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Articles

Jakob Nielsen

Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D., is a retired principal and co-founder (with Dr. Donald A. Norman) of the Nielsen Norman Group. Jakob established the "discount usability engineering" movement for fast and cheap improvements of user interfaces and invented the heuristic evaluation method.

Articles and Videos

  • Mental Models

    What users believe they know about a user interface impacts how they use it. Mismatched mental models are common, especially with designs that try something new.

  • AI for UX: Getting Started

    Use generative-AI tools to support and enhance your UX skills — not to replace them. Start with small UX tasks and watch out for hallucinations and bad advice.

  • The 4 Degrees of Anthropomorphism of Generative AI

    Users attribute human-like qualities to chatbots, anthropomorphizing the AI in four distinct ways — from basic courtesy to seeing AI as companions.

  • The Solo UX Researcher: How to Grow

    Dr. Jakob Nielsen answers the audience question "As the only UX researcher on my team, how do I learn and grow?"

  • Accordion Editing and Apple Picking: Early Generative-AI User Behaviors

    Two new user behaviors are prevalent in interactions with text-based AI chatbots. User research shows the iterative and often complex ways users engage with AI tools for productivity.

  • AI Improves Employee Productivity by 66%

    Using generative AI (like ChatGPT) in business improves users’ performance by 66%, averaged across 3 case studies. More complex tasks have bigger gains, and less-skilled workers benefit the most from AI use.

  • AI: First New UI Paradigm in 60 Years

    AI is introducing the third user-interface paradigm in computing history, shifting to a new interaction mechanism where users tell the computer what they want, not how to do it — thus reversing the locus of control.

  • ChatGPT Lifts Business Professionals’ Productivity and Improves Work Quality

    In a study of business professionals using ChatGPT to write business documents, task time decreased, while rated quality improved substantially.

  • Impact on UX: Individual Designers vs. Systematic Methodology

    How is the quality of the final design impacted by the contribution of individual designers vs. the outcome of following systematic UX methodology?

  • Discount Usability Revisited (Jakob Nielsen Keynote)

    3 methods for cheap and fast UX work are still good advice to emphasize iterative design and accelerate UX maturity improvements (This was Jakob Nielsen's keynote at the in-person Washington DC UX Conference)