About the Authors

Jakob Nielsen

Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D., is a principal of Nielsen Norman Group. He is the founder of the "discount usability engineering" movement, which emphasizes fast and efficient methods for improving the quality of user interfaces. Nielsen, noted as "the world's leading expert on Web usability" by U.S. News and World Report and "the next best thing to a true time machine" by USA Today, is the author of the best-selling book Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity (New Riders Publishing, 2000), which has sold more than a quarter of a million copies in 22 languages. His other books include Usability Engineering (Morgan Kaufmann, 1993); with Robert L. Mack, Usability Inspection Methods (Wiley, 1994); Multimedia and Hypertext: The Internet and Beyond (Morgan Kaufmann, 1995); International User Interfaces (Wiley, 1996); and with Marie Tahir, Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed (New Riders Publishing, 2001). Nielsen's Alertbox column on Web usability has been published on the Internet since 1995 and currently has about 200,000 readers at www.useit.com.

From 1994 to 1998, Nielsen was a Sun Microsystems Distinguished Engineer. His previous affiliations include Bell Communications Research, the Technical University of Denmark, and the IBM User Interface Institute. He has been awarded 79 United States patents, mainly on ways of making the Internet easier to use. Nielsen holds a Ph.D. in human-computer interaction from the Technical University of Denmark.

Hoa Loranger

Hoa Loranger is a user experience specialist at Nielsen Norman Group and heads the group's San Diego office. She consults with many prominent companies in the entertainment, finance, technology, e-commerce, intranet, and other industries. She has worked with clients to successfully implement user-centered design strategies leading to improved sales and ROI.

Loranger gives keynotes and tutorials on a wide range of topics, including usability principles and guidelines, user-centered design concepts, and applied research methodologies. She produces training videos and authors reports on topics such as: Flash-based applications, teenagers on the Web, "About Us," business-to-business (B2B) Web sites, and paper prototyping techniques. Her extensive usability research has spanned the globe, including Asia, Australia, Europe, and North America.

Before joining Nielsen Norman Group, Loranger served as human factors lead at Intuit, where her group was responsible for the user interaction and visual design for the TurboTax and QuickBooks product line. At TRW (currently Northrop Grumman), she specialized in both hardware and software systems, including navigational and logistical applications, and computer configurations for military vehicles.

Loranger holds a Masters degree in Human Factors and Applied Experimental Psychology from California State University at Northridge, and a B.A. in Psychology from the University of California at Irvine.