2025 Year in Review: Themes, Trends, Status, Top 10 Articles
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
Jakob Nielsen
Dec 18, 202533 min read
UX Roundup: How People Use AI | AI Does User Research | Founding Designers | Prompt Engineering | AI Agent Use Cases | Electricity Fuels AI | GPT 5.2 Beats Humans
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
Jakob Nielsen
Dec 15, 202520 min read
UX Roundup: Developers Outrace UX | AI Traffic Safety | Dovetail Conference | Usability Poster | RIP Prompt Engineering | Comparing 6 Image Models
Developers outracing UX because of AI acceleration | AI is 5x times safer than humans when driving cars | Usability poster | Prompt engineering no longer a viable job
Jakob Nielsen
May 5, 202513 min read
UX Roundup: UI vs. UX | Content Con | AI Avoids Traffic Accidents | AI Poetry | Direct vs. Indirect Prompting | Image Gen Progress
UI vs. UX | AI reduces traffic injuries | AI Poetry | Direct vs. Indirect Prompting | Image Gen Progress
Jakob Nielsen
Apr 14, 20258 min read
Aided Prompt Understanding: UX Design Patterns to Build AI Prompting Skills
AI won’t reach its full potential until people better understand how to work with it, but most people have no idea how their AI prompt works
Jakob Nielsen
Apr 10, 20258 min read
Prompt Augmentation: UX Design Patterns for Better AI Prompting
Design patterns to overcome the AI articulation barrier: Style Galleries, Prompt Rewrite, Targeted Prompt Rewrite, Related Prompts, Prompt B
Jakob Nielsen
Mar 27, 202517 min read
UX Roundup: Jakob Live | AI in Education | Bill Gates on AI | Midjourney Styles | Flux Versions Compared
Summary : Jakob live on Internet Sept. 19 | AI helps education but teachers are poorly supported | Bill Gates thinks AI is easy |...
Jakob Nielsen
Sep 3, 202410 min read
Impact of Tokens on Image Generation
Removing and adding keywords in image prompting changes the generated images in unpredictable ways. Current prompt adherence is too weak.
Jakob Nielsen
May 23, 20244 min read
UX Roundup: Prompting for Music Styles | Combining AI Tools | Style Randomization
Summary: Music prompting harder than image prompting | Combining up to 8 different AI tools into a single task workflow | Midjourney...
Jakob Nielsen
May 20, 20247 min read
UX Roundup: Many-Shot UX Prompting | Professor Prompts | Useless UX | 10K Midjourney | Offshoring Comments | Tourist Users | Dark Design
Many-Shot prompts likely to improve some UX tasks | Prompt library for educational use of AI | LinkedIn’s useless UX advice
Jakob Nielsen
May 6, 202410 min read
Diamond Prompting in UX Work
The dual prompting approach in AI-driven UX design distinguishes between exploratory and detail-refining phases.
Jakob Nielsen
Apr 25, 202411 min read
UX Roundup: How UX Researchers Use AI | Integrate AI With Existing App | Short Videos | New Remote Research Tool | Business School AI
Study of how user researchers use AI | Integrating AI within an existing software product | Short highlights from Jakob’s recent videos
Jakob Nielsen
Apr 8, 20248 min read