science. He then moved to the Technical University of Denmark at Copenhagen where he studied for a Ph.D. in user interface design and computer science. In 1985 Nielsen worked at IBM as a visiting scientist--at their User Interface Institute at the T.J. Watson Research Center--where he studied users and how they interacted with various interfaces. This had been a recurring theme in Nielsen's studies since 1983 when he became interested in human interactions with computers. From 1986 to 1990 Nielsen worked as an assistant professor at the Technical University of Denmark, where he taught user interface design and other topics. He was awarded his Ph.D. in 1988. In 1990 Nielsen took up a position at Bell Communications Research (Bellcore) where he worked with hypertext, online systems, and telephony interfaces. He left Bell in 1994 to work for Sun Microsystems where, as a distinguished engineer, he worked on defining the next generation of object orientated interfaces. Nielsen was employed by SunSoft, which is the software arm of Sun Microsystems. His other work at Sun included designing the user interface for their next generation of online documentation and enhancing the maturity level of current usability engineering methodology. Nielsen also co-designed the Sun Microsystems internal intranet system--SunWeb--in 1994.

Since leaving Sun in 1998 Nielsen has worked as a consultant for businesses seeking a Web presence--he advises on human factors and their relationship with Web browsing. He carries this out through his position as a user advocate and principal of the Nielsen Norman Group, which he co-founded with Donald A. Norman (former vice president of research at Apple Computers) in 1998. As part of his consultancy business Nielsen advocates a user-centered Web design approach, believes that a Web page should ease rather than hinder a user's interactions with the Web site, and discourages the use of unnecessary technology and gimmicks. As a logical extension of his core work Nielsen also regards himself as an e-commerce consultant--Nielsen makes Web sites easier to use, and the easier they are to use the more items they can sell. At a daily consulting rate of $20,000, only Web sites that sell a lot can afford to use him, although much useful information is available in his numerous publications. For those wondering whether Nielsen advocates total Web site designs (not just a tacking on of something that seems like a good idea at the time), he also preaches the avoidance of any technology that is less than two years old--he feels it needs this time to penetrate to the majority of users. Nielsen is also an advocate of the abolition of the Mac and Windows graphic user interfaces. The Nielsen Norman Group is based in California where Nielsen lives with his wife. For relaxation Nielsen indulges in his loves of science fiction, travel, and good food. In 2000 Nielsen was inducted into the Scandinavian Interactive Media Hall of Fame.

As of 2001 Nielsen holds nearly 60 U.S. patents, the majority concerned with ways to make the Internet easier to use. Nielsen founded the "discount usability engineering" movement to aid in rapid improvements of the user interface system, one output of which is heuristic evaluation. He writes several Web columns on the Internet, one of which regularly gets over nine million views per year. Nielsen also serves on the editorial boards of several noted technology journals including The New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia, Personal Technologies, and a number of Association of Computer Machinery (ACM) publications. With nine popular books on Web usability to his name, including Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity and Multimedia and Hypertext: The Internet and Beyond, and over 130 separate publications in scientific journals, it is no exaggeration to say that Jakob Nielsen has had, and will continue to have, a profound affect on how we use and Interact with the Web.