The hottest UX Substack posts right now

And their main takeaways
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Top Technology Topics

Intent by Discovery: Designing the AI User Experience

Jakob Nielsen on UX • 56 implied HN points • 26 Mar 26
🪑 Design UX
  1. AI shifts users from operators to supervisors, so interfaces must let people state outcomes, set constraints and permissions, and then clearly show what the system plans and why.
  2. UX needs a new stack and metrics: build an intent surface, an orchestration/audit layer, and a direct-manipulation fallback, and measure success by intent-capture, evaluability, and trust calibration rather than clicks or speed.
  3. The future is exploration not typing: support discovery by letting users navigate latent solution spaces with multimodal curation, spatial maps, Socratic questioning, and subtractive editing, while keeping users engaged to avoid cognitive atrophy.

The SwiftUI Design System War: Composition vs Progressive Disclosure

Jacob’s Tech Tavern • 1530 implied HN points • 17 Mar 26
🪑 Design UX
  1. There are two main ways to build a SwiftUI design system: idiomatic view composition and a progressive-disclosure style that centralizes options into simpler initializers.
  2. Progressive disclosure can be pragmatic for large projects because it reduces API surface and makes components easier to use, even though it departs from SwiftUI conventions.
  3. Pick the approach that fits your team and project scale, weighing the trade-offs between idiomatic composition and pragmatic simplicity.

My Fitbit Buzzed and I Understood Enshittification

Software Design: Tidy First? • 3910 implied HN points • 14 Jan 26
đź•ą Technology UX
  1. Relying on metrics to prove value pushes teams to optimize numbers instead of actual user delight, which leads to annoying features like unsolicited notifications or easy-to-hit call buttons.
  2. Adding more metrics creates an arms race where people game the measurements and complexity grows until nobody knows what 'good' really means, so metrics end up replacing real product quality.
  3. A better approach is to adopt simple principles—like don't interrupt users or put buttons where they'll be pressed by accident—and defend those rules even when they aren't measurable on a dashboard.

Don’t Design for Average Users

Jakob Nielsen on UX • 48 implied HN points • 19 Mar 26
🪑 Design UX
  1. The arithmetic average lies in digital products because usage is heavily skewed: a small P95/P99 group often creates most of the value while the median user is usually a low-contribution "tourist."
  2. You must design two experiences: a ruthlessly simple, friction-free on‑ramp for P50 tourists, and deep, uncapped, high‑performance tools (APIs, macros, shortcuts) for P95 whales, revealed via progressive disclosure.
  3. Track the full distribution (P25/P50/P75/P95/P99) and the P95/P50 ratio to guide pricing, retention, and roadmap choices, and focus resources on protecting and growing the high-value tail.

How to Run a UX Design Critique

Jakob Nielsen on UX • 75 implied HN points • 12 Mar 26
🪑 Design UX
  1. Run critiques as a structured, time-boxed process: define roles, set scope and a facilitator, share context at least 24 hours before, and use silent feedback plus a note-taker to keep the meeting focused and psychologically safe.
  2. Make feedback problem-focused and evidence-based. Avoid taste-based comments, solutionizing, and bikeshedding; use formats like “I like / I wish / What if” and synthesize comments with affinity mapping to create clear issues to act on.
  3. Close the loop with prioritization, documentation, and tooling. Score issues with Impact/Effort or RICE, publish action items within 24 hours, and use AI and collaboration tools to help prep, synthesize async feedback, and learn from past crits.
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UX Roundup: Old vs New UX | Adam Smith Predicts AI | AI Video | AI Agents

Jakob Nielsen on UX • 32 implied HN points • 16 Mar 26
đź•ą Technology UX
  1. Most recent UX books still teach pre-AI practices, but designers now need AI-first methods like reversed creative workflows, generative UIs, and designing for AI agents or UI-less experiences.
  2. AI is acting as a new form of capital that will massively boost cognitive productivity, causing short-term job displacement but long-term abundance; people’s economic value will shift toward orchestrating AI and roles requiring empathy, judgment, and creativity.
  3. Agentic commerce will progress from simple checkout automation to full anticipation of needs, and scaling it safely requires interoperable standards and shared financial infrastructure so many agents and businesses can transact together.

The crit is the product

Kathy PM • 13 implied HN points • 19 Mar 26
🪑 Design UX
  1. Design agents should do more than follow orders; they need to challenge assumptions, ask clarifying questions, and push back like a good design crit.
  2. Tools should offer separate modes: a fast obedient execution mode for production tasks, and a slower, conversational crit mode that is opinionated and willing to interrupt.
  3. To reach that crit-level value, agents must act like designers—investigating users, analyzing problems, bringing references, and reframing solutions rather than only generating visuals.

Claude Charts 101: The Complete Guide to Interactive Visualizations + 60 Copy-Paste Prompts

The Product Channel By Sid Saladi • 23 implied HN points • 17 Mar 26
đź•ą Technology UX
  1. Claude can generate interactive, inline visualizations — charts, diagrams, flowcharts and widgets — built with HTML/SVG so you can click, hover, and change parameters right inside the chat.
  2. It’s easy and conversational: ask for a visual or nudge with prompts like “Chart this data,” then tweak sliders, toggles, or request updates and Claude will modify the visual on the fly.
  3. The feature is available to all plans (including free), is meant for ephemeral in-chat thinking, and you can export or save visuals as images, SVG/HTML, or artifacts when you need a permanent copy.

Lessons from Building AI Agents for Financial Services

Nicolas Bustamante • 435 implied HN points • 24 Jan 26
đź•ą Technology UX
  1. Isolated sandboxes and an S3-first, filesystem-backed architecture are essential for safely running multi-step agent workflows and giving each user a private, replayable execution environment.
  2. Clean, normalized context is the product: chunked markdown narratives, structured CSV/tables, and rich JSON metadata are what let agents reliably reason over messy financial sources like SEC filings.
  3. Skills plus the surrounding experience are the moat: lightweight, editable markdown skills, rigorous evals, real-time streaming UX, long-running orchestration, and production monitoring make the product reliable and defensible as models improve.

The Capability Maturity Model for AI in Design

Jakob Nielsen on UX • 63 implied HN points • 05 Mar 26
🪑 Design UX
  1. AI design maturity is framed as six progressive levels that cover leadership, strategy, culture, enablement, automation, and product design, and organizations must climb them one step at a time.
  2. As AI matures the designer’s role shifts from creating pixels to curating and governing systems, so teams must design for probabilistic outputs, trust, refusal patterns, and continuous runtime adaptation.
  3. The model is a practical self‑assessment and roadmap: invest in the specific capabilities of your current level to unlock the next, treating Level 5 as a realistic target today and Level 6 as a longer‑term stretch goal.

The case for wasteful agents

Generating Conversation • 116 implied HN points • 19 Feb 26
đź•ą Technology UX
  1. When the cost of trying things becomes tiny, run lots of quick experiments in parallel. Most will fail, but this approach finds the right solution much faster.
  2. Cheap AI prototypes and low-cost automation change how teams spend time: product people should build many rough, working prototypes while engineers focus on hardening and scaling, and experience matters more for taste than for avoiding every mistake.
  3. Build agents to be 'wasteful' by trying multiple speculative paths and presenting options for incremental user feedback. This beam-search–like behavior will likely become the standard and yields better results than single-shot attempts.

UX Roundup: GUI Heroes | Great AI Videos | AI Won’t Kill Software | Bing GEO | AI Capability Growth | Google AI UX | One-Shot Video | GPT 5.4 Writing

Jakob Nielsen on UX • 29 implied HN points • 09 Mar 26
đź•ą Technology UX
  1. AI is improving fast across images, video, and language. New models make much better visuals and one-shot instructional videos, GPT 5.4 writes more compellingly, and capability metrics show AI handling longer expert tasks.
  2. AI won’t kill software — it will make building software cheaper and open much larger markets, though legacy vendors that don’t adapt may be disrupted while AI-native firms and new business models grow.
  3. Website visibility now requires Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) instead of just SEO; tools like Bing’s AI Performance help measure AI citations, which are often highly concentrated, so focus on your top pages and track the AI grounding queries that drive citations.

What Moltbot tells us about the ideal UX for AI

Generating Conversation • 186 implied HN points • 29 Jan 26
đź•ą Technology UX
  1. AI should be present in the tools and workflows you already use, integrating deeply so it can act where and when you need it.
  2. Trust is earned by making the AI's work visible and giving users control to inspect, accept, or correct steps and decisions.
  3. Design AI like a teammate: it should do real work on your behalf, learn from feedback, and fit into your team's existing practices rather than forcing new ones.

UX Roundup: AI is the Computer | Disrupting Filmed Entertainment | UX Trends | GOMS | Nano Banana 2 | Lyria 3

Jakob Nielsen on UX • 21 implied HN points • 02 Mar 26
đź•ą Technology UX
  1. AI is becoming the computer itself: many specialized models will be orchestrated into a single, personal system that works on users' behalf and reduces the role of traditional user interfaces. This orchestration combines file systems, secure code execution, web access, and persistent memory to deliver personalized, autonomous capabilities.
  2. AI will disrupt filmed entertainment by improving production workflows, enabling small creators to produce professional-grade content, and spawning entirely new formats and distribution channels. These shifts could redirect tens of billions in industry revenue and reshape how audiences and legacy studios operate.
  3. AI is changing UX practice and tooling: models now make formal methods like GOMS cheap and practical for optimizing skilled-user efficiency, while new models (e.g., Nano Banana 2, Lyria 3) show steady progress but still have limits. Image generation is improving incrementally and music models remain short and constrained by copyright safeguards, so the tools are powerful but not yet perfect.

Cursor's Unfair UX Advantage

Generating Conversation • 46 implied HN points • 12 Feb 26
đź•ą Technology UX
  1. Make tasks tiny: small, incremental units of work let users catch mistakes early, build trust, and produce dense feedback that powers a strong data advantage.
  2. A low‑stakes autocomplete/IDE UX makes it easy to accept or reject suggestions, so even imperfect prompts save time and generate lots of useful training signals.
  3. Design agents for fast iteration and cumulative correctness rather than one‑shot perfection — cheap inference and quick feedback loops let users get to the right answer over a few tries and move much faster.

18 Predictions for 2026

Jakob Nielsen on UX • 116 implied HN points • 13 Jan 26
đź•ą Technology UX
  1. 2026 is the Integration Era: AI stops being a party trick and gets embedded into work and products through autonomous agents, generative UIs, and multimodal/physical capabilities. User experience and agent management, not raw model IQ, become the primary business differentiators.
  2. A compute-driven two-tier world will emerge: persistent shortages and costly inference mean premium subscribers get powerful, multimodal agents while most people use weaker, eco-models. This forces tiered pricing, compute-aware product design, and widens professional and economic divides.
  3. Human roles shift toward judgment, oversight, and trust work: people will focus on setting goals, auditing agent decisions, designing guardrails, and training via apprenticeships. New risks like AI-powered dark patterns will create demand for defensive agents, governance, and stronger UX ethics.

đź’» Zoom

First 1000 • 1513 implied HN points • 13 Jul 23
đź•ą Technology UX
  1. In UX design, smart defaults can be very powerful.
  2. Sometimes, a design that looks slick and communicates well may not perform as well as another in tests.
  3. Don't underestimate the impact of smart defaults in design choices.

The Enshittification of Google Docs

How the Hell • 184 implied HN points • 18 Nov 25
đź•ą Technology UX
  1. Google put its AI buttons right on top of the document, creating a persistent distraction that breaks writers' focus and wastes ideas.
  2. The AI features are poorly integrated: suggestions appear as pop-ups you can’t easily compare, get pasted into docs messily (even breaking formatting), and the experience has become more intrusive instead of better.
  3. A new editor called Owl Editor aims to fix this by letting you write without distractions, run a review that inserts AI feedback as track-changes you can accept or reject, and gather multiple reviewer perspectives to catch factual and reasoning errors.

How I Used Methodable to Have a Nice Tuesday

Human Programming • 51 implied HN points • 22 Jan 26
đź•ą Technology UX
  1. A small meta-plan in Methodable can un-scatter your attention by giving you one clear instruction at a time so you follow prior intentions and finish high-priority tasks.
  2. Start with a simple seed meta-plan and gradually structure it: collect your to-dos, free-write motivations, then convert those into detailed, executable subprograms.
  3. Designing guided workspaces with time-boxing, embedded editors, and positive self-talk makes it easier to regain focus, stay motivated, and end the day feeling accomplished.

Don't grab the brass ring, grab the copper pipe

Sunday Letters • 59 implied HN points • 28 Jul 24
đź•ą Technology UX
  1. Focus on building the essential tools and infrastructure first. These are often overlooked but are crucial for long-term success.
  2. Reaching for groundbreaking goals is important, but make sure the technology is ready. Many ideas are great, but timing matters.
  3. While big ideas attract attention, don't forget about solving smaller, tougher problems that can support those ideas. Both are important for progress.

Dialogical Design

the shimmering void • 93 implied HN points • 08 Dec 25
🪑 Design UX
  1. Your computer should feel like a personal world built from people, places, and things, where structure emerges as you use it rather than being forced by pre-set apps or folders.
  2. Current software habits create silos and rigid schemas that ossify your life’s data, so designers must stop assuming they know what users need and enable iterative, user-driven structure instead.
  3. Large language models make fuzzy, dialogical interaction possible and can help shape meaning, but we also need new technical substrates that support flexible subdivision, derivation, and coherent sharing/privacy.

Why chasing twitter's approval doesn't work

Load-bearing Tomato • 11 implied HN points • 12 Feb 26
🪑 Design UX
  1. Social media opinions are skewed by algorithms and loud minorities, so what trends on platforms often isn't representative of your real player base.
  2. People misremember and tell stories about themselves, and many commenters lack the expertise to propose workable fixes. So direct suggestions are often wrong, and you should rely on behavior data and experiments instead.
  3. Media and creators amplify noisy or inflammatory takes into supposed truths, so treat player comments as data not gospel and always validate them with in-game metrics and careful testing.

UX Roundup: Year of the Horse | Creative Workflow | AI Coding | Usability Scaling | Was I Right or Wrong? | 30,000 Citations | Winning AI Video

Jakob Nielsen on UX • 13 implied HN points • 16 Feb 26
🪑 Design UX
  1. AI is creating a new interaction paradigm where users express intentions and the system handles the rest, making interfaces faster and more transformative than old command-driven models.
  2. AI is reversing creative workflows and dominating coding: creators can start from polished final outputs and iterate, while AI now writes the bulk of code and massively amplifies developer productivity.
  3. AI’s usability skills are scaling quickly and already cover a growing portion of evaluation tasks, so UX work will shift to higher-level oversight and new roles as AI soon outperforms manual methods.

Enhancing Employee Experience through UX

UX Psychology • 238 implied HN points • 02 Feb 24
đź’Ľ Business UX
  1. It is crucial to integrate UX principles into the employee experience to enhance engagement and productivity in the workplace.
  2. By applying UX methodologies like user research, iterative design, and usability testing, organizations can create environments that prioritize employee needs and well-being.
  3. UX professionals can play key roles in optimizing the employee experience by leading research, advising on best practices, and educating workplace teams on UX skills and mindsets.

Beyond Five Seconds: Rethinking First Impressions in UX

UX Psychology • 238 implied HN points • 08 Dec 23
đź•ą Technology UX
  1. First impressions are crucial in UX and can influence user engagement throughout their interaction with an interface.
  2. Traditional 'five-second tests' in UX may not account for variations in users' cognitive abilities and the complexity of visual designs.
  3. To enhance UX design, consider customizing testing based on cognitive abilities, evaluating visual complexity, and rethinking the standard 'five-second rule.'

Making API Documentation Dynamic

The API Changelog • 1 implied HN point • 06 Mar 26
đź•ą Technology UX
  1. High-quality documentation shapes how developers judge an API, so make docs easy to use and remove anything that creates friction.
  2. MDX lets you embed components and run JavaScript inside docs so users see personalized data and can try requests, which speeds onboarding and lowers Time to First Call (TTFC).
  3. MDX adds power but also build steps and maintenance overhead, so weigh that complexity against a simple Markdown README when resources are limited.

The Big Tough UX-AI Quiz

Jakob Nielsen on UX • 21 implied HN points • 05 Jan 26
🪑 Design UX
  1. UX must change for AI: designers need patterns for long-running "Slow AI" work (resumption summaries, conceptual breadcrumbs, tiered notifications, salvage value) and must embrace generative, disposable UIs that are created on-the-fly for immediate user intent.
  2. Human roles and skills are shifting from pure craft to higher-level capacities: agency, judgment, and persuasion become key, with new hybrid roles like product engineers and forward-deployed engineers who integrate, oversee, and operationalize AI.
  3. Measurement and economics are in flux: AI introduces extra variance in A/B tests, creates a "measurement gap" for traditional metrics, and while AI is often cheaper and improving fast, teams must manage hallucinations, noisy evaluation, and calibrate human trust and vigilance.

2025 Year in Review: Themes, Trends, Status, Top 10 Articles

Jakob Nielsen on UX • 29 implied HN points • 18 Dec 25
🪑 Design UX
  1. AI has become the interface. Design now focuses less on pixels and more on defining goals, constraints, guardrails, and when humans should intervene.
  2. Agency is the new professional currency. Careers shift from titles and craft to the ability to frame problems, set intent, and steer AI systems under uncertainty.
  3. Research, creativity, and distribution are refashioned by AI. User research runs at machine speed, visual creation is democratized, and UX must handle time, prompt literacy, and AI‑mediated discovery.

Let the chatbot ask the questions

A Bit Gamey • 20 implied HN points • 04 Jan 26
đź•ą Technology UX
  1. Ask the AI to ask you one question at a time and wait for your answer, so it helps you think through problems step by step.
  2. Speak your thoughts aloud (voice-to-text) and share uncertainty, because that reveals hidden assumptions and gives the AI richer input to probe.
  3. Use the AI like a Socratic coach — it should augment your thinking by uncovering insights, not replace your judgement.

The Year in Image Generation

Jakob Nielsen on UX • 23 implied HN points • 29 Dec 25
đź•ą Technology UX
  1. Image rendering is no longer the bottleneck; creators can cheaply produce many bespoke variations, so the scarce resource is attention and editorial selection — the best images earn attention by adding clarity, not noise.
  2. Image models have moved from drawing single objects to composing multi-concept scenes and full layouts, and different models trade visual lushness for prompt adherence; creators need to pick or switch models based on the task and content rules.
  3. AI-generated infographics and comics can look authoritative but still hallucinate facts or structure, so people must verify and correct outputs even as hallucinations steadily decline.

Ronin Wallet Upgrades are LIVE!

Ronin’s Newsletter • 24 implied HN points • 15 Dec 25
đź”® Crypto UX
  1. Ronin Wallet got a fresh look and simpler onboarding with big Fund, Swap, Send, and Receive buttons plus other UI tweaks for both mobile and browser. These changes make the app easier to use and navigate.
  2. Ronin integrated Onramper to offer many more fiat-to-RON onramps, supporting 175+ payment options like MoonPay and GrabPay. This makes buying RON faster and available in more regions, but fees and KYC will vary by provider.
  3. Ronin Wallet now supports Solana deposits and cross-chain swaps, so you can manage SOL and move assets between Ronin and Solana from the same wallet. It also connects with other chains (Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum, BNB Chain, Polygon) to simplify multi-chain portfolio management.

UX Roundup: 2025 Predictions Revisited | AI Paradigm Shifts | AI and Doctor Burnout | Useful AI Sells

Jakob Nielsen on UX • 23 implied HN points • 22 Dec 25
🪑 Design UX
  1. AI automated much of the hand-crafted UX production, shifting value toward senior designers who guide strategy and causing many entry-level production roles to vanish.
  2. AI works best as a co-pilot: it boosts productivity and automates routine work but still needs human judgment and core usability principles to keep interfaces usable and trustworthy.
  3. Practical AI services scaled fast because they deliver clear economic value — for example, ambient scribes cut doctors' paperwork and burnout — so continuous learning and business-focused design skills are now essential.

The Future of Design? Using AI to Enhance Human Cognition and Creativity

UX Psychology • 119 implied HN points • 09 Feb 24
đź•ą Technology UX
  1. Monitoring emotional reactions in design using AI and biosensors can promote self-reflection and enhance creativity in UX work.
  2. The Multi-Self tool combines EEG sensors and machine learning to provide real-time feedback on emotional responses during design tasks.
  3. Designers showed varying responses to AI-based emotional feedback, with novices relying on it more for guidance while experts often trusted their own judgment.

The UX Recruitment Struggle Is Real: How to Find Participants

UX Psychology • 238 implied HN points • 21 Jul 23
đź•ą Technology UX
  1. Finding the right participants for UX research can be a major challenge, hindering the effectiveness of your study.
  2. Being resourceful in recruiting participants is key - leverage niche communities, engage with customer-facing teams, and consider using professional panels.
  3. When facing internal roadblocks, start small to showcase the value of UX research, analyze indirect user touchpoints, and conduct desk research or UX audits as alternative solutions.

đź“ž The Magic Hotline: Talk to Substack Sam!

The Cosmopolitan Globalist • 3 implied HN points • 14 Feb 26
đź•ą Technology UX
  1. A live webinar with Substack engineer Sam Sudar is scheduled for Monday, February 16 at 11:30 AM Pacific, giving readers a chance to ask about the platform directly.
  2. You can ask about features, bugs, billing, podcasting, notifications, and design issues, and if you can’t join live you can leave questions in the comments for the host to ask.
  3. The Zoom link and some event access are behind the paywall, and subscribing also gives access to archives, podcasts, classes, group chats, and an upcoming symposium tomorrow at 4:30 PM Paris time.

Who Designs the Future When Everyone Can?

New World Same Humans • 12 implied HN points • 11 Jan 26
🪑 Design UX
  1. AI makes it easy for anyone to create products and experiences, so standing out will depend on clear intent, a strong mission, and high product quality.
  2. The design of AI output is its own challenge — you must decide if AI is the product or a feature and intentionally design for differentiation, trust, and taste.
  3. Putting humans at the centre matters more than ever, because genuine stories, authenticity, and human delight will command a premium in AI-driven experiences.