When Nielsen Speaks . . .
By Yvonne L. Lee
If anyone's name has come to mean usability, it's Jakob Nielsen's.
The New York Times called him "a guru of Web usability;" USA Today called him a "true time machine" for predicting Web trends; and the Chicago Tribune says he "knows more about what makes Web sites work than anyone else on the planet." His 1994 book, Usability Engineering was the pioneering work on creating interfaces that people can understand and operate, and his current book, Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity, takes those principles and applies them to the Web.
In August 1998, Nielsen cofounded Nielsen Norman Group with Don Norman, former vice president of Apple's research division. From 1994 until then, he had been a Sun Microsystems Distinguished Engineer in the SunSoft Science Office in Menlo Park, CA. From 1990 to 1994 he was the principal investigator for usability engineering research in Bellcore's Applied Research Area in Morristown, NJ.
Nielsen spoke with Web Techniques' senior editor Yvonne Lee before his company's User Experience World Tour, a 12-city series of conferences designed to gather usability experts and to spread the gospel of simpler, more navigable Web sites.
WT: What is usability?
JN: Well, it's really defined as supporting the user's task, that is, making it easy for people to do what they want to do.
There are five components. The first is ease of learning. When you don't know how to do something, how easy is it to gain that knowledge? On the Web, you constantly hit new pages, and you have very little motivation to start a learning process.
