- Jakob Nielsen held a Q and A session
during our July Virtual UX Conference.
Athir from Chicago said that
"Many people cite Jakob as a source of inspiration."
And he asked who Jakob looks to for his own inspiration.
- Many people certainly during the years,
but one in the very beginning was Ted Nelson
and that's Nelson, not Nielsen, so no relation.
But Ted Nelson is the guy who invented hypertext.
And he was back in the 1980s, he was like a kind of radical
person in terms of talk about how computers
could be completely different than they were at the time
where most use of computers were for payroll processing
or for scientific calculations and those types of things.
So he actually wrote a book called, "Literal Machines"
that I bought when I was a graduate student
and I still have it.
And that this book was like kind of homemade,
'cause he like sort of just made up in his typewriter
and hand-drawn, let's see if we can find anything
with the illustration.
Kind of hand drawn illustrations and everything.
So yes, he was like an old hippie guy,
but honestly, very inspiring
and I really got into this notion of hypertext,
which is like when the web came around,
then knowing about usability and hypertext,
that was a great combo.
So Ted Nelson was a great inspiration for me
in the early days.
Then later on when I actually became a professional,
I got jobs and all of that,
I worked at IBM's Research Headquarters
in Yorktown Heights, in New York.
And there were many great people there
that I admired many of them,
but particularly I'd like to mention John Gould
as an inspiration.
John Gould was one of the senior researchers there
and he was actually in many ways very different than me.
He was a very classical psychologist in terms of like
very rigorous experimentation.
I'm more on the side of let's do some sort of simple,
quick experiments, but he was very rigorous
and he just taught me, like you can just study anything.
You just have to put your mind to designing
the experiment right.
And I remember that he was studying
how you could do a 3D manipulation.
Kind of reminded me about this question about how you do VR.
They didn't have any of that technology at the time.
So what he was doing, he made studies where the participants
were given like a Mr. Potato head doll
and had to manipulate that doll in various ways.
And so I was actually one of the pilot participants
in the study.
As it turns out, I was brought up in Denmark,
we didn't have Mr. Potato head dolls. (chuckles)
So I was kind of stumped at how to use that doll, the toy.
So that was kind of actually
a good learning experience as well,
because you really had to kind of recognize
how participants often think that they're stupid
when they can't do something even though of course,
it's the user interface that that's bad as we always say.
But you experience that yourself when you're in a study
and you have a hard time doing something very simple,
like play with a children's toy
just because you never tried that toy before.
So John was really a great inspiration to me
in many, many ways.
More recently, I would also mention somebody like JYP
he's a K-pop star.
It's not really because I like several of his songs,
but that's not really why I mention him.
But, he also in addition to forming songs himself,
he's also written 50, about 50 kind of hit songs
and for many others and he's put together
a lot of these groups that perform.
And so this notion that you can kinda not just only be
you know, your own presenter, your own style,
but you can actually put together the teams
and one thing he's done recently, he's Korean,
but most recently his most recent project
was to put together a Japanese group.
Which I think is another thing that's kind of inspiring
to me this notion that we are worldwide
and we've got to reach out
beyond just where we are from ourselves
and pull that together.
I don't think I'm personally gonna go
and like hire nine Japanese teenagers(laughs)
and train them like he is doing.
But that approach though, I think is very interesting.
And actually one last thing I would mention
as an inspiration.
This is a Sir Ernest Shackleton, the British Polar explorer.
And I would not have mentioned him until recently
because I have no inspiration or idea
that I wanted like live off a penguin for two years
or anything of that nature.
But, it's just because of the current situation
with the pandemic, you know.
So Shackleton, is famous for, there's actually a nice book
I'd also like to recommend, a book about Shackleton.
So this one called "The Endurance".
Endurance was the name of his ship.
You can see here how the ship was frozen in the ice.
So his crew was trapped for two years,
living off penguin meat.
The name of the ship was very prophetic in that sense,
but what Sir Ernest Shackleton is famous for
is that he brought back every single member of that crew
despite that hardship.
And I think that's really inspiring
in this current circumstances.
So you just wanna like bring the team home
you know, despite the situation.
So that I think it's another good inspiration.