

UX Roundup: UX Slogans | Improve Google Search Results | Outdated Academic Research | Staff vs. Executive AI Use | Free AI | Bosses Decide AI Culture | Technology Acceptance Model | AI Acceptance
Top 10 UX slogans explained by Greek gods | Improve your Google search results by boosting the sites you like | Academic research on AI user experience uses outdated models | Worker bees send 13 more AI messages per week than their executives | Free AI accounts dominate even in the enterprise | AI splits company culture down the middle, and managers are the tiebreaker | The Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology

Jakob Nielsen
23 hours ago24 min read


Fitts’s Law: Big and Near Beats Small and Far
Pointing time depends on two numbers: target distance and target size. Paul Fitts quantified this in 1954, explaining every mouse move and thumb tap since then. Make frequent targets big and near, make destructive ones small and far, and don’t supersize everything else. The law holds up in VR and AR, at degraded throughput. And AI doesn’t repeal it; it merely shrinks pointing’s kingdom as conversation replaces cascades of clicks.

Jakob Nielsen
2 days ago18 min read


UX Roundup: Benchmarking Office Work | AI Undermines Billable Hours | AI as Delegate | Error Recovery | Pareto Frontier | Left-Digit Effect | Empty States | AI Use Differences | Educational Video
Chinese AI models deliver 64% of entry-level human office-work quality in new benchmark | AI breaks the billable-hours model for consulting and shifts it to outcome-based pricing | Workers delegate whole tasks to AI but rarely review the output | Turning error messages into recovery tools | The Pareto Frontier of advancing AI capabilities | The left-digit effect is why $2.99 outsells the simpler $3.00 | Alleviating the empty-screen problem | AI usage may follow a power law in

Jakob Nielsen
5 days ago18 min read


UX Roundup: AI as Interviewer | Design Theater | The Planning Fallacy | Humans as Middleware | Long-Horizon Tasks | Good Videos
AI conducting user interviews mostly failed to probe deeply | AI UI tools break 1/4 of their design promises | The planning fallacy makes us believe more in schedules than they deserve | Cards as a UI element | Humans are middleware for AI | How to make AI support extended tasks that take weeks to complete | Two recommended AI videos in sharply different genres and durations

Jakob Nielsen
Aug 2117 min read


UX Roundup: Hedonic Adaptation | Knowledge Worker AI | AI Sensemaking | Delegating Agent Actions | Branching UI vs. Linear Chat | Base-Rate Neglect | Rating Controls | Animated Prompt Understanding
New music video about hedonic adaptation | AI better at some forms of knowledge work than at others | AI increasingly used for sensemaking among corporate users | Users want to approve certain autonomous actions | For exploratory creation, a branching UI beat the traditional linear chat interface to the AI backend model | Base-rate neglect: one vivid anecdote outweighs a thousand statistics | The ***** UI for user ratings | Experimental system connects specific words in the u

Jakob Nielsen
Aug 1421 min read


UX Roundup: AI Diffusion Speed | Synthetic Personas | AI Learning | Brad Myers | Agatha Christie | Mental Accounting | Grok Imagine 2
AI technical capabilities are exploding, but sophisticated use crawls | Synthetic personas exaggerate demographics | AI hurts education when used wrong | Professor Brad Myers is a UX hero | In the future, we’ll all be Agatha Christie | Mental accounting gives users separate budgets for separate expenses | Grok releases upgraded image model

Jakob Nielsen
Aug 1018 min read


Progress Indicators Ease the Wait
Show a progress indicator when response time exceeds 10 seconds, preferably as a percent-done bar. It tells users two things: the system heard you, and here’s how long the ordeal will last. But never let the bar stall, lie, or reset. AI agents that work for hours have raised the stakes: progress indicators must now serve users who walked away. Follow the 12 design guidelines in this article.

Jakob Nielsen
Aug 813 min read


UX Roundup: Simplicity | Fact Flooding | AI Integration | AI Adoption Personas | Tone of Voice | Timelines | Cybersecurity | Agentic E-commerce
Keep It Simple | AI uses fact flooding to overwhelm users and persuade them | Deep AI integration in business processes | 5 personas for adopting AI | Using AI to change the tone of voice of your writing | Timelines: a chrono-based UI | AI improves cybersecurity | Increasing use of AI agents for online shopping

Jakob Nielsen
Aug 723 min read


76 Open Research Questions in AI Usability
AI is the biggest change to UX design in 60 years, yet we know embarrassingly little about how people actually use it. Here are 76 open research questions, organized into 7 lists sized for everyone from high school students to the big AI labs. Students who complete a research challenge gain the two qualities employers now screen for: agency and demonstrated AI experience.

Jakob Nielsen
Aug 526 min read


UX Roundup: Design Guidelines Changing for AI | AI Anxiety | Toggle Switches | Erdős Problems | Glanceable Monitoring
Design guidelines held steady for 30 years but are shifting with AI | Users who are anxious about AI use it more, not less | A toggle is a light switch, not a form field | What are the Erdős problems and why are they relevant for AI? | An ambient monitoring interface with glanceable feedback on agent progress cut errors in hal

Jakob Nielsen
Aug 319 min read


UX Roundup: Web Design for AI Agents | AI Assistants Beat Brand Websites | Ship, Learn, Iterate | AI as Business Strategist | AI-Assisted Creativity for Children | Infinite Canvas | Scott McCloud
Agent-ready web design lifts AI task success | Shoppers now pick AI assistants over brand websites, 41% to 38% | Learn from reality: build and iterate | AI getting better at business strategy, but still not good enough to run your company | AI raised the floor but lowered the ceiling in children’s storytelling | Infinite canvas as a UI space for organizing and collaborating on unstructured information | My Hero: Scott McCloud, comic book artist and theorist | AI animates clas

Jakob Nielsen
Jul 3125 min read


UX Roundup: New AI Models | How Designers Use AI Design | User Agency | Breadcrumbs | Doug Engelbart | Decoy Effect | Active Users | AI Training vs. Copyright
Comparing GPT 5.6 Sol, Opus 5, Kimi K3 | How designers use a UI design agent | AI enhances users’ agency, and they like it | Breadcrumb navigation | UX Hero Doug Engelbart | The decoy effect in pricing plan comparison pages | The paradox of the Active User | Delhi High Court rules that AI training on copyrighted content is legal in India

Jakob Nielsen
Jul 2723 min read


UX Roundup: Carousels | AI-Native Games | Bulk Actions | AI Film Wins at Cannes | AI Use 2× in One Year
Carousels are scanned in an L-pattern, not the F-pattern | Making AI-Native games playable | Bulk actions support flexibility and efficiency of use | AI film wins a bronze lion at the Cannes Festival | Use of AI applications doubled in one year

Jakob Nielsen
Jul 2421 min read


AI Turns Competence into a Commodity: Evidence from 2.26 Million Freelance Contracts
AI narrows skill gaps by helping weak performers the most. Employers are reacting: hiring in AI-exposed job categories now weights human capital 7.8% less and price 1.1% more than before ChatGPT and the demand premium for highly skilled workers is shrinking. Competence has become commodity, so sell judgment. Agentic AI will reverse the equalization and widen skill gaps again.

Jakob Nielsen
Jul 2229 min read


UX Roundup: Usability of AI “Skills” | UXR Job Listings | AI Comics Help Learning | Quick View | The AI Economy | Social Learning | Automated Ads
How AI “skills” are reused and other usability issues with skills | User research job listings for junior staff dry up, and senior staff need AI experience to be hired | Data comics generated with AI increase student learning | Quick view as a shortcut for seeing product info | The AI economy has $175 billion in revenue | AI use spreads from peers | Automatically creating advertisements based on a website

Jakob Nielsen
Jul 1726 min read


Predicting the AI Interface 30 Years Ago: I Was 71% Right
In 1993 and 1996, I predicted that user interfaces would abandon commands: computers would infer and execute user intent instead of obeying point-and-click orders. Modern AI delivered that paradigm, 30 years later. Scoring the papers’ 23 specific predictions against 2026 reality produces a decent grade: 71% correct. The biggest hit: language as the primary interface. The biggest miss: I predicted expert users, and AI instead became the great equalizer.

Jakob Nielsen
Jul 1519 min read


UX Roundup: AI Agents Change Workflows | User Expertise and Agentic AI | Controlling AI Complexity | Constraints | Meta Muse Image | Seedream 5 Pro | Image-Model Shootout | GPT 5.6 Sol
AI agents expand user tasks | Agentic AI makes expertise more valuable, not less | Users need control over the complexity of AI results | Constraints help users | Meta launched a new image model, Muse Image | ByteDance upgrades its image model to Seedream 5 Pro | Comparing the leading image models | GPT receives a major upgrade to v. 5.6 Sol

Jakob Nielsen
Jul 1330 min read


Progressive Disclosure: From Training Wheels to Week-Long AI Agents
Progressive disclosure puts the few features that serve most tasks on the first screen and defers the rest to a clearly labeled second level. The pattern has 4 decades of evidence behind it: novices learn faster and err less, while experts pay 1 click. It’s about to matter more than ever, because AI answers and long-running agents need layered revealing even more than settings screens do.

Jakob Nielsen
Jul 913 min read


UX Roundup: UX Benchmark | Impact of AI Mentions | Character Design Workflow | AI Maturity | UX Hero: Stu Card | Microsoft FDE
UX benchmark for AI | Being mentioned in AI answers drives subsequent user behavior | Cheaper character design workflow for new video | AI maturity model | My hero: Dr. Stuart K. Card of Xerox PARC | Microsoft FDE

Jakob Nielsen
Jul 622 min read


2026 AI and UX Predictions: A Mid-Year Reality Check
Halfway through 2026, AI is evolving faster than expected, but usability is struggling to keep pace. I graded my 18 predictions on autonomous agents, compute shortages, and interface design to separate the hype from reality.

Jakob Nielsen
Jul 230 min read
