About Me – Rolf Molich

I own and manage DialogDesign, a tiny Danish usability consultancy, which I founded in 1993. I started working full-time for DialogDesign in February 1997. I have worked with usability since 1984.

I am also a founding member and former Vice President of the User Experience Qualification Board, UXQB. The UXQB provides UX training materials and certification. As of December 2022, almost 7,700 people had obtained a CPUX-F certificate. I am currently the editor of two UXQB Curricula:

  • Essentials in UX and HCD Management, CPUX-M,
  • Usability Testing, CPUX-UT.

    I am the former editor of the CPUX-F Foundation level curriculum.

    In 2014, the User Experience Professionals Association awarded me the UXPA Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition of my work on the Comparative Usability Evaluation studies (CUE) and Heuristic evaluation.

    In 2022, the German UPA awarded me the User Experience Achievement Award in recognition of my work on the CPUX-certification and Heuristic evaluation.

    I conceived and coordinated the Comparative Usability Evaluation studies CUE-1 through CUE-10, in which more than 150 professional usability teams evaluated the usability of the same applications, mostly using usability testing.

    I regularly present my research and insights at international conferences in workshops, talks and keynotes. I always ask participants to evaluate the presentations. Typical scores range from 4.0 to 4.5 on a five-point scale.

    I am the co-inventor of the heuristic evaluation method, which I developed in cooperation with Jakob Nielsen.

    From 2011 to 2017, I was a part-time external lecturer at DIKU, the Department of Computer Science at the University of Copenhagen, where I taught an introductory Human-Computer Interaction course that was mandatory for all computer science students. I am particularly proud of the fact that in 2013 my students named me “teacher of the year” in recognition of my highly usable approach to teaching:

    I try not only to preach usability, but also to practice it; and I always try to pay careful attention to the feedback I get from my users.

    From 1986 to 2011, I was an external lecturer at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), where I taught the popular Usability Engineering course. 

    In 2000, I was a principal investigator in the Nielsen Norman Group’s large-scale usability test of 20 US e-commerce websites, involving more than 60 users. I wrote the resulting book “E-Commerce User Experience” together with Carolyn Snyder, Susan Farrell and Jakob Nielsen.

    In 1984, I edited the best-selling Danish book Brugervenlige edb-systemer (“User Friendly Computer Systems”), written by myself and 4 colleagues, Peter Beyer, Peter Carstensen, Anker Helms Jørgensen and Finn Hindkjær Pedersen. In 1994, I took over full responsibility for the book and wrote several editions of the book. The last edition was published in 2003. Over the years, roughly 30,000 copies of the various editions of the book have been sold. The book is also available in English, with the title “Usable Web Design”. I readily admit that the book is now obsolete.

    I was born in February 1949. I graduated as a software engineer (M.Sc. in software engineering) from the Technical University of Denmark in 1974. My master’s project was a multi-task operating system for the Intel 8080 microprocessor including an assembler and a word-processing system. I carried out the project in cooperation with Finn Verner Nielsen.

    From 1974 to 1997, I worked as a project manager and software methods specialist for several Danish companies: Christian Rovsing A/S (1974-1976), Crone & Koch K/S (1976), Dansk Data Elektronik A/S (1976-1980), Dansk Datamatik Center (1980-1986), I S Hahns Enke (stockbroker) (1986), Baltica Bank (1986-1988), Baltica Forsikring (1988-1995) and Kommunedata (1995-1997).