Google's Yahoo Moment. Tognazzini and Brenda Laurel have joined as principals in their company, Nielsen Norman Group. Since then, we've succeeded in getting many companies to recognize the necessity of usability for survival on the Internet. This new united front of usability gurus gains us a powerful enough voice to penetrate the skulls of the holdouts.
Laurel strongly considers the cultural contexts in which products and services are developed.
Norman advises that the achievement of usable design can only occur when a company builds an internal structure and cultural commitment that places the needs of the customer first. Joining the company in its infancy, he designed a series of sophisticated Web-based applications, ensuring they were fast to learn and highly productive. Prior to that, he was a colleague of Jakob Nielsen's at Sun Microsystems, serving as its Distinguished Engineer for Strategic Technology, inventing next-generation user interfaces that earned him 30 United States patents. He spent 14 years at Apple Computer, founding the Macintosh Human Interface Group, and acting as Apple's chief design troubleshooter, helping key clients swiftly and dramatically improve their products and processes. Brenda Laurel, a usability expert specializing in interactive entertainment for the last 25 years, is best known as co-founder and chief designer of Purple Moon, a company formed to develop interactive products for girls.