

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
5 days ago20 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
