Talk:Jakob Nielsen (usability consultant)

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2003 VfD[edit]

Apparently there was one and the article was kept. [1]. The actual discussion appears to have been lost in the mist of ancient wikitimes. It probably doesn't matter much since the standards have changed a lot since then. JMP EAX (talk) 13:25, 29 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Photo[edit]

Who the h*** deleted the photo of Jakob Nielsen? Any why? I added the image originally, then I had to add it again since someone removed it. Now it's gone again! abelson 12:35, 9 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I see the whole sordid history of the deletion. Also search for the word "photo" in the history page. All I remember is that it was a great photo. Please dig it up and put it back. Jidanni (talk) 03:52, 28 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
To my mind the photo is terrible. Cant we use one of theese? -> http://www.useit.com/jakob/photos/ --95.222.51.176 (talk) 21:30, 19 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Removal of external links to vacuous pages[edit]

I've just re-removed a link to a page that reads in full:

"The Original Dancing Jakob Neilsen! [sic]
"Your ad here. Your ad here. Your ad here. Your ad here. Your ad here. Your a
"Your ad here. Your ad here. Your ad here. Your ad here. Your ad here. Your a
"Your ad here. Your ad here. Your ad here. Your ad here. Your ad here. Your a
"Your ad here. Your ad here. Your ad here. Your ad here. Your ad here. Your a
"Your ad here. Your ad here. Your ad here. Powered by AdBrite
"The Dancing Jakob Neilsen [sic]
"This piece was originally produced on 10/28/2000 and moved to this location on 1/13/2001.
"See more sites dedicated to Jakob Neilsen [sic] at: {USEITorLOSEIT}
"Back to Kermit"

This is supremely uninformative and thus worthless to Wikipedia. I've removed it, and I'll regard any reinsertion as disruptive. -- Hoary 06:48, 19 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]


1990 or 1991[edit]

WTF? He wrote it in 1990, or in 1991? In 1991, when the Web was new, Nielsen correctly predicted that hypertext was the future of user interface design and jumped on the bandwagon by writing a comprehensive book about it: "Hypertext and Hypermedia", published in 1990. Family Guy Guy 02:37, 10 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

This book was indeed published in 1990, not 1991. See the official book page on my site.

Jakobnielsen 00:20, 12 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Pronunciation[edit]

Any idea how one should pronounce his name properly? Is it [dʒeikəb] or [ja:kob]? Cameltrader 07:40, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I think [dʒeikəb] is actually used in his daily life though he is originally from Denmark. Please review following interview video http://www.devsource.com/article2/0,1895,1937615,00.asp#

--221.140.109.171 12:25, 20 January 2007 (UTC) Sorry I didn't login when I sign in. --Alf 12:28, 20 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

In Korea Wikipedia, Pronunciation of his name is in discussion. --Alf 12:28, 20 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. --Cameltrader 15:44, 20 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I use [dʒeikəb], because I got tired of people not being able to pronounce my name. At one conference I attended, various speakers employed five different pronounciations when referring to my work! Better to standardize on the normal English pronounciation, since I live in the U.S. Jakobnielsen 00:17, 12 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

vandalism[edit]

FYI my additions weren't and aren't vandalism, although maybe there were raw. Claiming yourself to be an expert on websites, yet demonstrating this with a hugely unpleasant one of your own that fails to give many usability tools, such as consistent signposting, leaves questions as to your credibility. Raising those questions is not vandalism; ignoring them is bizarre.

Genesisblade —Preceding unsigned comment added by Genesisblade (talk • contribs)

Maybe you have your reason to say that, but please be extra careful when adding controversial information about living persons. "Self-proclaimed" seems too strong a word for one of the most famous (though disputed) authorities on usability. Improvement of user experience is the aim, so "[...] at the expense of the user experience" is equivalent to saying that he totally failed. Do attribute your statements to a reliable source, or someone will likely revert your edit again soon. Have fun. --Cameltrader 14:01, 26 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
See WP:NOT#SOAPBOX, WP:NOR, and WP:RS. Wikipedia is not where we post our original criticisms or endorsements of people, places, or things. Instead, we start with reliable, published sources which may criticize or endorse someone or something, summarize what they say, and cite them. (Typically, a person as notable as Jakob Nielsen will have some published critics and endorsers.) Also please follow the instructions that appear above the edit window when you edit a Help:Talk page entry (namely, to sign your posts). It helps if you will link your jargon terms such as "signposting" to Wikipedia articles or Web pages that define them. That way readers who are unfamiliar with your use of a jargon term can see what you mean by it. Linking one's jargon terms is a way to increase the usability of one's online writing, and the MediaWiki software that powers Wikipedia makes linking very easy. --Teratornis (talk) 21:14, 19 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

False info on the page[edit]

I don't know who added the following statement, but it is false: "while at the same time his "fan club" has eroded steadily"

The way I measure the size of my fan club is by the number of subscribers to my email newsletter, the Alertbox. This number has shown steady growth year after year. The subscriber count for July 11, 2007 is 12,667 higher than it was on July 11, 2006.

A more hardnosed business-oriented way of measuring the "fan club" is the number of attendees at my annual usability conference. This number is also up: the conference gets bigger every year. However, paying attendees are more an indication of the size of the customer base than the "fan club", as quoted on the Wikipedia page.

Since it's free to subscribe to the email newsletter, the trend in subscriptions is a better estimate of the "fan club", so if the Wikipedia article wants to comment on the "fan club", it should go by the real empirical data and not some hearsay.

Since I understand that Wikipedia's policy is that one is not supposed to edit one's own biography, I have not made this change, but as long as the false info is on the page it is certainly not up to any reasonable editorial standards.

Jakob Nielsen (the topic of the article!) Jakobnielsen 00:12, 12 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I have removed the "fan club"-statement. I think the statement would need an explanation on how the size of the fan club is measured and some kind of reliable source supporting the statement to belong in the article. And at a quick search, I couldn't find such a source. Hemmingsen 17:58, 15 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

WikiProject class rating[edit]

This article was automatically assessed because at least one WikiProject had rated the article as start, and the rating on other projects was brought up to start class. BetacommandBot 14:16, 10 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Article layout[edit]

I edited the article layout to give it a distinct lead section (which still needs some work) and content-specific sections. Previously, most of the article was in its lead section, and that is not desirable. I removed a __NOTOC__ because the article needs a table of contents like all our other biography articles. I added an {{Infobox person}} template, but I do not have data to fill out many of the fields. In particular, I did not find the birthday of Jakob Nielsen in a reliable source, only the birth year (I tried several Google searches and Google Books searches). I found a source of unknown reliability that says October 5, so I'm using that for the time being. I also added links on several terms in the article which have articles themselves. --Teratornis (talk) 01:17, 20 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I should add that now that the article groups related information under coherent section headings, the parts that need further work are more apparent. --Teratornis (talk) 01:29, 20 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

No validity expert[edit]

Somebody ought to tell Nielsen to run an HTML validator on his website. He may be a usability expert, but his pages have lots of invalid HTML. Jidanni (talk) 04:35, 4 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Controversy Section[edit]

This section is NPOV. If it's true that Nielsen's advice is criticised by designers as being incompatible with "eye appeal", that's not controversy. Only within the field of usability could his articles be controversial; where these are incompatible with other magisteria that's just unfortunate. The links are also just links to rants on the same issue - and in each of them I find the crux of the article is "This usability advice just doesn't feel right to me. Given my background in graphic design, I think I know well enough what users want by now". An appeal from personal authority is the easiest argument in the world to refute (though because Nielsen doesn't freely distribute his more formal research he could be accused of the same thing), and doesn't apply to Jakob Nielsen any more than any other usability researcher but for his prominence in the field. My view is that it can probably be removed entirely or replaced with a single remark somewhere about these conflicting concerns, but I'm just going to pare it down and mark it as {{POV-section}}. DanPope (talk) 10:43, 3 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

His standing was (and remains?) controversial.
The whole basis of this article was dubious before as it portrayed opinion as fact, but it seems better now, regardless of my personal views. For many years he was entirely self-proclaimed as an expert or guru (like many of us are in our chosen fields) while demonstrating nothing regarding good usability practices on his own site (useit.com). Yes, there were news articles about him, but written by people who didn't seem to have a clue but jumped on the bandwagon and used reference to him to look like experts themselves (ironic, really).
I'm not sure that was a basis for strong assertions of expertise (which basically meant the article functioned as marketing for him). Many other experts refuted much of what he said but were blocked from being used as evidence for qualifying the article because they were unfairly deemed rants.
Now he's finally closed useit.com and moved to a shared site, he's dodged the bullet. Well done to him maybe, but for the sake of record, he was widely mocked in the industry and only acclaimed outside of it by non-experts.
It just goes to show that using newspapers as evidence of standing vs the weight of noise from individual experts in the field can be a flawed approach. Had he been introduced as "considered by many to be a usability guru" that would have been qualified enough statement. Instead his standing was portrayed as fact when maybe it was also just opinion.

Guy.shrimpton (talk) 12:11, 4 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Autobiography tag removed[edit]

As far as I can tell, this article was (mostly) not written by Jakob Nielsen. Special:Contributions/Jakobnielsen shows only some contributions to this talk page (not the article itself), which are entirely permissible by WP:COI. JMP EAX (talk) 12:54, 29 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I noticed that other editors have removed similar (and relatively recent) tag spamming [2]. JMP EAX (talk) 12:56, 29 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

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