#jakob neilsen

Jakob Neilsen Has Run Out Of Things To Say

Not that I wanted to use a ridiculously-exagerated title like “PDF: Unfit for Human Consumption“, or “Flash: 99% Bad“, but I think it’s getting to the point that someone’s got to say something about the fact: Jakob Nielsen is running out of things to write about in his bi-weekly column, Alertbox.

Jakob used to be a fountain of information on usability techniques, concepts, tools and processes, but now he seems to have degenerated into selling his own products and moaning about (usually) related technologies and industries.

I hope that he reigns things in and starts writing some decent content again, he really did have some useful gems back in the early days. Maybe it’s time to scale it back to once a month?

Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox

Fortnightly articles/reports posted by Monsieur Guru Nielsen himself. Some of these are pretty good, personally I think some of them are just plain stupid.

An example of taking things too far: in the most recent alertbox, Nielsen extrapolates his calculated statement that the companies he studied which would “spend $3,042 per employee annually to cover time spent on the sixteen tasks we measured” to mean that if we improved intranets to the best ones they saw in their tests, we would “save the world economy $1.3 trillion per year”… come on dude, seriously. You so can’t make that assumption.