Nielsen and Norman Should Be Ignored
We were told to look up to them and others whose best days appear to have been in the 1990s. So we looked up to them. But I question who these people really are and their relevance today.
I question who didn’t get credit for terms, techniques, or studies while they got or took credit.
We are surprised or offended when we read what Norman messaged someone. Or what Nielsen said about AI or how everybody being laid off was a bottom performer, and it’s good for companies to get rid of those people. We were surprised and offended when Nielsen said all the wrong things about accessibility.
We are surprised and offended because we expected better from people we thought were heroes.
They’re not my heroes. They were for a short time, but as I put the pieces together, they fell off the pedestal, and the pedestal came crashing down.
I read the tweets. I read Fast Company’s article on Don Norman. I read their elitish bullshitty job descriptions, including a new one that is part-time yet combines at least six jobs into one. I watched them hire what one article called “Tender Technicians:” young, slim, female, and white or white-presenting.
I watched Norman publicly saying that he hated what most design thinking was while NNg was making money training the version he was against. I expected NNg to come out against bad UX techniques, stripped down UX techniques, and fake UX like design thinking, Lean UX, and others. But they sold us out, and they make money training fake and bad UX.
I watched Norman claim he was going to redefine UX education while having little knowledge on what it currently was or how predatory it was at all levels. I watched him have little knowledge of the carnage of what most UX jobs had become… so what would jobs would we be training people for? He wasn’t aware of this.
I was so disappointed by NNg training that I got money back on one course when I said “significantly not as described,” and the other I wrote off as a loss. But it inspired my “Think Out Loud” pedagogy. And semi inspired this article, “Bad Courses And Programs Quietly Gaslight You.”
I watched them seemingly do nothing about UX’s biggest problems. Or they added to our problems.
It got so bad that I saw some people hypothesizing that Nielsen was ghostwritten. Or some people suggesting that they are old, senile, or not mentally functioning well due to age. That seems ageist. Why are we making excuses for this behavior?
But then people have been coming out on LinkedIn, and saying, “Nope, this sounds like the same asshole I dealt with in 2008.” Or the like.
It sounds like at least Nielsen has been somewhat unlikeable for a long time, and we didn’t know. Or we gave him a pass. We don’t have to give anybody a pass anymore.
If you needed permission to stop idolizing them, here it is!
We don’t have a “Nielsen problem.” We don’t need to talk about them any more ever again. They have made themselves irrelevant.
I unsubscribed from all of their mailing lists and newsletters. I don’t follow them on LinkedIn. I’m not applying to their jobs. I’m not taking their courses. I have no interest in what they say or do.
And I think very few people do. Some of us old schoolers will remember Nielsen and Norman. But what legacy are they leaving behind? Anybody who cares about good UX done well won’t vibe with a lot of what NNg teaches or Nielsen’s love letter articles on how much of our work AI can take over. Anybody who has real empathy for people won’t vibe with a lot of what has been coming out of N and N for years now.
They’re not relevant. Which means we can stop talking about them. Nobody but us is talking about them. Why should we amplify shitty messages from people nobody is talking about anymore?
Bonus:
Throw into this bucket anybody else who seemed to have had their best days in the 1990s, and has sold us out. Trains companies that anybody can do UX, everybody is a Designer, and it’s better when the Agile team can do UX work. Wants to sell you on being layoff-proof in 2024. Will this advice work for all who will try it? Possible but unlikely.
Throw into this bucket anybody who seemed to have last worked in UX in the 1990s, but wants to tell us now the best ways for Designers or Researchers to work, even though they barely had a career in any of these.
Throw into this bucket anybody who wrote UX books 10+ years ago and last had a UX job over 15 years ago. Tried to sell you on being layoff-proof in 2020, which turned out to not be true.
Throw into this bucket anybody who switched from doing the work to talking about the work. Anybody who is out of touch because they haven’t seen in the work in years. Corporate training, especially techniques that sell us out, don’t count.
UX and UX-adjacent domains have a lot of “cult leaders” who have become popular, mostly for speaking out of both sides of their mouth. They sold companies what they wanted to hear while trying to tell UX this was our fault. Our struggle, our problem. This is one of many reasons why I always call for critical thinking.
And speaking up. We in UX tend to be nice people. We said so little when books and techniques came out that streamrolled us, belittled us, and disempowered us. We really said little when it came from someone who was supposed to be “one of us.” We figured people would know that book was crap, and forget about it. But Engineers and Product Managers discovered it, and ran with it as “how a UX expert said to do UX.”
We must speak up more. And pull everybody off the pedestals.
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