Summary:  Three design patterns exist for inactive UI commands: showing them as normal commands with an error message if clicked, a visibly disabled state, or completely hiding unavailable options. Best practice is to display disabled features in muted colors, accompanied by explanations of why they are currently unavailable.   Short music video about this article  (YouTube, 4 min.) Behold the epic saga of the disabled button: Sometimes, a command or feature is inactive , me

Summary : Experimenting with same song in different genres | Humans impolite to AI, which needs to be reflected in training data | Subscriptions beat social media for insightful content | AI answers beat search   UX Roundup for November 10, 2025. (Seedream 4) Two New Music Genres I remade my opera about direct manipulation (YouTube, 4 min.) in two modern music genres: Jazz song  about direct manipulation (YouTube, 3 min.) Rock song  about direct manipulation (YouTube, 3 min.

Summary:  The prevailing “human in the loop” paradigm for AI use must die or be drastically reduced. In many cases, human involvement already degrades AI performance, especially in analytical tasks. Creative fields still benefit from the positive synergistic effects of human-AI collaboration, but as AI improves, the scope for human involvement will likely shrink. Humans must move up the food chain to exhibit agency and strategic management, while letting superior AI systems o

Summary : UX for long-running AI tasks | Consistent user interface design | What are the best AI models to use now | AI anxiety in the workplace | AI helps blind users, but a study found that accessibility challenges remain in current AI UI | NPS scored   UX Roundup for November 3, 2025. (Seedream 4)   UX For Long-Running AI Tasks New explainer video about the UX of AI that runs for hours  or days (YouTube, 5 min.). Concept: Eton upperclassman. I had a hard time making this a

Summary:  When can AI replace UX designers? We need longitudinal research to compare AI with human experts across multiple UX methods and track the improvement rates. Results could define an AI scaling law for UX skills, helping companies decide when to delegate what UX work to AI versus humans.   We need to discover if a scaling law exists for AI’s ability to perform UX and usability work. (Similar to the well-established existing AI scaling laws .) This includes facilitatin

Summary : Usability Halloween | Study Similarity Score to assess the relevance of secondary research | 23 design ideas to improve AI UI | Using AI to conduct heuristic evaluation UX Roundup for October 27, 2025. (Seedream 4) Usability Halloween Costume Dress up as a usability expert this Halloween ! I made a short video (YouTube, 3 min.) with Sora 2 and Veo 3 to show what kids think of this idea. (Spoiler: They like it, but then all these kids were generated by my prompts.) H

Summary:  Next-generation AI-UX design must deliver human handoff harmony, with seamless transitions between machine execution and user cognition that recognize people’s limited mental processing budgets across different time periods. Includes 23 UX design patterns that support cognitive latency. Design to support the different time scales of human cognition. (Seedream 4) My good buddy Steve Krug famously said, “Don’t Make Me Think,”  as his rule number one for achieving usab

Summary : Latent affordances | Automating best-practice dissemination by having AI learn from top staff | Entry-level user researcher job opening at LEGO | Direct manipulation: the opera | One-shotting a narrated slideshow with Google’s NotebookLM | New video model Veo 3.1 | Avatar company HeyGen scores $100M annual run rate UX Roundup for October 20, 2025: Many of this week’s news items relate to the process of going from idea to video with AI. (GPT Image-1) Latent Affordanc