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

AI’s impact on job prospects for junior vs. senior employees | Founder Mode | Learn AI-First design | Secondary user research | Comparing avatars animated with HeyGen and Chinese AI tool Wan

The Simplicity Poof | Error prevention explained by Vikings | AI in education | Heuristic Evaluation with AI | UX career pivot | AI was 4x better than human doctors at diagnosing complex cases | Grok 4 sets new record for AI subscription pricing | Advances in AI Video

Herds of UX unicorns | Captcha Must Die | Supporting the Flow state | If it feels like dark design, it probably is | HeyGen’s Avatar IV worked better with a photorealistic avatar than a cartoon character

Midjourney doubles down on usability atrocity | AI drives website traffic | Improvements in lip synch for AI avatar videos | AI music improves with Suno 4.5 | You are not the user

Newsletter subscribers | Voice sound vs character | Voice UI for old users | Does chain-of-thought help users form mental models of AI?

AI stigma & SEO explainer videos | Overwhelmed by AI progress | AI music improves | Overrecruiting study participants to account for no-show

Tech advances outpace human aging | Specializing in design for a target domain | The best-performing Avatars vary by social-media platform

AI-Assisted Video Editing with CapCut | Comparing services for generating AI avatars | The core NotebookLM team leaves Google

Cookie banners waste 575 M hours of European users’ time annually | Jensen Huang on AI infrastructure | AI training clusters keep growing