The X-Interviews | Back to the Future of UX

Interview #7 - Jakob Nielsen on His Legacy & The Future of UX

Dr. Jakob Nielsen on The Future of UX

Today on The X-Mentor we have a UX and Usability pioneer, Dr. Jakob Nielsen!  For most UX practitioners, Jakob needs no introduction because his name is synonymous with usability. For everyone else, here is a short summary.

Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D., is a usability pioneer with 40 years of experience in UX. Jakob and his long-time business partner, Donald A. Norman, who coined the term “User Experience,” founded NN/g (Nielsen Norman Group) in 1998. Dr. Nielsen established the discount usability movement for fast and cheap iterative design, including heuristic evaluation and the 10 usability heuristics. He also formulated the eponymous Jakob’s Law of the Internet User Experience. Jakob has been nicknamed “the king of usability” by Internet Magazine, “the guru of Web page usability" by The New York Times, and “the next best thing to a true time machine” by USA Today. Before starting NN/g, Dr. Nielsen was a Sun Microsystems Distinguished Engineer and a Member of Research Staff at Bell Communications Research, the branch of Bell Labs owned by the Regional Bell Operating Companies. He is the author of 8 books, including the best-selling Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity (published in 22 languages), Usability Engineering (26,147 citations in Google Scholar), and the pioneering Hypertext and Hypermedia. Dr. Nielsen holds 79 United States patents, mainly on making the Internet easier to use. He received the Lifetime Achievement Award for Human–Computer Interaction Practice from ACM SIGCHI.

Jakob and I will discuss some of his most durable ideas, reflect on a retrospective of his career, and contemplate the future of UX in context of disruptive technologies like AI. We’ll also get a rare glimpse into what shaped Jakob’s formative years and how that set him on a journey to pioneer a new discipline.

The X-Mentor: Jakob Nielsen, thank you so much for being with us today on The X-Mentor! This is a very special moment for me especially because in many ways you were my first UX mentor. So, I truly appreciate you taking time for this X-Interview.

Jakob: Well, thank you, Greg. I'm sure it'll be a good time for me also.

The X-Mentor: To set the stage for everyone, we've heard a lot from Jakob Nielsen over the years through books, talks, and other publications. But Jakob, I'm hoping that we can take some time to learn more about your personal experiences. Then we can discuss where UX is today, and where you think UX may be headed in the future. Of course, recently you've been writing a lot about AI and UX, which we will also discuss.

So, let's dive right in, shall we. Knowing yourself as you do, who is Jakob Nielsen? When you step back and take more of an introspective look, how do you see yourself?

Jakob: Well, I hope people would say he’s a nice guy, maybe also a smart guy. [Laughs]

I've just been pursuing one thing throughout my career. Of course, my life is more than my career. However, in my career, I'm just pursuing one thing, which is to make technology adapt to humans rather than having humans submit to technology. Computers are the main thing because by virtue of being so computationally cognitively complex, they make it just more difficult to use than a more physical object that can do fewer things. But of course, in principle it applies to any possible thing that people interact with. We want it to be easy and pleasant and things like that. So, that's what I've been pursuing ever since I started 40 years ago, working on usability.

The Early Years

The X-Mentor: I've been following your career practically all my career. I first came across your book, Hypermedia & Hypertext, in 1990 while I was studying HCI & Interactive Design in Graduate School. Thinking about all that you’ve done in your career since then, what are some of the moments that mattered most to you?

Jakob: Right. Well, it started before the career because, why did I even get into this area? That's going to go back to when I was a little child, like about 5-6 years old, something like that. My mother was a clinical psychologist specializing in children's psychology. And every time they got a new test that she could use in her clinical practice, she would also take it home and try it out on me. And I mean, the Professional scientific reason for her to do that she said was, well, I already know my own son, so I don’t need to test him to know his IQ, or something. When you test something, you already know, that is actually a test of the test. So that to me was an interesting thought that I got from my mom. Even today, we like to ‘test the test.’ And it was then that I first started to think about how methodology works.

Another early experience also gave me this general concept that you can test things. My dad was also a psychologist and a university professor, so more of a traditional research psychologist. He took me into the University’s Psychology lab several times when I was maybe 9 or 10 years old. So, I saw some of those labyrinths they used to run the rats through, and those type of things. These experiences would emphasize and strengthen my thinking that, well, we can find out how the world works. We can run experiments and things like that. It would be another 15 years before I really started doing that as a graduate student.

But when I was in high school, I started using my first computer and this was back in 1974. It was really, in terms of user experience, a personal computer. It was not physically a personal computer. It was a computer that took up an entire room in the basement of the university’s Computer Science department. It wasn’t a timeshare computer. But it was so old they just had it around to run a little bit of software that they hadn't ported to more modern computers. So, 99% of the time the computer was just standing there unused and idle. So, some of the high school students were allowed to get in and try that computer. And it was so old. It was a second-generation computer made out of individual transistors, not integrated circuits, but individual transistors. That's how old it was. It had five Kilobytes (5K) of RAM memory. It was fun because it was hands on and that gave me that feeling that computers could actually be fun and engaging. So, I was very captivated by the computer when I was in high school.

And when I started college, I started studying computer science for that reason. And man was that a disappointment. Because now we got to use the big computer and that was a timeshare Computer. This was back in 1976, a timeshare computer was very unpleasant to use, very divorced from the user. Terrible. And the documentation had never seen a technical writer. I mean, everything about it was bad.

So now, I had this feeling that computers can be fun and engaging to use, or they can be terrible and oppressive to use. And putting that together and then adding that early childhood experience, we can find out why things work the way they work, all that kind of crystallized in my thinking as I was progressing through that computer science program and thinking it was so boring and unpleasant. I just stuck to it. I never really became a programmer or technical geek. I have some technical background from those many courses. But I started right away doing usability, so that's what I've done for 40 years.

From the very beginning, I was interested in online information and hypertext even back in 1983. And I read Ted Nelson's books about literary machines, dream machines. We talked about his vision for the future of online information. So, I didn't just think about hypertext, I wrote a book about hypertext – HyperText & HyperMedia. When Hypercard came out in 1987 there was a big surge of interest in hypertext work, both research and just as important, actual products. People would build these experiences in HyperCard that were very engaging and very visual because HyperCard was more than just hypertext, it was also hypermedia. Because those pictures were linked together and when you clicked on things they could move and so it was very interesting and engaging. And as I wrote HyperText & HyperMedia, it was just before Tim Berners-Lee introduced the World Wide Web in 1991.

We moved from hypertext, being on personal computers, like a Macintosh, to being on the Internet. But the user experience took a big step back on the web. Or at least I should say the usability and the user interface. I mean, again, user experience is everything that you encounter. So, what was rich about the user experience on the web was the amount of information that you could access. When the graphical user interface of Mosaic came out, tens of thousands of websites came online every day.

At that time, I was working at Sun Microsystems, where I was a Distinguished Engineer. They really hired me to fix Unix, to make Unix easy to use. But luckily the Distinguished Engineers are the top 0.1% of the technical talent in the company. There were very few of them, and the job description is that since you are the company’s leading expert in your particular area of expertise, you should figure out what's important to do. It's not that you have an assigned project, but rather you figure out what should be done, which of course was why I took the job, because it's a very appealing job description. I very quickly decided that what was important was to figure out this online information problem.

 Sun Microsystems used this marketing tagline in their advertising campaign: “We’re the dot in .com” Which I think we all thought was something silly the marketing people dreamed up, but I faithfully was parroting that slogan when talking to the press.

So, I did the right thing by thinking about how we can make the web easier to use.

Because it would explode the number of services, which is what was important to the company because they sold these big computers for the servers. But we can also explode the number of users using it because otherwise of course companies would not put out services if there are no customers. So that is kind of how I got into web usability. But I actually started out working on online information, more generally on hypertext. The web is a narrow interpretation of all the things we really talked about back before the web started. But the web was just so big it just steamrolled over everything.

The X-Mentor: Thinking about the arc of your career, you certainly have demonstrated how good design can have an enormous business impact, especially on the web. You pioneered usability and shaped how we design usable user experiences. Then in 2013, you received the Lifetime Achievement Award for HCI Practice.

Jakob: That was definitely a big honor, and I was very grateful. I've tried to live up to that and keep doing it. The lifetime is not over just because you reach the status of the senior guru. I think for my entire career I’ve always been very excited about getting the word out. Convincing other people, having a multiplier effect. Not so much in writing my own academic papers. I mean, I started out as a university professor for a few years, but even then, I spent a lot of time going out to more public appearances, and the press, even doing interviews and so on. And that geared up when the “.com bubble” started. There was more interest in my work, and I was able to get more press coverage. But it's always been one of my big goals, to get it out there! I mean if you just sit and work on something yourself. Yeah, that can be intellectually satisfying. You don't change the world, so that has been my approach to try to change the world by having hundreds of thousands of people, take what I’m advocating and actually do it. And then they go out and gain hundreds of millions of users, so I can't personally go and touch, you know, a billion users. But I can help the people who create those products make them better.

The X-Mentor: Sometimes when we’re putting the word out there it sticks, and other times it doesn’t. I'm just thinking of Henry Dreyfus and his book, Designing for People. Here’s an example of someone who shaped the 20th century and yet some of his ideas did not seem to stick with us as technology advanced. For example, a quote from his 1955 book states: “When the point of contact between the product and the people becomes a source of friction. Then the designer has failed.” Right? In 1955 he’s talking about [Design] friction in the context of products and people! Is this ignorance or just generally implying that we humans don’t slow down enough to think?

Jakob: That's right.

Today, if something is difficult to use it is not the user's fault for being stupid. People are the way they are. We must design for the way people actually are, not the way we hope or think or dream they would be. So, yeah, I mean absolutely there's been people before me, and together with me, who have had many of those same insights. I think one of the differences is that I have not been satisfied with having an insight. I want to take people, almost like strangling, and say “do this” as I feel that's very important. I feel it's important that it gets done. I get uncommonly annoyed when I see bad design, or I see products that violate principles that I or others have described 20 or 30 years ago. Honestly, this is well known, well established, and has been so for a long time. So why can't you design it right, you know?

The X-Mentor: Right. I mean, when you think about that computer that you initially encountered in high school and then looking back at the Altair in 1974, Xerox PARC in 1970, and jumping ahead to Apple Macintosh in 1984, which I have one of those beauties sitting on my shelf up here next to me that still has my HyperCard thesis on it. You watched as computing became increasingly personal and you've seen it all.

Thinking about those types of technological moments of innovation that truly changed things, what were some of your observations? How were you reacting to these technological changes at that time?

Jakob: I mean, there's no doubt that the personal computer was a true revolution in getting that tighter connection between the human and the computer. But that said, there was also a lot of bad design in the early days of personal computing. Both in text based personal computing like DOS, but even in the graphical user interface like Macintosh and Windows. There was a lot of bad design there too. I feel like for my entire career it's been sort of like, 2 Steps forward, one step back. You know, you do the math, and it's forward, but there's always that step back. Also, and that's one of the things that really does annoy me, because when we get something new, we shouldn't forget the lessons from the old.

That's what often happens. And I've seen that so many times. There were some graphical user interfaces that were clunky to use. When the web came out, people were doing print brochures on websites. When mobile came out, they were doing regular websites, just microscopic size. When tablets came out like the iPad, I think was the first good tablet. They were trying to do magazines on a touch screen. I mean, so we've seen this so many times over and over again that the new technology has all this promise for doing things in a better way. And yet it's often used in blatantly wrong ways. Blatantly either that you can just tell if you know the history of user interfaces, or at least you can discover it with a usability study with 5 users or so.

User research has been another one of the foundational elements of my career. I've always been a very strong advocate of doing these empirical studies. Again, going back to my childhood experience, that we can test things. But then also I think I rebelled a little bit against the traditional psychology approach, which is very thorough studies which you do need if you want to find out how the brain works. But that's not really our problem. We want to find out how computer user interfaces work, which is actually much easier. So, we can test a very small number of users. And people are different, so each person will use it differently.

But the big point in usability is really the gap between humans and computers, which is vast.

And so, because there's this vast gap, we can actually discover it with a relatively small amount of data. So again, I don't think there is any excuse for these companies that are often billion-dollar companies launching new products for not having spent like 2 days with some customers to see how it works.

The X-Mentor: You're suggesting that they actually do that, Jakob? [Laughs!]

Jakob: I mean, some do actually. And that's the second question is, how many of the lessons did they actually take and implement? But I think a lot of products actually get launched without any user testing even today.

The Journey to The Web

The X-Mentor: Let’s fast forward to 1998 and discuss the creation of Nielsen Norman group. Your business partner, Donald A. Norman, was the first person who coined the phrase “user experience.” Tell me about those early days with Don and how that led to the creation of Nielsen Norman Group.

Jakob: Well, Don is a true genius. I actually knew him before we got together and partnered up to start a company. I'd actually left Sun Microsystems and was working on writing my book, Designing Web Usability, because there was such a demand for web usability information. In fact, when it was published it sold like gangbusters. It sold really a lot of copies. It was translated into 22 languages. So, the book was really a great thing to do. But I got sidetracked by Don. I was supposed to spend half a year, to a year writing this book and then gotten another job. But that was not what happened.

So instead, Don called me up and said, I suggest we talk about maybe starting a company to bring this user experience idea more broadly out to the world. So, I would of course always take a call from Don Norman because he was then super famous, and I've known him from meeting him at various research conferences. It turned out that both of us lived in the same town in Silicon Valley called Atherton, which is sort of a snooty, upscale town for rich people. But for that reason, I guess many of the elite in Silicon Valley live in a very small area, as it turns out. It was a 6-minute drive between our two houses. So, it was very, very easy to get from one to the other. So, I think that physical coincidence actually did help because we could get together a lot and talk about different ideas and what we should do. So, Don gets the credit. I just want to point that out because he's the one who called me. I didn't call him. I of course came to him as soon as he suggested it. But he's the one who got the idea and then we decided to start the company.

Basically, the point was that user experience had outgrown its roots in Silicon Valley. It was no longer a question just for computer companies, but for all companies. Because online, you know, brand is experience, brand is how customers interact with you. It's not your logo.

I mean, yeah, logos still have some value, but the real impression people get of a company is how it feels to interact with them. And if they have a hostile user experience, if it's just very unpleasant and off putting to use their website. Or their products. You know, then people will get a bad feeling about that company, that's bad branding. So, it started out that user experience and usability were for computer companies. I.e., Build a computer people can use. Make software applications like a word processor, a spreadsheet people can use.

You know I worked at IBM and the telephone company Bell Communications Research, right? Those kinds of technology companies were the founding area, the founding industries for sure. But around that time in the late 1990s, that world had changed. And it's not the case that all those companies outside the tech industry recognized that they needed usability, that they needed user experience as a way of connecting with their customers. But it was nevertheless the case. That's why there was this good argument that Don put forward, and I agreed with, that it was worthwhile changing our focus from being Silicon Valley focused to being world focused.

The X-Mentor: Speaking of brands, I started my career in Seattle in 1996. That same year I created what became the first Service Mark (SM) for Interactive Branding. So, I consider myself a pioneer. You would love this, I titled it “Hyperbranding.”

Jakob: Ah, yes. Yes, exactly!

[Laughs]

The X-Mentor: But you know, I was really functioning in this role of Director of Internet Strategy. Just thinking about what you were saying there. It's about more than just putting the skin on the UI. The logo, fonts, the brand color schemes, or what somebody might call a design system today. Rather, it is about intentionally designing the behavioral aspect of an experience. Going from a broadcast brand in a broad market where every brand message is carefully crafted and broadcast out via networks, then going to what we were calling a “Market of One” where a customer is interacting 1-to-1 with the brand.

As designers we would think about, well, if you translate a brand into a persona, how would that brand interact and respond? And what kind of personality characteristics would you experience as part of that brand’s behavior?

At what point were you thinking about ideas like that?

Jakob: Well, the same thing of exactly like that with the persona of the brand. But it's certainly a good perspective. I was more thinking about the point that we're changing direction from branding being one way communication like you say, you broadcast your television commercials like you said to a broad mass market. So, you have an interaction and a one-on-one connection.

So, there are two things that happen. You're narrowing it down from mass market to individual. And secondly, you are adding a dimension which is, it goes both ways. Not only one way. So, it becomes an interaction, and that's also why it has a much stronger impact. Because yes, it has impact to watch a well-made television commercial; no doubt about that. But not that same impact because it's mass market not your exact thing. That's also why YouTube has become so popular, TikTok or other forms of online media, online video. I mean the production values are typically nothing compared with Hollywood movies, and they don't have the famous actors and that sort of thing. But, because there's millions of these videos, you can find a much narrower definition of things that really interest you.  And every day, I forget the number, but it's a very large number of new videos that upload every single day to both TikTok and YouTube. And so that can compensate for the lower production values. Still, that’s only one way communication. But then on websites you start having two-way communication and then of course even more so with artificial intelligence, you can have even more of a two-way communication. Now it’s starting to really feel like interacting with these personas, that type of AI experience.

The X-Mentor: You mentioned back in the early days of Apple when the Macintosh first came out, people didn't find it quite usable. This is really where UX was being discussed as something that was a market driver. The idea of Ease of Use being a critical factor in purchasing decisions, right.

What were UX practitioners doing prior to that UX title? As an example, “User Centered System Design” was one such role at that time. Correct me if I'm wrong about this, but I think Don's title at Apple was actually User Experience Architect, right?

Jakob: That's correct, but that was something he made up. It was not something that Apple hired him as. But once he went there, he recognized that was a need and he invented that word really to describe the need of the broader view of user experience.

It started out at Bell where I used to work with the business justification being that we could reduce customer support calls in the phone company. We were also very attuned to this notion of improving employee productivity because there was vast scale. Telephone companies back then were huge in terms of number of employees. Even just in the United States, not even worldwide, but just in the US, they had hundreds of thousands of people doing these jobs. Which meant that if you could squeeze like one second off the time, make a little bit better user interface, you would save millions of dollars for that one second saved in doing a certain task, like looking up a phone number for directory assistance, for example. That was a large amount of money. Similarly for computer companies, they would offer support so people who bought a product would call in and say, “I cannot figure out how to make a pie chart in Excel.” And they would have to walk you through it and that would be very expensive. That was really their main argument for having human factors people. It wasn’t about branded experience. It was just really to have those pesky customers not bother us because they can't use their products.

[Laughs]

Enterprise computing, that was of course also a big thing as well because they had very expensive training courses and internal support desks for the software they bought from the outside. So, the selling argument that you didn't need to have as big of a support desk.

All those things were relatively weak arguments, and there was a big distance between where the rubber meets the road. Which is some person out in some company that bought an enterprise product and the difficulty using it, calling their support desk, spending expensive call time and getting help. And then you trace it back all the way many, many steps to the person buying the software, back to the vendor company that could have had better usability, then you would not have had that support call. But that was a long, thin line there, and that argument was hard to make. So, these companies definitely had some usability people. They had some professional designers, but not very many.

And then we came to the personal computer revolution. That changed the picture a lot because now the person using the computer and using the software was the same person as who bought the software and bought the computer. Back then, there were magazines. There was trade press called PC World and Mac World, and they published millions of copies per week of those magazines. And they had reviews.  They would say, OK, here's the Top 10 Word Processors, and using this one it is too difficult to make a footnote. And this one you can figure everything out, just install it and you can write your memo right away. They would say things like that in their reviews. So, when people buying the software read these reviews, they would recognize that some things were easier to use than others. Because people talk to each other. Or you could see some other person showing you something. Plus, they would just have that personal painful experience with something that's difficult to do. That really created a much, much stronger demand for usability. That's really where the field got much more formalized, rather than being a few scattered individuals in the 1970s and early 1980s to the late 1980s.

I started in the early 1980s, which was still mainframes. At the time I was living in Denmark, and one thing I remember was I think there were probably three jobs in usability. There were two big software development companies. Each had one guy who would help, like, 5000 programmers or something like that, make better design. And then there was also the Nuclear Energy Research Center that was working on nuclear power plant control rooms to enable operators at the power plant to prevent a meltdown. So, they had a small human factors team there. But that's why I became a university professor in the beginning. Because there were just three jobs in a country of 6 million people.

The PC era really changed that, and we got thousands of jobs. And budgets were much bigger. We started having Usability Groups, with an active professional management. Some companies would even have bigger teams with multiple managers and maybe a director. So, that was a huge revolution. And then the second big revolution was the Web revolution because that changed things again. Much like the PC was a revolution compared to mainframes. With the PC, the sequence is first you buy the software and second you have the user experience, right? So, by the time you discover your PC is difficult to use, Bill Gates already has your money!

The X-Mentor: That's right!

[Laughs]

Jakob: With the web the sequence is, first you go to the homepage. Can you figure out where to click? Then you get the product page. Can you understand the product description? Then you add something to the shopping cart. Can you figure out how to check out? Is the usability good for all these many steps? If it falls apart even in one place, the entire thing doesn't happen. If everything goes well and people can figure out all the steps, then they buy and they give you their money.

So, on the web it's user experience first, pay money second. And that change in the sequence of those two elements of paying money and having user experience, that meant that user experience became even more important. This is why the number of jobs changed from several thousand in the PC era or 10,000 maybe in the world, to being more on the order of a million jobs. And now we are at the stage where my estimate is about 3 million UX people in the world. It keeps growing and it's spreading to more and more industries. More and more countries.

You know, I started a new e-mail newsletter and the subscriber numbers are such that the #1 country is the United States, but the #2 is Brazil, and #3 is India. It just shows you how user experience and usability has gone worldwide in a big way, and there's like 101 different countries subscribing. It's really, really worldwide.

The X-Mentor: Do I understand correctly that you were at the Hypertext conference in 1991 when Tim Berners-Lee first introduced the World Wide Web?

Jakob: I was at all those early hypertext conferences, even starting in 1987. But I definitely was at the 91. And what was interesting was that the Web was only a small demo. And I think they had a hard time getting space because it was not really considered to be important.

And I have to say, this is also one of the cases I must admit that my credentials as a visionary are not 100% great because I saw it and thought it was not interesting either, just as the conference organizers. It was like, yeah, we can sit here, and we can type in some commands, and it'll echo back from Switzerland, you know, and show me some pages of physics information from CERN.

By the way, this is completely not related to this, but I was an intern at CERN at the European Nuclear Physics Research Lab. But that was before the web, so I had nothing to do with the invention of the web. It was just like I said, there were no real jobs in Denmark. So, I got this internship when I was a graduate student, I was an intern in Switzerland. I've actually worked at that lab for an entire summer.

But several years later, [Tim Berners-Lee] invented the web, and we could sit at this demo [in San Antonio, TX] watch things coming in very slowly over a dial-up line and it was not very compelling. It was boring information. There were a handful of websites, you know, it was not very compelling. Of course, in retrospect what was compelling about it was this ability to connect everything to everything. And that's what made it explode. But only two years later, when it got the graphical user interface. The first two years of the web, it was really very small.

The X-Mentor: In the late 1990s in Seattle, I used to organize events for the MIT Enterprise Forum. Tim Berners-Lee was touring with his book, Weaving the Web, so we invited him to speak at one of our events. He told us the story of the 1991 demo in San Antonio you just mentioned. At the end of his talk, we had a Q&A, and someone asked Tim: If you could go back and change anything about your invention of the World Wide Web, what would you do differently?

Tim’s answer: “I would have used only one slash.”

Jakob: That's also true. That has annoyed a lot of people over the years, there’s no doubt!

[Laughs]

The X-Mentor: Yeah, that's awesome! [Laughs]

The Ultimate UX Mentor

The X-Mentor: You know, Jakob, you’ve been a mentor for a long time. And you’re still very busy mentoring and educating us today on topics such as UX & AI. Your work has impacted the lives and careers of so many in our UX community. If you don’t mind, I would like to take a moment to share with you and our readers a little bit about the influence and impact your mentorship and advice has had on me personally.

Jakob: Oh, OK.

The X-Mentor: Back in 1990 at SIGGRAPH in Dallas, Texas, I first heard you speak about your book Hypermedia & Hypertext, and I still have that book with me right here.

Jakob: Ohh yes. Nice! The original hardcover.

The X-Mentor: I would like to share with you something that you wrote, on page 190 if anyone's following along at home. You were writing about the potential problems with non-linear structures of hypertext.

As early as 1989 you were talking about AI: “it might be necessary to include an AI monitoring system that could nudge” people in the right direction. You also talk about the potential of hypertext having “the long-term effect of giving people a fragmented world view.” You’re exploring the social issues of this new technology. You also explore the promise and potential, stating: “On the other hand it could just as well be true that the cross-linking inherent in hypertext encourages people to see the connections among different aspects of the world so that they will get less fragmented knowledge.”

That idea of seeing “connections” rang true for me then, and it still does to this day. In fact, that question you posed in your book became my graduate thesis for my studies in HCI and Interactive Design at The School of Visual Information Arts at Memphis College of Art in Memphis, Tennessee. Memphis College of Art at that time had built a reputation for its mission of becoming “The Bauhaus of The Information Age” and for being the first graduate school to publish a Hypertext thesis. My thesis was a HyperCard that allowed users to interact with multimedia content that connected and explored diverse areas of human knowledge in a way that neatly stacked rows of books in the library couldn’t. My thesis focused on three areas of human knowledge: Art, Science, and Technology. Very quickly, I started to see all these relationships between Art and Technology. There were a lot of similarities. They were infinite, creative, and open. And it was science that was anchoring these two things, right. Giving them structure.

So, Jakob, I want to share with you what happened after grad school, and ironically, after I had been awarded the Microsoft Multimedia Scholarship by the folks who created Microsoft Encarta.

Encyclopedia Britannica CD 98 - Multimedia Edition

Jakob: Oh, oh, yes. I actually remember that product. Yeah!

The X-Mentor: This is what a “Large Language Model” looked like before ChatGPT.

I was the [Interactive/Internet] strategist behind this product. And when you talked about hypertext going global and outselling print, this is proof. This product generated twice the revenue of all the other products combined in its category. It won all the prestigious multimedia awards in its category too.

Encyclopedia Britannica had a lot of success with this product. However, we’ve all heard about the problem of success, which is, you can’t keep doing what worked in the past. You must plan for growth and know how to adapt to changing market conditions, right. So, Encyclopedia Britannica's editors, the elite, have spent hundreds of years creating the most authoritative reference articles and documents in the world. If articles were not approved by Britannica’s editors, then they were not considered authoritative and could not be published. So, when the Internet and web publishing came along, where virtually anyone could publish anything online, Britannica created something called EBIG, Encyclopedia Britannica Internet Guide. It was their idea for “controlling quality” of their online content by having their editors approve of each article that EBIG referenced on the web.

My argument to Britannica’s Leadership in Chicago was backed by new research from Forrester, which at that time had talked about this idea of “content that enabled the creation of new content.” In other words, there's more authoritative people out in the world that can contribute great content for trustworthy reference and most of them are not employed by Encyclopedia Britannica. This CD 98 product contained 72,000 articles and 1.4 million Hyperlinks. There was simply no way one company could review and approve all the content that was exploding onto the web at that time.

Britannica’s EBIG Web Navigation service with sites selected by Britannica’s editors ultimately faltered.

What happened next?

Wikipedia!

Jakob: Exactly!

Well, I would say Google was the first ones to really come up with this notion of PageRank or authority that's derived from other authorities as opposed to a centralized authority. So as a distributed authority. I think Google has not been able to keep up against the profusion of spam and low-quality sources on the Internet. But at least the original Google from the early days was exactly this notion of having authority derived from distributed commonality of the times and its sense of what's worth linking to and what's worth pointing to. And those became the prime sources. And I think that's really valuable. The point is that you cannot really have a single personal editorial committee, or even a single company.

At Sun Microsystems, one of the founders was Bill Joy, and he had this saying called Joy’s Law. It says: Most of the smartest people work for someone else.

It doesn't matter who you are or which company. Most smart people work elsewhere, right? And that's just true. And he's really right on that. To the extent you have an ability to harness collective wisdom, sometimes called the wisdom of the crowd, which I'm not 100% happy with that term. But there's a lot of smart people all over the world. So, the question is can we find a way of harvesting that?

But I think we have lost it, to be honest. Because the search engines are less good now at really bringing forward the best information. You mentioned Wikipedia, Wikipedia I think is in my opinion not the best information. It's a lot of information, you have information about basically anything you may want.  I think it was 15 years ago or so, there was a big debate about errors in Wikipedia, that you could definitely find articles where there's some point mentioned that's false and it's wrong. But that doesn't tend to last long, because that's the benefit of that vast audience, that somebody will notice this is wrong, and then they'll fix it.

So, the problem with Wikipedia is not so much that there's false information there. Because, I mean, any publication will have some, if nothing else, typos. So, the problem really is more that it doesn't have good judgment, or maybe as Steve Jobs would say, have good taste. I mean, you read an article about something. And quite often they go into very minute detail about a minor point. That's not really the important issue. Which means that from a reader's perspective, right, you want to get the BIG INSIGHT, what's the most important point? And then maybe you want to dig into some other points, which is where hypertext shines. But Wikipedia doesn't quite support that because it's actually written by people who are too interested in the minutia as opposed to the broader picture of what can we teach the reader. So, they don't have a reader-oriented perspective, as a good journalist would have. They have that nerd perspective of all the details are exciting.

That's the downside of Wikipedia. And then that becomes a downside of the search engines. Because Wikipedia is extremely popular. It usually becomes the first hit. And also, because Wikipedia is open source, they can scoop it up and use it for these knowledge panels they generate, which means that they often contain information that's not necessarily the best. And this is where I think there's a hope that AI will actually do better than that. Because things like ChatGPT and all the other competitors, they read and take everything in. If you say, explain [something] to me in one paragraph or in one page, then they actually quite often are able to give you a very nice explanation that actually has more of the important information and less of the unimportant information and at the desired length, because sometimes you don't want everything. Sometimes you just want the basics.

Sometimes you want to compare two things and explain to me the nuances of how these two things are different. That's important. If you're writing, you want to pick the right word. You can go to the dictionary, and it'll tell you this word means this, and that word means that. But combining the two, you have to do it yourself. But you can get ChatGPT to do it for you, i.e., “This is the difference between these two words.” So, I feel like there's a lot of benefit to that.

Now what people will say is that the current AI systems hallucinate and come up with this fake information. That's true. And that's definitely a sign that they're not quite there yet. But I feel like they are almost there, and I imagine they will be in another few years. I'm taking this 40-year perspective, you know, so I'm not thinking about this month versus next month. I’m thinking about how it is this year versus next decade. So, I think that that could be a major step forward as well.

The X-Mentor: The reason I brought up Britannica and Wikipedia was in part because I see common patterns in your article that you released today, Navigating the Web with Text vs. GUI Browsers: AI UX Is 1992 All Over Again.

The Britannica editors guarded against publishing false information with their brand attached to it. Conversely, Wikipedia published first, then corrected false content later. And as you’ve stated, search engines would crawl Wikipedia and push those hits to the top of the results page.

Similarly, today in our conversation, and in your article, you mentioned hallucinations. These large language models continuously “take everything in” as you just said. This feeding back into itself practice potentially could lead to model collapse. It’s not exactly a 1998 problem, but it nevertheless feels like it.

It comes right back to the question, what are your most durable ideas? Some of the things that we were talking about back in 1992 are going to directly apply to AI all over again.

Jakob: Oh yeah!

[Laughs]

They do! I really come to this from the human perspective. Like, what does it mean for Users? People, they don't change. So, people are the same now as they were 1000 years ago. And if you go back 100,000 years ago, maybe there was an evolutionary change. But certainly, for the last many, many years people have been the same. And that means it will literally be the same five years from now. Because almost the entire world population today will be the world population in five years. There'll be a little bit new people coming in, a little bit of old people going out, but the vast majority are going to be identically the same people in five years as who are the users now. They're not going to change. They're going to be exactly the same people.

Total Economic Impact

The X-Mentor: I’ve been thinking about your catalog of work and number of years in the UX discipline, and of course pioneering the discipline. And just thinking about all that I'm aware of and knowing there's probably just as much of your work that I'm not aware of. That's just how productive you've been!

Jakob: Exactly!

[Laughs]

The X-Mentor: I'm curious, Jakob, have you ever thought about the Total Economic Impact of your work?

Jakob: Yeah, I have not calculated it, but I certainly hope it's very big.  Because as I mentioned before, I think there's a double multiplier in that I do something and then hundreds of thousands of people will read it. And then hundreds of millions of people, billions of people, will then benefit from those improved designs.

But it's so hard to say. Is it because somebody read this article of mine that they made this design improvement? You know, it's hard to prove or trace back, but I mean it's proven that people keep reading my stuff. And this is one of the nice things about economics that you know if people don't like it, they're not going to come back. So, there’s a reason that people keep reading this, this usability material that they recognize, that there's some value to it.

And we know that user interfaces have been improving a lot. I’m not claiming that is all due to me because there have been other people in UX, and there's also been technological advances. As I mentioned, new technology and user interfaces they're two steps forward, one step back. I’m just trying to avoid that one step back, or maybe make it only a half a step back, whatever is the most I can achieve.

Technology, you know, technology is getting better. Computers can do more things, but at the same time, we've also got to the point now where companies recognized the need to actually design these products to be easy. And the designers who are working on them are recognizing that design is not a matter of kind of glamour or spinning balls or flashing lights or anything like that. Rather, designing an interactive environment is interaction design. It’s a matter of making it such that people can use your product. And all those insights. You know, I've been pushing them for 40 years and I'm not done. I mean, there's still more work to be done there.

I haven't truly won in the sense that everything I say is just automatically done by everybody, when they create any product in the world. That's unrealistic. But I do think that there's been immense progress as well. So, I'm not saying we have this glass half full or half empty. I think the glass is now more sort of like 2/3 full at least. Yeah, there’s still another third we can pour more water into this glass and make it better you know.

[More Laughs!]

The X-Mentor: In the article that you published today, you talked about that period between 1993 and 1994, where the web itself went from text based to graphic based UI. Jakob, you reported that the web grew by a whopping 44,423% between 1993 and 1994 and that amounts to a 2,010% growth rate.

And I’m quoting from Jakob’s article here:

“User interfaces do matter.”

[Rolling Laughter!]

Calculate the ROI of that!

It’s literally almost too big to quantify. So, something more specific like Discount Usability might be quantifiable by a Forrester type analyst.

As you know, Jakob, The X-Mentor is focused on The Business Impact of Design. This is exactly the argument in favor of good design. We need to start thinking in this way about our craft.

This discipline of design that we're in has an enormous business impact.

And it's because of pioneers like yourself who laid the foundation to think about things in this way so that we can know the value of our work and carry it forward into the future.

Jakob: Yeah. Well, I Absolutely believe that!

I feel like the world is becoming more and more a knowledge economy and this has been true for a long time already, but it's accelerating. For what you might call mid-income countries that transformation is happening as well. You still have some people who work in so-called primary industries like agriculture and fishing, but it's very few. And you still have people who work in manufacturing, and it's more but not that many either these days or in many countries. That same evolution already happened in United States, and in Europe it is happening there as well. The rest of the people, most of the people, are working in knowledge-intensive jobs. These days being a farmer is a knowledge-intensive job as well because they’ve got to manage a lot of complexity there.

So that's why this kind of cognitive augmentation is so important and drives that economic growth and in in many ways. And Marc Andreessen, who's the guy who invented that graphical user interface for the web and is now a venture capitalist, and he's famous for one of his sayings: “Software is eating the world.” And that means that more and more things are becoming software driven. And then what I say is well, if they're software driven, there's that all this complexity and we need to have better user interface design. But I think there is a next step past that.

So, software is eating the world and taking over how people do things.

But then I think AI is feeding the world. Or at least it will be because I feel like this can have this vast productivity impact, which is what we know from the early studies.

There's not that much research yet because it's still relatively new, but all the studies show it more basically the same thing, which is huge productivity increases. And what's called narrowing of the skill gap, which says that you always have some people who are better than other people at doing the job. That's just being human and the nature of the world right. But you're narrowing, not closing, but you're narrowing the skill gap. You're improving the top people's performance, absolutely. But you're improving the bottom people's performance much more. That is super valuable because there's not that many top people in the world. So, they can't do all the work. So, we've got to have, like all the rest of the population, employed as well. And so, the fact that we can improve their performance enormously, it will be an even bigger economic gain once these products roll out and are more broadly used in day-to-day business.

UX & The Years to Come

The X-Mentor: Let’s discuss a couple of parting thoughts for us to think about, Jakob.

First is your quote: “UX is People.” You know, we humans and the way that we relate to technology. Technology certainly appears to be with us even more as we go forward into the future.

How does “UX is People” fit into that future?

Second, what do you think are your most durable ideas that will stay with us?

Jakob: Yes, absolutely. Well, I mean, “UX is people” has a dual meaning. First, people in the sense that we're designing for people, we're designing for humans. And as I mentioned before, we have to accept people for who they are.

It’s my most fundamental ideology or belief that technology should adapt to humans. Humans shouldn't adapt to technology. So, we're designing for people. So that's the first way in which UX is People. And it also means that most of the important lessons in user experience derive from the characteristics of people. From the human brain. Our personality types. All that type of information – that does not change.

People don't get any smarter, you know, 10 years from now, they're not going to get any smarter than they are today. And so, if you think today people are too stupid to use my product, they'll also be too stupid to use your product in 10 years. So, if you want your product to be used, you have to design for the way people are.

The underlying driver has to be people. We're the ones (UX) who have to understand the other people who are our users, our customers. And that's again the human understanding that we must derive. Then we can have AI assistance to help us with all that work and that will make us more productive and improve the economy and all those good things.

But UX is People because we're deciding for people. But who is doing the design? Also, people! That means that a lot of issues, for example organizational behavior, become important. It's not enough that I do a research study so that I can prove x is the best way to do our product. We must actually convince the product manager, and the stakeholders, and the higher ups, this is the way to go, right. So, you have to understand those organizational dynamics and that's one of the very, very important aspects of doing UX in practice is that you're doing it while you're embedded in an organization.

The goal of all of this is to make technology better for humans.

That's our ultimate goal. And you may do that by working with the other people who are in the organization. So, there’s all these ways in which UX is People. And understanding people becomes our most fundamental and important thing. And I feel like that has always been one of my main lessons.

Another lesson is what I mentioned at the beginning of this interview with my experience when I was five years old: “we can understand people, we can test them, we can run these empirical methods.” We don't just sit around the meeting room table and discuss how we think the customers are. We can find out. And that's something I've been pushing my entire career: we can find out and we can find out in better ways, cheaper ways, faster ways. But ultimately, we can find out. That I feel is going to be with us always.

A particular user interface design has, you know, so many dimensions. It's a multidimensional problem-solving exercise that is so complicated you can never design the perfect user interface the first time you try, no matter if you hire the world's best designer. And as I always say, most likely the world's best designer is actually not working on your project. But even if you do. If you're the one product in the world that does have the world's best designer, even that person is not going to create the perfect design the first time.

So, we can improve it! That improvement, I think, is also really big. And I think in the field in general, there's a lot of worship around the revolutionary changes because they make for big news and good stories. But incremental change is often more important. Because if you compare one incremental change with one revolutionary change, then the revolutionary change is bigger. But if you compare 10,000 incremental changes and do that at the same time. I'm very, very keen on this notion of continuous quality improvement. It really works. It works in user interfaces as well.

The X-Mentor: Jakob Nielsen, thank you so much for being with us on The X-Mentor today. It was an absolute delight! You've given us so much to consider today. Thank you for everything you’ve given all of us in the UX community over the years!

Jakob: Well, thank you, Greg. And you really led me through a lot of very interesting perspectives on this. Thank you so much!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

Jakob Nielsen is a usability pioneer, author, and co-founder of Nielsen Norman Group, where he established the "discount usability engineering" movement for fast and cheap improvements of user interfaces.

Greg Parrott is The X-Mentor and publisher of The X-Interviews.