Top all-time · #172
Jakob Nielsen
Personal blog · useit.comdesignweb
Jakob Nielsen writes Nielsen Norman Group, a personal blog at useit.com about design and web. Since 2006, 244 different Hacker News readers have linked it 443 times, most often “Jakob Nielsen on Usability and Web Design”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Sometimes recommended · 9 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Nielsen's Alertbox articles and useit.com, mostly as evidence for usability claims such as response time, scrolling, link design and microcontent headlines.
- Recommended for · 9 comments
- Called more poignant, better researched, still very relevant, a good read, and the gist still holds true.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
A leader in the user experience field, NN/g conducts groundbreaking research, trains and certifies UX practitioners, and provides UX consulting to clients.
Most-linked posts?
- Jakob Nielsen on Usability and Web Design14 people · 15 mentions · first linked 2007-10-12
- Why you only need 5 users for usability testing10 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2007-07-04
- Jakob Nielsen: 80-20 rule applies to the page fold10 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2010-03-22
- Mistakes in Web Design 9 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2008-05-07
- Response Times: The 3 Important Limits (199X)9 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2007-05-16
- F-Shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2007-09-02
- The Anti-Mac User Interface8 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2008-09-26
- First Rule of Usability? Don't Listen to Users7 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2007-04-19
- /alertbox/7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2007-10-28
- Banner Blindness: Old and New Findings7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2007-08-20
What Hacker News says?
I date all this to Jakob Nielsen retiring the ever-so-wonderful https://useit.com for the utterly forgetable https://nngroup.com (Fortunately the redirect still works.)
Comment linking /
on “The Decline of Usability”Submitted Windows 8 — Disappointing Usability for Both Novice and Power Users as a story · 340 points
HN discussionIn the early 2000s there was a site usability movement centred around the work of Jakob Nielsen and http://useit.com . Fortune 500s were paying him huge sums to have extraneous crap removed from their home pages and just for a while sanity and minimalism ruled. Then Web 2.0 arrived.
Comment linking /
on “How I Experience Web Today”Submitted The Anti-Mac User Interface as a story · 161 points
HN discussionGreat, finally micropayments http://www.useit.com/articles/the-case-for-micropayments/ will work? If Google wants to display its good intentions, they would take a lower percentage when the user bought the ads. The same price paid by an user would top the advertiser.
Comment linking /articles/the-case-for-micropayments/
on “Give Google Contributor a try: Pay to remove ads”Submitted Jakob Nielsen on iPad Usability: First Findings as a story · 138 points
HN discussionAnyone remember http://www.useit.com in 2000? Bring back Jakob Nielsen.
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on “I can only think that modern front end development has failed”Submitted Flash: 99% Bad as a story · 137 points
HN discussionYou mean like this? http://www.useit.com/ I would make a distinction between designers and researchers in the field. The researchers and scholars, almost without fail, seem to care the least about their own website aesthetics.
Comment linking /
on “What are the most intellectually stimulating websites you know of?”Submitted Jakob Nielsen: Mega Drop-Down Navigation Menus Work Well as a story · 115 points
HN discussion> Google is way more than just google-search and has been for a long, long time. Google is mainly an intelligent services company. Their main intelligent service is search, and other services such as machine translation and intelligent prediction are also provided. [1][2] Besides services, Google actively develops many open platforms, such as Chromium and Android. Many of their attempts to build simple applications…
Comment linking /papers/anti-mac.html
on “Apple Lossless Audio Codec is now open source (Apache license)”Submitted Why WSJ Mobile App Gets 2 Star Customer Reviews as a story · 108 points
HN discussionNo, you'd use EC2 servers to avoid doing your own maintenance, and you'd do so as a last resort because GUIs are useful and remote development is laggy. http://www.useit.com/papers/responsetime.html
Comment linking /papers/responsetime.html
on “The New Apple Advantage”Submitted Stop Password Masking as a story · 66 points
HN discussion> implying that power users are the only ones who should think about performance. 1.0 second is about the limit for the user's flow of thought to stay uninterrupted. This turns out to make a big difference in productivity. See http://www.useit.com/papers/responsetime.html I'm talking about anyone who values their time. You're talking about secretaries looking at cat pictures. You're also doing that on a thread start…
Comment linking /papers/responsetime.html
on “The New Apple Advantage”Submitted IPad and Kindle Reading Speeds as a story · 53 points
HN discussionFirst of all, the thing you are replying to isn't in reply to OP's article. It's in reply to a particularly stupid comment. Secondly, the HN crowd doesn't seem to consider that when selling to large corporations the Dell, Lenovo, etc. "overly complex" approach makes sense -- that there might be a reason that apple isn't the #1 computer manufacturer, especially for institutional purchases. Fourthly, before talking ab…
Comment linking /papers/responsetime.html
on “The New Apple Advantage”Submitted Mistakes in Web Design as a story · 53 points
HN discussionAnimated images win an instant ad-block from me. Regarding headlines, Jakob Nielsen addresses this too: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/headlines-bbc.html Traditional print headlines fare poorly in Web form. There's been a fair amount written as to how HuffPo writes web search/link/click-bait articles and headlines as well.
Comment linking /alertbox/headlines-bbc.html
on “Andy Rutledge Redesigns NYTimes.com”Submitted iPad Usability: Year One as a story · 51 points
HN discussionI've always seen mobile web apps winning over native mobile apps in the long term. Jacob Nielsen described as much last week as well but was careful not to put a timeline on it.[1] Hopefully this project helps make it happen sooner than later. [1] http://www.useit.com/alertbox/mobile-sites-apps.html
Comment linking /alertbox/mobile-sites-apps.html
on “Open Web Device”Submitted Jakob Nielsen ranks Wufoo, Sugarsync and Xero among 10 Best Application UIs of 2008 as a story · 47 points
HN discussionMy baseline tools and resources for front-end development: - Page speed https://developers.google.com/pagespeed/ http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/ - Valid HTML http://validator.w3.org/ http://html5.validator.nu/ - Usability http://www.userfocus.co.uk/resources/guidelines.html http://www.useit.com/ - Accessibility http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/ - On-page SEO http://www.…
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on “A Baseline for Front-End Developers”Submitted Jakob Nielsen: World's Best Headlines: BBC News as a story · 46 points
HN discussion> In other words, I can tell that there's a potentially poignant idea about web design in this post, but it was a little drowned out because of the way it was presented. I think it would be difficult to find an idea in this post that hasn't already been more poignantly formulated on [0] or more funny and even less respectfully on [1]. I really don't see the point. [0] http://www.useit.com [1] http://maddox.xmission.…
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on “Motherfucking Website”Submitted Kindle Fire HD: Much Better Than Original Kindle Fire as a story · 38 points
HN discussionEven though the advice is from 2004, useit.com's article "Guidelines for Visualizing Links" http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20040510.html appears to offer more user-friendly advice (perhaps because it is based on more thorough usability research) than the advice in the article kindly submitted here. The Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design" article http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9605.html (updated 2011) says one of the top t…
Comment linking /alertbox/9605.html
on “Why Your Links Should Never Say “Click Here””Submitted Why you only need 5 users for usability testing as a story · 38 points
HN discussionFact check. From the study mentioned. http://www.useit.com/alertbox/ipad-kindle-reading.html "The iPad measured at 6.2% lower reading speed than the printed book, whereas the Kindle measured at 10.7% slower than print. However, the difference between the two devices was not statistically significant because of the data's fairly high variability. Thus, the only fair conclusion is that we can't say for sure which devi…
Comment linking /alertbox/ipad-kindle-reading.html
on “Kindle vs. iPad Displays: Up close and personal”Submitted Top 10 Application-Design Mistakes as a story · 38 points
HN discussion
