

UX Roundup: AI Music | Humans Impolite to AI | Subscriptions vs. Social Media | AI vs. Search
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.

Jakob Nielsen
Nov 10, 20259 min read


When Humans Add Negative Value: AI Alone vs. Human–AI Synergy
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

Jakob Nielsen
Nov 6, 202532 min read


UX Roundup: Long-Running AI | Consistency | What AI to Use | AI Anxiety | AI Helps Blind Users | NPS
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

Jakob Nielsen
Nov 3, 202510 min read


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 30, 20256 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 27, 202512 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 23, 202527 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 20, 202512 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 13, 202528 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 6, 202514 min read


UX Roundup: AI Music and Video Upgrades | Survey Length | Self-Driving Safety | AI GDP Metric | Amazon Dark Design
Summary : New versions of leading AI music and video models Suno and Kling | Shorter surveys have higher validity | Safety update for...

Jakob Nielsen
Sep 29, 202511 min read


Transformative AI Changes the Future of Work and Firms
Summary: Transformative AI (TAI) is AI that fundamentally changes the economy, increasing productivity at an unprecedented rate and...

Jakob Nielsen
Sep 25, 202520 min read


UX Roundup: Forward Deployed Engineers | AI GUI Controls | Apple Liquid Glass UI | User Testing Explained
Summary : Forward Deployed Engineers are the new user researchers | Reve has GUI controls for AI image editing | Apple Liquid Glass UI...

Jakob Nielsen
Sep 22, 202512 min read


Email Newsletters Build Loyal Audiences
Email newsletters outperform social media for audience loyalty because they're permission-based, direct channels. Unlike platform-dependent followers, subscribers actively choose your content. As AI disintermediates search traffic, owned email lists become strategic imperatives for direct audience access.

Jakob Nielsen
Sep 18, 202525 min read


UX Roundup: User Testing | AI Ads | Users Like AI | Multiple Analytics Experiments | Low-Fi Prototyping | AI for User Research
Summary : User Testing 12-step process | AI advertisements outperformed human-created ads | Users give high NPS scores to the main AI...

Jakob Nielsen
Sep 15, 202512 min read


AI-First Companies
Summary: AI-First means massive automation to repetitive tasks, rapid iteration over perfection, ubiquitous AI integration across...

Jakob Nielsen
Sep 11, 202517 min read
