Abstract
Nielsen Norman Group (NN/g) YouTube content predominantly features young, white or white-presenting, normatively attractive women. The uniform presentation of these women, combined with the unspecific, universalizing script content, compromises their expertise and is objectifying. This treatment, combined with a lack of diversity in featured employees, undercuts NN/g’s standing as an authoritative resource in the field of user experience (UX). Additionally, it contributes to a sexist representation of UX as a pink-collar field and compounds librarianship’s own pink-collar culture and whiteness problems. NN/g video content echoes a century-old manipulation of librarians as “tender technicians” (Garrison, 1972; Sloniowski, 2016), now made into clickbait using the aesthetics of YouTube beauty vloggers.
Read the full article now at WeaveUX.
Citation
Wilkinson, J. (2022). The “tender technicians” of Nielsen Norman Group videos. Weave: Journal of Library User Experience, 5(1). https://doi.org/10.3998/weaveux.2131
JP Wilkinson 