Dr. Jakob
Nielsen is a User Advocate specializing in Web usability and a principal
of Nielsen Norman
Group, 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 of the
bestselling textbooks "Usability Engineering"
and "Multimedia and
Hypertext: The Internet and Beyond"; his next book on Web design will be
published by New Riders in August 1999. Since 1995, Nielsen has written the
biweekly Alertbox column about
Web usability; his website received 5 million page views in 1998. Nielsen
has been called "the guru of Web page usability" (The New York Times)
and "the smartest person on the Web"
(Ziff-Davis Network), and "the next best
thing to a true time machine" (USA Today. He holds 24 U.S.
patents, mainly on ways to make the Internet easier to use.
