Called the world's leading expert on Web usability by US News and World Report, Jakob Nielsen today serves as user advocate and principal of the Nielsen Norman Group. In the course of a career in which he held influential positions at Sun Microsystems, Bellcore, and IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center, Nielsen founded the "discount usability engineering" movement for fast and cheap improvements of user interfaces and invented several usability methods, including heuristic evaluation. He holds 58 US patents, many of which focus on ways to make the Internet easier to use. He has written the Alertbox column on Web usability since 1995 and is the author of Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity and Usability Engineering, plus eight other books.