Designing Web Usability

Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D. is a User Advocate specializing in web usability and a principal of Nielsen Norman Group (http://www.nngroup. com), which he co-founded with Dr. Donald A. Norman, former vice president of Apple Research. Until 1998, Dr. Nielsen was a Sun Microsystems Distinguished Engineer and led that company's web usability efforts starting with the original design of SunWeb in early 1994. His previous affiliations include the IBM User Interface Institute, Bell Communications Research, and the Technical University of Denmark. Nielsen is the author and editor of 8 other books and more than 75 research papers on usability engineering, user interface design, and hypertext. He is also a frequent keynote presenter at industry conferences. Nielsen is the founder of the "discount usability engineering" movement for fast and simple ways of improving user interfaces. Nielsen's Alertbox column about web usability has been published on the Internet since 1995 (http://www.useit.com/alertbox) and currently has about 100,000 readers. He is also the usability columnist for Ziff-Davis Network's DevHead and a web design critic for Internet World magazine. He holds 46 U.S. patents, mainly on ways to make the Internet easier to use. Dr. Nielsen's website is at http://www.useit.com: It's text-only and pretty fast.