

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
54 minutes ago17 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
1 day ago20 min read


The 50 Most Common User Research Methods, Ranked by Value
The 50 most common user research methods scored on breadth of scope, depth of insights, remote suitability, and cost, then ranked by total value.
Jakob Nielsen
2 days ago22 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
4 days ago21 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


Cognitive Load Is a Budget, Not an Enemy: Design for the Brain’s 4 Chunks
Cognitive load is the mental effort users spend to perceive, understand, decide, and act within an interface, drawn from a working memory that holds roughly 4 chunks. The design task is allocation: spend that scarce budget on the user’s goal, cut everything else, and mind the new debts run up by open loops and Slow AI. 26 design guidelines show how.
Jakob Nielsen
Aug 1218 min read
