Jakob Nielsen has been called:

number 6 of The Web's 10 Most Influential People (AnchorDesk)
"the guru of Web page usability" (The New York Times)
"the next best thing to a true time machine" (USA Today)
"the smartest person on the Web" (Ziff-Davis Network)
"a real guru" (CNET The Computer Network)
"among the Web's most recognized human-interface experts" (WebWeek)
"not yet as famous as Elvis" (CONTENTIOUS Magazine)

Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D., is a User Advocate and principal of the Nielsen Norman Group which he co-founded with Donald A. Norman (former VP of research at Apple Computer). Until 1998 he was a Sun Microsystems Distinguished Engineer and the company's Web usability guru.

Dr. Nielsen coined the term "discount usability engineering" and has invented several usability techniques for fast and cheap improvements of user interfaces, including heuristic evaluation. He holds 39 United States patents, mainly on ways of making the Internet easier to use.

Columns

Bi-weekly Alertbox column on Web usability (readership: 5 million page views per year; all of useit.com is at 7 Mpv/y)
Users First! column on Ziff-Davis Network
Deconstructing famous websites in Internet World

Books

(Forthcoming) Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity to be published by New Riders in December 1999.
Usability Engineering, 1994: textbook on the methods needed to make interfaces easier to use
Multimedia and Hypertext: The Internet and Beyond, 1995: second edition of textbook on linked online information
Usability Inspection Methods, 1994 (co-editor with Robert L. Mack): with chapters by each of the inventors of these methods
International User Interfaces, 1996 (co-editor with with Elisa del Galdo) Advances in Human-Computer Interaction Vol. 5, 1995 (editor)
Hypertext and Hypermedia, 1990: the first edition of classic textbook (no longer in print)
Designing User Interfaces for International Use, 1990 (editor)
Coordinating User Interfaces for Consistency, 1989 (editor): still the best book on how to get a standard look-and-feel

Professional Background

Dr. Nielsen was usability lead for several design and redesign rounds of Sun's website and intranet (SunWeb), including the original SunWeb design in 1994.

His earlier affiliations include Bellcore (Bell Communications Research), the Technical University of Denmark, and the IBM User Interface Institute at the T.J. Watson Research Center.

Nielsen is on the editorial board of the Morgan Kaufmann book series in Interactive Technologies; contact him if you are planning an advanced book on user interfaces (no GUI Design for Dummies, even though it's apparently a good book).

Professional journal editorial board memberships: ACM interactions magazine, ACM netWorker magazine, Behaviour & Information Technology, Interacting with Computers, International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, The New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia, Personal Technologies, World Wide Web. For each journal, contact the editor-in-chief to submit a manuscript.

Jakob Nielsen
2704 Fairbrook Dr.
Mountain View, CA 94040
Email: jakob@useit.com

Website: http://www.useit.com