More from Jakob Nielsen on UX
Asking users to watch AI carefully is doomed to failure | Adaptive authoring of content that changes depending on the reader | A cluttered experience kills user focus | To predict patients’ treatment preferences, discussing medical dilemmas beat both survey responses and the patients’ own spouses | Measure outcomes, not vanity metrics | User satisfaction depends on expectations | Spotlight the main features and keep specialized options backstage | Allow users to paste passwords | Ambient AI works in the background to proactively surface relevant information during meetings | Writers don’t know what to ask, so AI should speak first, softly | Information pollution: cheap to publish, expensive to read | Give users bigger images when they want to zoom to see details | Past work must have a name so it can be found
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 action to the wrong object. Proximity, similarity, enclosure, and the other Gestalt cues guide the eye, snapping visual chaos into clarity.
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 are the Erdős problems and why are they relevant for AI? | An ambient monitoring interface with glanceable feedback on agent progress cut errors in half
Summary: Halfway through 2026, AI is evolving faster than expected, but usability is struggling to keep pace.
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