Jakob Nielsen, PhD - Plainspoken, Hard-hitting and Unorthodox

Jakob Nielsen addresses some of the criticism he’s faced, calls on UXers to urgently adopt AI, and shares why he believes the commoditisation of UX is a good thing.

Highlights include:

• Are you surprised by how much you’ve offended some people?
• Why do UXers need a greater sense of urgency about adopting AI?
• Were the hiring practices at your previous company elitist?
• What is the state of UX today and where is the growth potential?
• Will AI impede our ability to develop our professional judgement?

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Who is Jakob Nielsen, PhD?

Jakob is the founder of UX Tigers, the website and associated substack he uses to bring his 41 years of UX knowledge and experience to the world, in what he has described as a plainspoken, hard-hitting and not bowing to orthodoxy kind-of-way.

Before founding UX Tigers, Jakob was the co-founder and principal - for 25 years - of a rather well known UX consultancy, the Nielsen Norman Group.

His other notable roles include being a distinguished engineer at Sun Microsystems, and a member of the research staff at Bell Communications Research - one of the world’s top three HCI labs in the 1990s.

Jakob is known for many other things, among which are being the founder of the discount usability movement, the foundational 10 usability heuristics for user interface design, and the eponymously named Jakob’s Law of Internet User Experience. 

He is the holder of no less than 79 United States patents and the author of 8 books, including the best-selling “Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity”, “Usability Engineering”, and the pioneering “Hypertext and Hypermedia”.

In 2013, Jakob received the Lifetime Achievement Award for HCI Practice from ACM SIGCHI and in 2024 he was named a “Titan of Human Factors” by the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.

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Find Jakob here:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakobnielsenphd/
Website: https://www.uxtigers.com/

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