Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | books | about  How usable is Jakob Nielsen? (16 Jun 2005) One of the things I have noticed about people who take Nielsen’s teachings at face value is that they end up communicating like him. The blaming, critical, and selfrighteous tones that characterise Nielsen’s articles and interviews are not to be confused with how a professional usability consultant ought to communicate. Of the hundreds of people I have trained in the past few years, I have noticed the “Critical Jakob” in their findings. The danger is that armed with Jakob’s influence, we can assume that we have a hammer large enough to break anything. A reader comment to Jakob’s partner Tog a few years ago raised this issue. Tog’s response was that this communication style was for marketing purposes only and that it was not the way he and his colleagues speak to their clients. It’s rich to criticise something as if no other dependencies exist. Even better to pretend like you have all the answers and that no humans (with feelings) were ever involved in the design. By taking the National Enquirer (a supermarket tabloid newspaper) approach to communication, Nielsen is doing a disservice to the usability practitioner community by not imparting best practices in communicating usability insights. Is it asking too much to have usable communication? Article URL: http://www.bcs-hci.org.uk/interfaces/interfaces62.pdf Read 164 more articles from British Computer Society sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: Interaction at Lincoln Laboratory in the 1960's: Looking Forward - Looking Back     This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy