Jakob Nielsen

According to the New York Times, Jakob Nielson is "The Guru of Web Page Usability;"
further appellations can be found in the biography on this Website. He terms himself a "user advocate."

Nielsen founded the "discount usability engineering" movement for fast and cheap
improvements of user interfaces and has invented several usability methods, including heuristic evaluation. His famous statement, based on the Nielsen-Landauer model from 1993, "Five test persons are enough" has recently been discussed controversially in the HCI community.

Nielsen authors the Alertbox column on Web usability, which is published on the Internet since 1995 and has a current readership of 10 million page views per year (Jakob Nielsen's Websitse: www.useit.com). He wrote a number of influential books, such as Usability Engineering and Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity. His newest book Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed from 2001 presents more than 100 guidelines for better homepage design.

Nielsen is principal of the Nielsen Norman Group (www.NNgroup.com) which he co-
founded with Donald A. Norman. Until 1998 he was a Sun Microsystems Distinguished
Engineer.
(from www.useit.com/jakob/index.html, adapted)

Read his bio on the company Website: www.useit.com/jakob/index.html