The "Tender Technicians" of Nielsen Norman Group Videos

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 trea...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Jaci Wilkinson
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Michigan Publishing 2022-05-01
Series:Weave: Journal of Library User Experience
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Online Access:https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/weaveux/article/id/2131/
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Summary: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. 
ISSN:2333-3316