Summary : AI exhibits better empathy than human clinicians | Compute limits should be made transparent in the user experience | User interface modes usually lower usability | Seedream 4.5 image model now with improved text rendering | How feasible is it to build an AI company outside Silicon Valley | The Kling video model now generates speaking characters UX Roundup for December 8, 2025. (Nano Banana Pro) Creation by Discovery New music video about how creators explore the la

Summary:  Three storylines from different categories of product design: apps, websites, and consumer electronics, all told in comic-strip format. Different cartooning styles are used to convey varying levels of detail, including a humorous version told through animal characters.   I made all the comics in this article with Nano Banana Pro. I have a systematic 12-step process for planning, running, and analyzing a usability study . Unfortunately, the write-up of the full proce

Summary : UX should quest for profits, not a seat at the table | In-depth AI reviews of draft academic papers | Emotional lip-synching of avatars when singing | Time needed to build AI supercompute data centers | Discover user needs UX Roundup for December 1, 2025. (Nano Banana Pro) Abandon Your CEO Crush Matthew Holloway published a great article deploring design leaders’ fixation on reporting directly to CEOs . He wrote that this resembles adolescent crushes: idealized fant

Summary:  Google's Nano Banana Pro takes AI image generation mainstream, making professional visual communication accessible to everyone. Integrating with Gemini 3 Pro's reasoning engine, it creates professional infographics, comic strips, and visual resumes instantly. While imperfect, with occasional typos, excessive verbosity,  and generic default styling, it outperforms competitors for practical applications. This advancement will transform how we explain complex informati

Summary : AI helps old users stay creative | Microsoft, Google, and our AI Future | Automatically generate on-brand campaigns | AI-created digital storytelling is worth $2 billion | AI music valued even higher than AI slides UX Roundup for November 24, 2025. (Nano Banana Pro) Happy Thanksgiving (Seedream 4) Happy Thanksgiving from UX Tigers and Jakob Nielsen! I made a short song with my mascot tiger celebrating Thanksgiving , combining animations from Seedance Pro 1, Grok Ima

Summary:  Google's new Gemini 3 Pro is making waves, but not just for its top leaderboard scores. The real story? Generative UI: interfaces that AI designs just for you, right when you need them. Users overwhelmingly prefer these custom-made interfaces over regular websites (90% of the time!). Sure, human designers still win by a hair, but with AI improving exponentially and humans staying roughly the same, that won't last long.   Google will be hammering out individualized u

Summary : New Image Models: Microsoft MAI-Image-1 vs. Grok Image 0.9 | Writing digital content: Julius Caesar as a role model | Should AI mimic human cognition? | AI helps e-commerce sell more | AI singers understand the lyrics   UX Roundup for November 17, 2025. (GPT Image-1) New Image Models: Microsoft MAI-Image-1 vs. Grok Image 0.9 Microsoft has released a new text-to-image model on www.bing.com/create , called MAI-Image-1. I tested it with the same prompt I had used with

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