Jakob Nielsen 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, which has sold more than a quarter of a million copies in twenty-two languages. His other books include the new Prioritizing Web Usability. Nielsen's Alertbox column on Web usability has been published on the Internet since 1995 and currently has about 200,000 readers.
Kara Pernice is the Director of Research at Nielsen Norman Group and heads the company's East Coast operations. She has led many of NN/g's major intercontinental research studies and then generated design guidelines and coauthored the study reports, including designing corporate intranets, designing for accessibility, designing for people over the age of 65, and designing websites to maximize press relations. She is a leading authority on intranet usability and has also judged the submissions for and coauthored the company's Intranet Design Annuals in 2001, 2002, 2003, 2005, and 2006, and its government intranets report.
