

Estimating AI’s Rate of Progress with UX Design and Research Methods
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

Jakob Nielsen
Oct 306 min read


UX Roundup: Usability Halloween | Score Secondary Research | AI UI Ideas | Heuristic Evaluation with AI
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

Jakob Nielsen
Oct 2712 min read


Think-Time UX: Design to Support Cognitive Latency
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

Jakob Nielsen
Oct 2327 min read


UX Roundup: Latent Affordances | Automating Competence | Entry-Level UXR Job | Direct Manipulation | One-Shot AI Slideshow | Veo 3.1 | $100M Avatars
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

Jakob Nielsen
Oct 2012 min read


Slow AI: Designing User Control for Long Tasks
Batch processing returns as AI agents run for hours or days, eliminating traditional turn-taking interaction. Slow AI creates control and observability problems; users forget context during long waits. UX solutions include upfront clarification, explicit run contracts, checkpointing for recovery, conceptual breadcrumbs showing reasoning, and progressive disclosure of partial results.

Jakob Nielsen
Oct 1328 min read


UX Roundup: Email UX | Sora 2 | AI New Business Capabilities | AI Consumer Surplus | Latent Affordances | Ambient Clinical AI
Summary : Email user experience | New video model Sora 2 compared with older models | AI offering new business capabilities instead of...

Jakob Nielsen
Oct 614 min read
