

UX Roundup: UX Slogans | Improve Google Search Results | Outdated Academic Research | Staff vs. Executive AI Use | Free AI | Bosses Decide AI Culture | Technology Acceptance Model | AI Acceptance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gods | Improve your Google search results by boosting the sites you like | Academic research on AI user experience uses outdated models | Worker bees send 13 more AI messages per week than their executives | Free AI accounts dominate even in the enterprise | AI splits company culture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
2 days 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
3 days ago18 min read


Cards: How a 3×5 Rectangle Conquered Screen Design
A card packs everything about one item (image, title, key facts, action) inside a clearly bounded rectangle that the user’s visual system sees as a single object, which is why cards excel at presenting browsable collections of self-contained things. But boxing everything produces flabby layouts with pitiful information density, and now that AI makes cards that no designer ever inspects, the old guidelines need a new enforcement mechanism.

Jakob Nielsen
Aug 2020 min read


UX Roundup: AI Spending Up | Adversarial AI Helps Designers | Design Hypotheses | Generative Accessibility | Skeleton Screens | Pain of Paying
AI spending growing 75% per year at the median firm | An AI agent that argued back against design ideas helped designers improve | A design is a hypothesis: try to defeat it | AI can generate superior accessibility when it prioritizes communication density over narrative completeness | Skeleton screens buy patience, not speed | Checkout design dials the pain of paying up or down

Jakob Nielsen
Aug 1721 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


10 GUI Design Elements Build Every User Interface
Almost every screen you design is assembled from 10 basic interaction elements: buttons, forms, menus, links, dialog boxes, alerts, icons, checkboxes and radio buttons, tabs, and search. Each is decades old but still misused daily. This article defines the GUI design alphabet, traces its history, and distills 86 evidence-based design guidelines, plus bonus coverage of windows and the pointer.

Jakob Nielsen
Jul 2928 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


History of the Graphical User Interface: The Rise (and Fall?) of WIMP Design
Summary: The GUI’s success wasn’t about any single invention, but a synergy of 4 elements: Window, Icon, Menu, and Pointer, through a 60-year history of usability improvements. But the era of WIMP is drawing to an end with a radical shift toward Generative UI and World Models, in which static menus are replaced by fluid, intent-driven AI interactions. (I made all the comics in this article with Nano Banana Pro.) The evolution of the Graphical User Interface (GUI) represents

Jakob Nielsen
Feb 2339 min read


UX Roundup: AI Empathy | Transparency About Compute Limits | UI Modes | Seedream 4.5 | AI In/Out of Silicon Valley | Kling Speaks
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

Jakob Nielsen
Dec 8, 202515 min read


Inactive GUI Controls: Show, Disable, or Hide?
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

Jakob Nielsen
Nov 13, 202518 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


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


UX Roundup: UX in the Street | AI Video | Infinite Scroll | Simplicity vs. Features | Logo as Coin | AI Blooper | Midjourney Animation
Street interview video about the consistency heuristic | AI auto-generates full videos | Infinite scrolling is a usability quagmire to avoid | Simplicity vs. features

Jakob Nielsen
Jun 23, 202512 min read


UX Roundup: Hamburger Menus | AI Agents | App Overload | Web Images | Modal Overuse
Reserve hamburger menus for small-screen designs | AI agents must remain under user control | One app per thing in your life = app overload | Images stand out on web pages | Overusing modal dialog boxes

Jakob Nielsen
Jun 9, 20256 min read


No More User Interface?
AI products have changed from invisible enhancement of classical user interfaces to soon become the main avenue for users to engage with digital features and content. This may mean the end of UI design in the traditional sense, refocusing designers’ work on orchestrating the experience at a deeper level.

Jakob Nielsen
May 8, 20257 min read


Maximum Minimalism: The Ultimate Evolution of Intuitive Design
Maximum Minimalism removes text and images, leaving only buttons for interaction. This streamlined approach leverages spatial memory.

Jakob Nielsen
Apr 1, 20256 min read


UX Roundup: OpenAI Product Roadmap | Parallel and Iterative AI Use | Virtual Boyfriends | Jakob in SF | Dropdown Menus | Early GUI | AI Urgency | Perplexity Deep Research
Parallel and iterative use of AI improves quality outcomes | Dropdowns must die | Early GUI prototypes | UX needs more urgency about AI

Jakob Nielsen
Feb 17, 202513 min read


10 Foundational Insights for UX
Summary : UX has come a long way since its early beginnings at Bell Labs in the 1940s. As we enter Year 2 of the AI revolution, it’s...

Jakob Nielsen
Aug 15, 202420 min read


End of Monoculture UI
Escape from the smartphone being the end all of user interface design. Bigger screens with richer data display hold much potential for UX.

Jakob Nielsen
Jun 6, 20242 min read
