- UX Roundup: Make It Easy | AI Traffic = Best Customers | AI Visibility | Hidden Team Disagreement | AI Attitude Questions | Sunk Costs | Tools PaletteMake It Easy song | Users referred from AI answers convert 60% better than other traffic | The visibility of sources in AI responses can shift 46x overnight without users noticing | Use AI to uncover the hidden disagree…
Jakob Nielsen
Usability pioneer; co-founder of Nielsen Norman Group and founder of UX Tigers; author of the ten usability heuristics and of Jakob's Law.
Jakob Nielsen did not write this page. What is this?
It collects the places they publish and what they have said there, each linked to the source. They have no account here. Is this you? Claim it, correct it, or ask us to remove it from ppll.
Where they publish
Newsletter Jakob Nielsen on UX Several articles a week on UX and AI, plus the UX Roundups.
Open jakobnielsenphd.substack.com
Recent
- UX Roundup: Make It Easy | AI Traffic = Best Customers | AI Visibility | Hidden Team Disagreement | AI Attitude Questions | Sunk Costs | Tools Palette 4 Sept 2026 Make It Easy song | Users referred from AI answers convert 60% better than other traffic | The visibility of sources in AI responses can shift 46x overnight without users noticing | Use AI to uncover the hidden disagree…
- Gestalt Principles for Visual UI Design 2 Sept 2026 Users parse a layout before they read its labels. Whitespace, borders, alignment, color, and motion determine what belongs together. When these cues fight the content, users attach the label, price, warning, status, or…
- UX Roundup: Usability Still Improves | AI Persuasiveness | Featuritis | Fitts’s Law | AI Fiction Wins | Stepper Controls 31 Aug 2026 A better design system improved usability | AI persuades even when people know it’s AI | Fewer features = better usability | Fitts’s Law: Big and near beats small and far | Readers prefer AI stories if they don’t know i…
Show 17 more
- UX Roundup: UX Slogans | Improve Google Search Results | Outdated Academic Research | Staff vs. Executive AI Use | Free AI | Bosses Decide AI Culture | Technology Acceptance Model | Getting AI Accepte 28 Aug 2026 Summary: Top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gods | Improve your Google search results by boosting the sites you like | Academic research on AI user experience uses outdated models | Worker bees send 13 more AI message…
- Cialdini’s 7 Influencing Principles 26 Aug 2026 Robert Cialdini’s 7 principles of persuasion are reciprocity, commitment and consistency, social proof, authority, liking, scarcity, and unity.
- UX Roundup: Benchmarking Office Work | AI Undermines Billable Hours | AI as Delegate | Error Recovery | Pareto Frontier | Left-Digit Effect | Empty States | AI Use Differences | Educational Video 24 Aug 2026 Chinese AI models deliver 64% of entry-level human office-work quality in new benchmark | AI breaks the billable-hours model for consulting and shifts it to outcome-based pricing | Workers delegate whole tasks to AI but…
- UX Roundup: AI as Interviewer | Design Theater | The Planning Fallacy | Card Design Pattern | Humans as Middleware | Long-Horizon Tasks | Good Videos 21 Aug 2026 Summary: 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 |…
- The 50 Most Common User Research Methods, Ranked by Value 19 Aug 2026 The 50 most common user research methods scored on breadth of scope, depth of insights, remote suitability, and cost, then ranked by total value.
- UX Roundup: AI Spending Up | Adversarial AI Helps Designers | Design Hypotheses | Generative Accessibility | Skeleton Screens | Pain of Paying 17 Aug 2026 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…
- 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 14 Aug 2026 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 e…
- Cognitive Load Is a Budget, Not an Enemy: Design for the Brain’s 4 Chunks 12 Aug 2026 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 bud…
- UX Roundup: AI Diffusion Speed | Progress Bars | Synthetic Personas | AI Learning | Brad Myers | Agatha Christie | Mental Accounting | Grok Imagine 2 10 Aug 2026 AI technical capabilities are exploding, but sophisticated use crawls | Progress bars make waits bearable | Synthetic personas exaggerate demographics | AI hurts education when used wrong | Professor Brad Myers is a UX…
- UX Roundup: Simplicity | Fact Flooding | AI Integration | AI Adoption Personas | Framing | Tone of Voice | Timelines | Cybersecurity | Agentic E-commerce 7 Aug 2026 Keep It Simple | AI uses fact flooding to overwhelm users and persuade them | Deep AI integration in business processes | 5 personas for adopting AI | The framing effect | Using AI to change the tone of voice of your wr…
- 76 Open Research Questions in AI Usability 5 Aug 2026 AI is the biggest change to UX design in 60 years, yet we know embarrassingly little about how people actually use it. Here are 76 open research questions, organized into 7 lists sized for everyone from high school stud…
- UX Roundup: Design Guidelines Changing for AI | AI Anxiety | Toggle Switches | Hedonic Adaptation | Erdős Problems | Glanceable Monitoring 3 Aug 2026 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 | The same design scores lower every year | What…
- UX Roundup: Web Design for AI Agents | AI Assistants Beat Brand Websites | Ship, Learn, Iterate | AI as Business Strategist | AI-Assisted Creativity for Children | Infinite Canvas | Scott McCloud 31 Jul 2026 Agent-ready web design lifts AI task success | Shoppers now pick AI assistants over brand websites, 41% to 38% | Learn from reality: build and iterate | AI getting better at business strategy, but still not good enough…
- 10 GUI Design Elements Build Every User Interface 29 Jul 2026 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 mi…
- UX Roundup: New AI Models | How Designers Use AI Design | User Agency | Breadcrumbs | Doug Engelbart | Decoy Effect | Active Users | AI Training vs. Copyright 27 Jul 2026 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 p…
- UX Roundup: Carousels | AI-Native Games | Bulk Actions | AI Film Wins at Cannes | Peak–End Rule | AI Use 2× in One Year 24 Jul 2026 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 | Users remember th…
- AI Turns Competence into a Commodity: Evidence from 2.26 Million Freelance Contracts 22 Jul 2026 Summary: AI narrows skill gaps by helping weak performers the most.
Link verified 6 Sept 2026. Recent items update automatically from the channel.
Beliefs
Korrents What they believe 19 beliefs — each backed by an exact quote.
Each is a — compiled by korrents.com, not by them: the one-line wordings are korrents', the quotes are theirs.
Recent
The winning system of the next decade will be the one that best understands the user's job to be done and shows what it is about to do, not the one with the prettiest buttons or fewest screens.
The winning system of the next decade will not be the one with the most aesthetically pleasing buttons, nor will it be the one with the fewest screens. It will be the system that best understands the human’s “job to be done,” autonomously selects the right tools on their behalf, clearly shows the user what is about to happen, and gracefully recovers when the user’s context is incomplete or ambiguous.
Intent by Discovery: Designing the AI User Experience Said 26 Mar 2026
Companies pay for design so that customers buy more and look at more ads; internet-era UX was manipulation, whatever designers set out to do.
The reason companies pay for design is to get customers to buy more and users to look at more advertisements.
Intent by Discovery: Designing the AI User Experience Said 26 Mar 2026
The average user is a dangerous statistical artifact: design for the gap between the median user and the heavy-use tail, not for a phantom mean.
In the world of high-stakes digital strategy, the “average user” is a dangerous statistical artifact.
Don’t Design for Average Users Said 19 Mar 2026
Show 16 more
UX does not die when the interface disappears; it becomes the design of policies, protocols and orchestration of what AI does on the user's behalf.
So no, UX doesn’t die; it metamorphoses. We’ll still craft humane experiences, but increasingly through policies, protocols, and orchestrations rather than panels and palettes.
No More User Interface? Said 8 May 2025
The return on UX design work is declining because the usability battles have been won: the low-hanging fruit was picked and interfaces are now reasonably good.
UX design has been steadily improving over the last 50 years and is now reasonably good. The low-hanging fruit of terrible usability has long since been picked.
Declining ROI From UX Design Work Said 20 Mar 2025
Vibe coding lets users design and build their own software, upending the user-centred design paradigm that has held since 1947.
The new trend toward vibe coding and vibe design may be upending the user-centered design paradigm that has remained based on the same ideology since the first UX design projects at Bell Labs, starting in 1947.
Does User-Driven Design Still Need User-Centered Design? Said 13 Mar 2025
Making coding easy makes design more critical, not less: when anyone can produce working features, the quality of the experience is what sets products apart.
In a vibe coding future, companies will hopefully invest more in understanding user needs, refining the interface, and polishing details that delight users, because those are harder for AI to get right without guidance.
Vibe Coding and Vibe Design Said 7 Mar 2025
Mockups existed because coding was hard; now designers can skip static mockups and go straight to building a UI that works.
Essentially, vibe coding makes it trivial to create front-end code, so designers can skip static mockups and go straight to building a UI that works.
Vibe Coding and Vibe Design Said 7 Mar 2025
Deciding what software should do and why is still a human job: vibe coding changes the implementation phase far more than the planning phase.
Vibe coding can execute instructions, but deciding what the software should do and why is not automated. Product managers and designers must still do user research, market analysis, and creative brainstorming. In that sense, vibe coding changes the implementation phase more than the planning phase of the product lifecycle.
Vibe Coding and Vibe Design Said 7 Mar 2025
AI agents will end traditional UI design and accessibility, because users will stop visiting websites and act only through their agent.
Once, humans navigated the web manually. In the future, AI agents will act on our behalf, browsing, clicking, and deciding. This shift marks the end of traditional UI design and accessibility, ushering in a future where agents are the primary users of digital services.
Hello AI Agents: Goodbye UI Design, RIP Accessibility Said 21 Feb 2025
AI will flatten the design profession: when ten AI-enabled designers do the work of a department of a hundred, the need for higher management levels shrivels.
When a team of 10 AI-enabled super-designers can do the work that used to require a UX department of 100, the need for higher management levels shrivels. I call this the “pancaking” of the design profession.
Design Leaders Should Go “Founder Mode” Said 21 Nov 2024
AI design tools are starting at the low end and eating their way up: within ten years even the richest brands will rely heavily on them.
Right now, they can make simple social media posts for small companies and individual influencers. Two years from now, they can make simple campaigns and tradeshow collateral for mid-sized businesses. And in 10 years, I bet that even the richest brand will rely heavily on these tools.
Innovator’s Dilemma Hits Design: Growing Capabilities of AI-Driven Amateur Design Tools Said 8 Aug 2024
Accessibility has failed as a way to make computers usable for disabled users, after thirty years of trying.
Accessibility has failed as a way to make computers usable for disabled users. My metrics for usable design are the same whether the user is disabled or not: whether it’s easy to learn the system, whether productivity is high when performing tasks, and whether the design is pleasant — even enjoyable — to use.
Accessibility Has Failed: Try Generative UI = Individualized UX Said 29 Feb 2024
Within about five years the user interface will be generated afresh each time a user opens an app, so different users will get drastically different designs.
I foresee a much more radical approach to generative UI to emerge shortly — maybe in 5 years or so. In this second-generation generative UI, the user interface is generated afresh every time the user accesses the app. Most important, this means that different users will get drastically different designs.
Accessibility Has Failed: Try Generative UI = Individualized UX Said 29 Feb 2024
Half the population in rich countries is not articulate enough in writing to use prompt-driven AI well.
For sure, half the population is insufficiently articulate in writing to use ChatGPT well.
The Articulation Barrier: Prompt-Driven AI UX Hurts Usability Said 26 Jun 2023
Graphical interfaces have superior usability because they show people what can be done rather than requiring them to articulate what they want.
GUIs have superior usability because they show people what can be done rather than requiring them to articulate what they want.
The Articulation Barrier: Prompt-Driven AI UX Hurts Usability Said 26 Jun 2023
AI is the first new user-interface paradigm in sixty years: intent-based outcome specification, where the user says what outcome they want rather than how to get it.
The third UI paradigm, represented by current generative AI, is intent-based outcome specification. The user tells the computer the desired result but does not specify how this outcome should be accomplished, such as the steps to be executed. Compared to traditional command-based interaction design, this completely reverses the locus of control.
AI Is First New UI Paradigm in 60 Years Said 22 Jun 2023
Today's chat-based AI tools have deep-rooted usability problems and are not the interfaces we will be using in a few years; prompt engineering is a symptom, not a career.
I doubt that the current set of generative AI tools, like ChatGPT, Bard, etc., are representative of the UIs we’ll be using in a few years because they have deep-rooted usability problems.
AI Is First New UI Paradigm in 60 Years Said 22 Jun 2023
The graphical user interface will survive AI in a less dominant role: future AI systems will have hybrid interfaces that combine intent and command.
Thus, the 2nd UI paradigm will survive, albeit in a less dominant role. Future AI systems will likely have a hybrid user interface that combines elements of both intent-based and command-based interfaces while still retaining many GUI elements.
AI Is First New UI Paradigm in 60 Years Said 22 Jun 2023
What is a korrent?
A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at korrents.com.
Under a name here, the quoted block is what they actually said. The korrent beneath it is the claim those words support, in korrents' wording — tap it to see the record, its source, and who else holds it.
Nobody here wrote their own korrents. They are compiled from public statements, and a person can change their mind, which is recorded too.
Feed
As its own page →Hiding
4 September
2 September
- Gestalt Principles for Visual UI DesignUsers parse a layout before they read its labels. Whitespace, borders, alignment, color, and motion determine what belongs together. When these cues fight the content, users attach the label, price, warning, status, or…
31 August
- UX Roundup: Usability Still Improves | AI Persuasiveness | Featuritis | Fitts’s Law | AI Fiction Wins | Stepper ControlsA better design system improved usability | AI persuades even when people know it’s AI | Fewer features = better usability | Fitts’s Law: Big and near beats small and far | Readers prefer AI stories if they don’t know i…
28 August
- 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 | Getting AI AccepteSummary: 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 message…
26 August
- Cialdini’s 7 Influencing PrinciplesRobert Cialdini’s 7 principles of persuasion are reciprocity, commitment and consistency, social proof, authority, liking, scarcity, and unity.
24 August
- UX Roundup: Benchmarking Office Work | AI Undermines Billable Hours | AI as Delegate | Error Recovery | Pareto Frontier | Left-Digit Effect | Empty States | AI Use Differences | Educational VideoChinese AI models deliver 64% of entry-level human office-work quality in new benchmark | AI breaks the billable-hours model for consulting and shifts it to outcome-based pricing | Workers delegate whole tasks to AI but…
21 August
- UX Roundup: AI as Interviewer | Design Theater | The Planning Fallacy | Card Design Pattern | Humans as Middleware | Long-Horizon Tasks | Good VideosSummary: 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 |…
19 August
- The 50 Most Common User Research Methods, Ranked by ValueThe 50 most common user research methods scored on breadth of scope, depth of insights, remote suitability, and cost, then ranked by total value.
17 August
- UX Roundup: AI Spending Up | Adversarial AI Helps Designers | Design Hypotheses | Generative Accessibility | Skeleton Screens | Pain of PayingAI 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…
14 August
- UX Roundup: Hedonic Adaptation | Knowledge Worker AI | AI Sensemaking | Delegating Agent Actions | Branching UI vs. Linear Chat | Base-Rate Neglect | Rating Controls | Animated Prompt UnderstandingNew 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 e…
12 August
- Cognitive Load Is a Budget, Not an Enemy: Design for the Brain’s 4 ChunksCognitive 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 bud…
10 August
- UX Roundup: AI Diffusion Speed | Progress Bars | Synthetic Personas | AI Learning | Brad Myers | Agatha Christie | Mental Accounting | Grok Imagine 2AI technical capabilities are exploding, but sophisticated use crawls | Progress bars make waits bearable | Synthetic personas exaggerate demographics | AI hurts education when used wrong | Professor Brad Myers is a UX…
7 August
- UX Roundup: Simplicity | Fact Flooding | AI Integration | AI Adoption Personas | Framing | Tone of Voice | Timelines | Cybersecurity | Agentic E-commerceKeep It Simple | AI uses fact flooding to overwhelm users and persuade them | Deep AI integration in business processes | 5 personas for adopting AI | The framing effect | Using AI to change the tone of voice of your wr…
5 August
- 76 Open Research Questions in AI UsabilityAI is the biggest change to UX design in 60 years, yet we know embarrassingly little about how people actually use it. Here are 76 open research questions, organized into 7 lists sized for everyone from high school stud…
3 August
- UX Roundup: Design Guidelines Changing for AI | AI Anxiety | Toggle Switches | Hedonic Adaptation | Erdős Problems | Glanceable MonitoringDesign 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 | The same design scores lower every year | What…
31 July
- UX Roundup: Web Design for AI Agents | AI Assistants Beat Brand Websites | Ship, Learn, Iterate | AI as Business Strategist | AI-Assisted Creativity for Children | Infinite Canvas | Scott McCloudAgent-ready web design lifts AI task success | Shoppers now pick AI assistants over brand websites, 41% to 38% | Learn from reality: build and iterate | AI getting better at business strategy, but still not good enough…
29 July
- 10 GUI Design Elements Build Every User InterfaceAlmost 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 mi…
27 July
- UX Roundup: New AI Models | How Designers Use AI Design | User Agency | Breadcrumbs | Doug Engelbart | Decoy Effect | Active Users | AI Training vs. CopyrightComparing 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 p…
24 July
- UX Roundup: Carousels | AI-Native Games | Bulk Actions | AI Film Wins at Cannes | Peak–End Rule | AI Use 2× in One YearCarousels 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 | Users remember th…
22 July
- AI Turns Competence into a Commodity: Evidence from 2.26 Million Freelance ContractsSummary: AI narrows skill gaps by helping weak performers the most.
26 March
-
The reason companies pay for design is to get customers to buy more and users to look at more advertisements.
-
The winning system of the next decade will not be the one with the most aesthetically pleasing buttons, nor will it be the one with the fewest screens. It will be the system that best understands the human’s “job to be done,” autonomously selects the right tools on their behalf, clearly shows the user what is about to happen, and gracefully recovers when the user’s context is incomplete or ambiguous.
19 March
-
In the world of high-stakes digital strategy, the “average user” is a dangerous statistical artifact.
8 May 2025
-
So no, UX doesn’t die; it metamorphoses. We’ll still craft humane experiences, but increasingly through policies, protocols, and orchestrations rather than panels and palettes.
20 March 2025
-
UX design has been steadily improving over the last 50 years and is now reasonably good. The low-hanging fruit of terrible usability has long since been picked.
13 March 2025
-
The new trend toward vibe coding and vibe design may be upending the user-centered design paradigm that has remained based on the same ideology since the first UX design projects at Bell Labs, starting in 1947.
7 March 2025
-
Vibe coding can execute instructions, but deciding what the software should do and why is not automated. Product managers and designers must still do user research, market analysis, and creative brainstorming. In that sense, vibe coding changes the implementation phase more than the planning phase of the product lifecycle.
-
Essentially, vibe coding makes it trivial to create front-end code, so designers can skip static mockups and go straight to building a UI that works.
-
In a vibe coding future, companies will hopefully invest more in understanding user needs, refining the interface, and polishing details that delight users, because those are harder for AI to get right without guidance.
21 February 2025
-
Once, humans navigated the web manually. In the future, AI agents will act on our behalf, browsing, clicking, and deciding. This shift marks the end of traditional UI design and accessibility, ushering in a future where agents are the primary users of digital services.
21 November 2024
-
When a team of 10 AI-enabled super-designers can do the work that used to require a UX department of 100, the need for higher management levels shrivels. I call this the “pancaking” of the design profession.
8 August 2024
-
Right now, they can make simple social media posts for small companies and individual influencers. Two years from now, they can make simple campaigns and tradeshow collateral for mid-sized businesses. And in 10 years, I bet that even the richest brand will rely heavily on these tools.
29 February 2024
-
I foresee a much more radical approach to generative UI to emerge shortly — maybe in 5 years or so. In this second-generation generative UI, the user interface is generated afresh every time the user accesses the app. Most important, this means that different users will get drastically different designs.
-
Accessibility has failed as a way to make computers usable for disabled users. My metrics for usable design are the same whether the user is disabled or not: whether it’s easy to learn the system, whether productivity is high when performing tasks, and whether the design is pleasant — even enjoyable — to use.
26 June 2023
-
GUIs have superior usability because they show people what can be done rather than requiring them to articulate what they want.
-
For sure, half the population is insufficiently articulate in writing to use ChatGPT well.
22 June 2023
-
Thus, the 2nd UI paradigm will survive, albeit in a less dominant role. Future AI systems will likely have a hybrid user interface that combines elements of both intent-based and command-based interfaces while still retaining many GUI elements.
-
I doubt that the current set of generative AI tools, like ChatGPT, Bard, etc., are representative of the UIs we’ll be using in a few years because they have deep-rooted usability problems.
-
The third UI paradigm, represented by current generative AI, is intent-based outcome specification. The user tells the computer the desired result but does not specify how this outcome should be accomplished, such as the steps to be executed. Compared to traditional command-based interaction design, this completely reverses the locus of control.
Nothing matches.