SETlinc Design Notes about Jakob Nielsen

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Jakob Nielsen
http://www.useit.com/

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

Dr. Nielsen founded the "discount usability engineering" movement for fast and cheap improvements of user interfaces and has invented several usability methods, including heuristic evaluation. He holds 74 United States patents, mainly on ways of making the Internet easier to use.

User Centered Design:
- All design considerations should be settled according to the needs of the user. Often the latest flashiest techniques only look cool once, so avoid using "leading-edge" web technologies, scrolling text, and excessive animation.
- Headlines clearly identify your page and orient your visitor.
- Avoid opening new windows to take your users to a new page.
- Facilitate page scanning, so that users can decide if they want to read more. Keep your pages short, and use inline hypertext links to additional, related or supporting content.
- Keep pages accessible to users with disabilities. Include alt tags for images.

Standard Operations:
- Pages should function in the same way from page to page in a site.
- The second most used navigational item (behind hyperlinks) is the back button. Maintain its usability by avoiding frames, and by avoiding JavaScript that would disable the back button.
- Use standard widgets to do what most people would expect them to do. Don't make a radio button or checkbox that effects a hyperlink.

Author / Reader Relationship:
- Keep load times miniscule by strictly minimizing graphical elements that are not critical to the content, or by structuring the code such that the text appears even as images (with sizes defined in the code, and therefore filling placeholders) load up.
- Links to biographical and content information regarding the author on every page, where that information can be made available.

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SETlinc - http://www.setlinc.com/