Summary : Year of the Fire Horse | Reversing creative workflows | AI coding wins complete dominance | Usability scaling continues | 40 years of being right become 40 years of being wrong | Usability Engineering book passes 30,000 citations | Award-winning AI video UX Roundup for February 16, 2026: Happy Year of the Horse! (xx)     Year of the Fire Horse Happy Year of the Horse! But it’s not just any old horse this year, it’s the fire horse, a combination that only comes aroun

Summary:  We possess the philosopher’s stone in the form of AI (transmuting cheap sand into expensive thought), tutoring that used to be limited to emperors (also AI), and tools that transcend biological limits (AI again). The only thing holding us back is our willingness to act, because humans still need agency. AI works. The question is: will you? I have long been a fan of Marc Andreessen, the man who built the first practical GUI web browser  and now co-leads Silicon Valle

Summary : AI judgment may follow a scaling law | Scaling AI’s judgment of usability heuristics | Generating consistent visual design assets with AI | New AI music model: Mureka O2   UX Roundup for February 2, 2026. (Nano Banana Pro) AI Judgment May Follow a Scaling Law The “bitter lesson” just became more bitter  for those humans who still believe in meatware supremacy and their “unique” ability to have “taste” or judgment about what’s best among the ceaseless AI creations. A

Summary:  Short and easily digested versions of Jakob Nielsen’s 18 predictions for UX and AI in 2026: A 10-Page comic book and a series of 10 posters. My 18 predictions for UX and AI in 2026  turned into a very long article of almost 10,000 words. I recommend reading the full thing, because details matter. But if you’re pressed for time, here are three fast ways of getting an overview: Music video about AI & UX in 2026  (YouTube, 5 min.) A 10-page comic strip A series of 10 s

Summary : New video with 2026 predictions for AI & UX | AI analyzing usability test recordings | Character consistency still difficult | Google DeepMind documentary film | Amazon’s ecommerce agent Rufus does well | AI renews drug prescriptions | Problems using Mechanical Turk for user research   UX Roundup for January 19, 2026. (Nano Banana Pro) 2026 Predictions: The Music Video The article with my 18 predictions for AI and UX in 2026  is very long (almost 10,000 words), so I

Summary:  Accelerating AI capabilities will shift focus from raw intelligence to autonomous agents and Generative UI, making UX the primary business moat. Multimodal integration and physical AI will revolutionize workflows, rendering static interfaces and single-purpose tools obsolete. However, progress faces hurdles like compute shortages and a widening class divide between premium and free-tier users. Let’s peek into Jakob’s crystal ball to see what’s ahead for 2026. (Nano

Summary:  70 hard questions about the last year in UX and AI. Did you master the fast pace of recent developments? Give the quiz a try and count up your score! Do you dare take my quiz? (GPT Image 1.5) I published more than 100 articles last year (see my list of the year’s top 10 articles and 10 main themes ). This quiz probes topics across the gamut of my coverage. Try answering these questions to check how much you learned from what happened in 2025. I have posted the answe

Summary:  For each month of 2025, here is the best image I made that month. The collection shows the progress of AI-generated images over the year, in terms of the complexity of imagery that creators can now attempt. I used 5 different image tools to create the winning pictures, using GPT Image-1 the most. (Nano Banana Pro) 2025 made one thing clear: image rendering  is no longer the hard part. Editorial selection  is. When you can generate dozens of plausible variations in a

Summary : Predictions for UX in 2025 revisited | 2025 saw major paradigm changes in AI | Simple AI reduces doctors’ burnout | Fast sales growth for providers of useful AI services UX Roundup for December 22, 2025. (Nano Banana Pro) Merry Christmas Merry Christmas from UX Tigers and Jakob Nielsen. (Nano Banana Pro) I hope you have a wonderful and peaceful holiday season. Watch my UX Christmas Song  (YouTube, 2 min.), and compare with my 2024 Christmas Song  to appreciate how f

Summary:  AI disrupted UX practice across multiple vectors: research methodology, interface ontology, temporal dynamics, economic structures, and distribution channels. UX professionals must reconceptualize their discipline from artifact-centric design toward orchestrating intent-driven systems while cultivating individual agency as the primary professional competency. (Nano Banana Pro) I published about 330,000 words  across 100 articles on UX Tigers in 2025 (including this

Summary : How People Use AI for professional and creative jobs | AI conducts user interviews at scale, converting qualitative quotes to quant data | When and how to hire the first designer in a startup company | Prompt engineering debunked: Don’t specify a mastery persona | Longitudinal user research needed to judge AI agent usability | A new generation of power turbines may meet the need for AI electricity | GPT 5.2 132% better than human experts on economically valuable tas

Summary:  AI video models advanced significantly in 2025, particularly in avatar expressiveness, enabling me to produce much better videos than in 2024. Further improvements are needed in 2026 to realize the potential of individual creators. Here are my 10 most popular videos, as determined by audience clicks and viewing durations. (Nano Banana Pro) I thought that 2024 was the year of AI video and that 2025 would be the year of AI agents . There certainly was strong growth in

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 : 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 : 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 : 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