Jakob Nielsen

Episode 133
Brave UX

Plainspoken, Hard-hitting and Unorthodox

In this episode of Brave UX, Jakob Nielsen addresses some of the criticism he’s faced 🎤, calls on UXers to urgently adopt AI 🐛, and shares why he believes the commoditisation of UX is a good thing 📈.

Highlights include:

Are you surprised by how much you’ve offended some people?
Why do UXers need a greater sense of urgency about adopting AI?
Were the hiring practices at your previous company elitist?
What is the state of UX today and where is the growth potential?
Will AI impede our ability to develop our professional judgement?

April 30, 202401:26:37

Listen on:

Who is Jakob Nielsen, PhD?

Jakob is the founder of UX Tigers 🐯, the website and associated substack he uses to bring his 41 years of UX knowledge and experience to the world, in what he has described as a plainspoken, hard-hitting and not bowing to orthodoxy kind-of-way.

Before founding UX Tigers, Jakob was the co-founder and principal - for 25 years - of a rather well known UX consultancy, the Nielsen Norman Group 📜.

His other notable roles include being a distinguished engineer at Sun Microsystems, and a member of the research staff at Bell Communications Research 🔔 - one of the world’s top three HCI labs in the 1990s.

Jakob is known for many other things, among which are being the founder of the discount usability movement, the foundational 10 usability heuristics for user interface design, and the eponymously named Jakob’s Law of Internet User Experience 🏛️.

He is the holder of no less than 79 United States patents and the author of 8 books, including the best-selling “Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity”, “Usability Engineering”, and the pioneering “Hypertext and Hypermedia” 📚.

In 2013, Jakob received the Lifetime Achievement Award for HCI Practice from ACM SIGCHI and in 2024 he was named a “Titan of Human Factors” by the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 🏆.

Transcript

Jakob Nielsen, PhD:
Start now. If you have not used AI yet, start now. The only way you'll have five years experience in five years will be mandatory to be experienced in using AI and UX.
Brendan Jarvis:
Hello and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, managing founder of The Space InBetween, the behavior-based UX research partner for enterprise leaders who need an independent perspective to align hearts and minds and also the home of New Zealand's first and only world-class, human-centered research and innovation lab. You can find out more about me and what we do at thespaceinbetween.co.nz.
Here on Brave UX though, it's my job to help you to keep on top of the latest thinking and important issues affecting the field of design. I do that by unpacking the stories, learnings, and expert advice of a diverse range of world-class leaders.
My guest today is Dr. Jakob Nielsen. Jakob is the founder of UX Tigers, the website and associated substack he uses to bring his 41 years of UX knowledge and experience to the world and what he has described as a plainspoken, hard hitting and not bowing to orthodoxy kind of way.
Before founding UX Tigers, Jakob was the co-founder and principal for 25 years of a rather well-known UX consultancy, the Nielsen Norman Group. His other notable roles include being a distinguished engineer at Sun Microsystems and a member of the research staff at Bell Communications Research, one of the world's top three HCI labs in the 1990s.
Jakob is known for many other things among which are being the founder of the discount usability movement, the foundational 10 usability heuristics for user interface design and the autonomously named Jakobs Law of Internet user experience.
He is the holder of no less than 79 United States patents and the author of eight books, including the bestselling Designing Web, usability, the Practise of Simplicity, usability Engineering, and the Pioneering Hypertext and Hypermedia.
In 2013, Jakob received the lifetime Achievement award for HCI practise from ACM SIGCHI. And earlier this year he was named a Titan of H00uman Factors by the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.
And now he's here with me in his human form for this conversation on Brave UX. Jakob, a very warm welcome to the show.
Jakob Nielsen, PhD:
Well, thank you so much, Brendan. I'm really looking forward to this conversation. Great show.
Brendan Jarvis:
And I've been looking forward to this as well, Jakob and I have to ask, why tigers?
Jakob Nielsen, PhD:
The true answer is that was a URL that was available. It's very hard to get any kind of thing that you can remember, and that's relatively short these days. So that's the honest reason. But of course, I also like the point that it's an animal that's known to be strong and it's going to come at you and all of, because that's my mission now. My mission now is just to be really plainspoken and to say what I think and therefore help the world move forward.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well, speaking of that plainspoken ness, you may have set the cat amongst the hens with some of your recent comments lately on topics such as AI and UXs role in ai, the tech layoffs, and perhaps most recently the one at least on my radar, was what you've seen as the failure of the accessibility movement. Are you surprised at all by how much some of what you've said has offended some people?
Jakob Nielsen, PhD:
Well, not really because I'm saying what I think to be the truth, and I'm not wrapping it up in making it easy on people. I'm saying what I think, and of course if somebody has it as their career to sell a certain perspective and then I say, well, you are not serving the actual users as well as you should be. You're not giving high enough return on investment to your clients. Of course, people are going to very much resent that. And this has happened in my entire career. I remember when I published an article that was called Flash, 99% Bad. That was back when Flash was like all spinning, moving websites and all of that. And honestly, it was really bad, whether it was 99% or 98, who that's hard to say, but my analysis, it was really, really bad. Well, all these people who like their life or their livelihood anyway was to sell these things that actually undermined company's business on the web. They hated me for saying this. And the same is true now for consultants who have a very snug business on selling to companies a way that they don't actually really help their customers with disabilities. Of course, they don't like me to say this. This is the old story, the emperor's new clothes in the stories like the hero little boy who said, well, he has no clothes. But in reality, that guy would've been off with his head because the emperor would not have liked him saying that.
Brendan Jarvis:
And you were liberated, I believe you called it Jakob's Liberation Day, right? Back in April of last year, and this is the day that you'd left your previous company. And you've said, actually it was an interview that I watched on the Cutting Edge show, and I'll just quote you now. You've said I had spent many years as a consultant and been focusing on growing the business and serving clients, but that really put a cramp on my creativity and my ability to just write what I want without worrying about offending anybody. So the things you've been saying since Jakob Liberation Day, things like we were just touching on there regarding accessibility. Are these the kinds of things that you felt that you couldn't say you were at risk of offending people from a commercial point of view when you were working with your previous company?
Jakob Nielsen, PhD:
Yeah, exactly. And I mean, the truth is, and in many ways I don't believe fully in a lot of these kind of consulting approaches, but you have to smooth the clients. You have to make them believe things and that's not who I really am. And so I was getting more and more dissatisfied with that approach. On the other hand, saying some of the things that I believe in are not very commercially viable, and so I am free to say them now because now I don't have a company, I'm a UX T. It is not like a real company because we don't have clients. It's just a publication vehicle, a vehicle for me to reach the world, but it's not a vehicle for me to make money. And that changes a lot in my ability to be really plainspoken. I have a lot of other things that I talk about that are quite unpopular with my actual, with actually my audience who I love.
But when I talk about things like commodification of UX and it's not so special as it used to be in the past, well, the people who love to be special, love to be able to charge high prices, they don't like that message. And so I've heard people say, well, you shouldn't say that because it's like undermine our business. But I'd rather say what I believe to be true, even if I say it goes against the orthodoxy, but I don't care about the orthodoxy, I care about the truth. The truth is my value. Helping the world's users is my goal. Helping humanity to dominate technology rather than technology dominating humans. Those are my values. And so yeah, I really relish being able to be plainspoken. And that's the other thing by the way, I've always believed in that's the same as saying call a spade a spade, not a digging implement or an excavation solution. And that's another thing I really try to do. I try to be simple. I don't try to be use kind of fancy weird vocabulary or politically correct things where you can't just call it what things are usually called I detest vocabulary inflation, which is always coming up with new phrases for well-known things. So I tend to try to be very plainspoken, which is one of my usability guidelines. Say it as it is and say it as simple and straightforward as you can.
Brendan Jarvis:
I looked into some past press of yours and one thing that came up was from 2007, it was an article that was published by The Guardian in the UK and it was titled The Web Design Guru that web designers Love to Hate. So this is almost going back, what's that, almost 20 years now. And you were quoted in there as saying, and I'll just quote you again here. There is something good about upsetting people because it's making an impact. It's not good if you only annoy people and then they paraphrased you and they went on to say something to the effect of you have to offer something of value. So listening to what you're saying now about what you're doing through UX Tigers and obviously casting the search back into the archives of the internet there and finding similar sentiments that you've previously shared, did you then, or have you always, and perhaps more specifically you seem to now, do you see yourself and have you always seen yourself as some sort of provocateur for the field?
Jakob Nielsen, PhD:
I think that's a fair statement. I want to make an impact. I'm not satisfied with just sitting in a corner and doing my own thing and nobody knowing about it. I really want to change the world. And one of the ways in which you change the world is to make things clear and to the point. And so going back to this example with the flash, 99% bad, I mean, that was a headline I wrote myself, and I of course specifically wrote it with the purpose of being clear and being something that would agonise a certain number of people. But no, I have never minded, agonising, antagonising people. I mean, there's about 3 million UX people in the world, and if 1 million hate me and 2 million love me, that's fine with me. Or if 2 million hate me, as long as 1 million love me, that's still okay. I'm not a mad of the majority who cares about the majority.
I care about making a difference. And so for that, I need to reach the people who have a similar philosophy as myself and my thinking, give them a perspective, give them ammunition to further their thinking because again, my impact is in sometimes very indirect or very derived. I'm not the person who actually makes a product. Those are the people who ultimately touch the users. I'm the person who helps the people who help the users. And so if I can help a hundred thousand or ideally a million UX people make better work, that will help billions of users, even though I don't know those users, I don't even know those hundreds of thousands of products that are a little better and help people save a few seconds here or a minute there, or be less oppressed by technology or feel less unpleasant when they use computers.
I mean, all of those hopefully more positive feelings for billions of people. I don't personally make that happen, but indirectly I facilitated it happening and that's really my goal. My goal is to have this indirect impact, but with enormous magnification factor. I say something, many people listen, some people hate it. Okay, go away. I don't care about people who hate me. I'm not writing for the haters, I'm writing for the fans. So some number of people, hopefully many will get some inspiration from what I said to make their products better. Hundreds of thousands of products, whether it's websites or applications or toothbrushes with a user interface, whatever it is. And then billions of people will have an easier life because of me. That's my goal.
Brendan Jarvis:
I was curious, when you step out of the limelight like you're in now, right? We're on a conversation that's eventually going to see the light of day, it's going to be published. Many people will listen to it and watch it, and you've done many other things like this in the past and you will do in the future, and you're bound to say other things that people take issue with as well. When you step away from that in just on your own, has there ever been any criticism or do you ever dwell on that criticism at all? And does it affect you in any way that you think surprises you from what you've heard? Do you ever say things and then receive criticism and think, oh gosh, I never really thought about it that way, or is it often pretty clear to you by the time you hit publish what you feel the criticism might be? I
Jakob Nielsen, PhD:
Think it's usually pretty clear, and I try to tend to ignore it. I suffer from over excitability, which is the classic problem with high IQ people. And so if I dwell too much on negativity, that can drive me down, and that's really counterproductive. So there's no reason to pay attention to the negative people. I mean, I can go in and fight with them and I can say, oh, I can come up with this really good counter argument to their counter argument, but then I get into this fighting mode and that's unpleasant and it drives me down. And I think the net effect, which is the important point is that I may or may not score a good point in that punching fight, but overall I will create less. Overall I will have less of an impact, whereas if I focus on the positive on my message that I want to promote and I ignore the haters, then ultimately the net effect is much more positive because it keeps me in a positive mindset. It keeps me thinking about the next thing rather than fighting over the past thing. And again, there's a lot of people who have other perspectives, and if they don't like what I say, the beauty now that I'm no longer running a business is I can say, well, how much did you pay me again? Let me check because my newsletter is free, which means you paid me $0 and 0 cents. Yeah, I'll refund you your 0 cents here. It's like nothing right here goes nothing. I mean, honestly, I don't owe these people to think.
Brendan Jarvis:
This may be a very short answer to this next question given what you've just said, but just before we move on, and just to give you some chance to have further right of reply, should you choose to, have there been any misconceptions about your recent commentary or things that you've heard that you'd like to specifically address and perhaps settle once and for all just before we move on? Well,
Jakob Nielsen, PhD:
I mean there's always misconceptions. And the problem is, again, if I go into that kind of tease apart, it becomes too much of an involved argument. I mean, even going back to the.com bubble where I was rather strongly against big images and websites, people say, oh, Jakob doesn't like good looking websites. And that was in fact not what I said, or at least not what I meant. I was against slow response times. And in the judging, the relative value of a snappy website versus a big picture, usually the trade-off is in favour of snappy response times. And all the websites that were big commercial successes back at the time were very fast Today when most people have high bandwidth, you can do a lot of big pictures. I mean, I use a lot of illustrations myself on my own new website, UX Tigers. So it's not that I hated images.
It's not that I hated things to look good, it's that response time one issue. Or for example, recently I published an article that said that the traditional approach to accessibility has failed. And I think that the way forward to help disabled users, I mean that's my goal, help disabled users is generative UI such that the AI can create a user interface that's customised or individualised as I call, individualised for that person's circumstances, which are very different for different people. They need different things, and it has just failed this approach that we design one thing and then we try to make that thing be capable of being, for example, read out aloud by a screen reader that will always create a substandard user interface to create a 2D design and then have it read aloud. That will always be bad, but we can create an auditory interface to the underlying features, the underlying data that's dramatically better.
When I say we can, I don't necessarily mean we can do it today. I mean, when we consider the likely advances in I AI over the next, let's say about five years or so, I think that's the future. And so that's the future I want people to start planning for. And I feel like some of the people criticising me would say, well, oh, Jakob doesn't care about disabled users. On the contrary, I have for almost 30 years cared about them. And I even had a chapter in my book Designing Web Usability was the foundation of web usability back when that was published. I think almost no other web design books did that 25 years ago. I can't speak to every single one, but very, very few anyway, and I did. So I've always been in favour, but I've been in favour of people as people, users as users or as customers because again, we do this for the sake of making better business websites.
So we've got to cater to the customers no matter what condition the customer may have, you cater to them on their premises. It's not the goal to funnel money into a specialised consulting service or some people who have a certain approach. The approach is, or the goal should be to help the human beings. And so that has always been my approach, and I do think that sometimes people will willfully misinterpret what I say to create an argument that's similar but different than my goal, and therefore they can attack that different version of what I'm trying to achieve.
Brendan Jarvis:
Jakob, let's wind the clock back quite away now before we wind it forward again to talk about AI and the future of our field. It was interesting for me to learn about your upbringing in Denmark a little bit, at least I learned that both of your parents were quite notable psychologists in Denmark. What influence did their chosen profession have on your own?
Jakob Nielsen, PhD:
I think it had the influence that I knew that we could study humans. I mean, that's an empirical phenomenon that we can study humans. I mean, I remember my dad took me into the psychology lab and we saw some of these weird experiments they were doing both on people and actually also on animals. That was back in the old days when a lot of those type of studies were being done. What I, so even the thing like you run a wrath through a labyrinth and you can measure how fast it can go through the maze, those kind of learning studies, that gave me a big appreciation for the empirical nature because I feel like later when I was in graduate school, a lot of other people's discussions were very driven by their personal opinions or personal aesthetics or personal feelings about how things ought to be.
This is good design, this is bad design. And I was always under opinion that no, we look at what people do and I don't know, that's like a psychology experiment like my parents would do. And my mother was actually a clinical psychologist, so she would help people with various conditions. So that's not what I do, but that real philosophy about it, which is that we can observe and watch humans and we can learn from that. That came from my parents being psychologists and from me in my little child way getting some impressions about what they did, and that really influenced me to a very, very large extent later on when I was in graduate school. So I think that had a very big impact on me. Actually.
Brendan Jarvis:
You decided not to pursue an academic career, or you did initially for a number of years, but then I believe it was a position at Bell Communications Research in 1990 that brought you across from Europe to the United States, and you've been there ever since. I also learned, I believe this is true, that there was another offer on the table at the time from a company that some people may have heard of before called Apple. What was it that gave the Bell job the edge?
Jakob Nielsen, PhD:
Well, one thing literally was the edge, which is they had a better human resources department because Apple was so arrogant that they thought if they give somebody a job offer, they'll jump at it. Which if I had not had another offer, maybe I probably would have, but I did have two offers, right? The Bell Abs Human Resources woman, she called me up, this was in the old days before video calls, this was a phone call. Anyway, she called me up say, do you have any other offers? And I was honest. I said, yeah, I do have one other offer. I'm comparing this and that. And then they worked with me and made it more and more attractive. Apple was like, no, we gave you an and you should be worshipping Apple or something like that and come work with us. So literally that phone call was the main reason.
But of course there were other reasons behind that as well, which is why were they able to convince me? And again, some of it was a matter of this arrogance. I mean, I have to say that the job I was going to work at at Apple was to create their next operating system with a very exciting user interface. So in some sense I regretted at the time and we not working on that. But then very shortly afterwards, I'd say very shortly, I don't know whether it is one or two years, but not that much longer before the product launched shipped. Anyway, it was cancelled because Apple decided to pursue a different strategy for user interfaces, which was the one Steve Jobs had brought over from Nick's computer. So you understand from a management perspective why they did it, but to be honest, which still to this day have impoverished user interfaces because of that choice.
Now, of course, I don't know if this alternative would've been able to work. Maybe it would've had a higher chance if I had worked on it, and there were other brilliant people that did work on it. So who knows That is an alternative history that we will never know. But for sure it was very promising. But on the other hand, the Bell Labs, a bell communications research job, it had another advantage, which was, and I've always pursued, I've always been very oriented towards freedom and liberty and the ability to do my own thing. And that was the definition of the Bill's job that we hire. I mean, remember the hiring managers just basically told me, we just go out and find the best people in the world and we hire them and then they do what they want to do and we just give them endless money.
And this was true. They had so much money there. I mean, the phone company was swimming in money at the time, so it was very well resourced and very based on driving towards what I thought was important to do. And that was quite in contrary to the university because you think that university professor is the ultimate freedom, but it's actually not because you have basically no money and you've got to send in applications in 40 copies. Well, this was back again the old days. We literally would make photo copies, 40 copies and send in the grant application. And then those grant agencies had no clue about user experience or usability or the future of the internet or anything like that. So it was actually hard to get money for really important research. You can get a lot of money for irrelevant research that they thought should be funded. Whereas Bell was like, we hire the best people in the world such that they can do their thing. That was very attractive to me, and that has always been a high value to me is to do what I think is right, not what other people think is right. No one has
Brendan Jarvis:
A crystal ball and can clearly see all the eventualities that are ahead of us. But if you think about when you were studying HCI as a PhD and then when you were working in the university system in Denmark, and you think about where you are now and the things that you've done since then, was it patently obvious to you at the time, say for example, when you were doing your PhD that you were going to be able to use the field of HCI to craft such a wonderful career?
Jakob Nielsen, PhD:
No, I don't think so. I thought it was obvious to me that computers could be easier to use than they were, and that would be of some importance. It was also obvious to me that unknown information would be important. Now, I didn't know it would be the worldwide web. I didn't know that the incident would be as big as it has been that it grew the economy in an unprecedented direction. None of those things I knew or even predicted, to be honest. I predicted that people would be sitting in use of things like HyperCat on their personal computers and navigate information, hypertext information and maybe write more hypertext as well, which we have not seen happening. So I don't think I can claim failure or truthfully that I predicted how it would go. I predicted that those two things make computers a technology easier to use and online information.
And then I very quickly added a third lake to that stool, which was to make it cheap and easy to use usability methodologies. But those things, it always clear to me that they were important, which is why I worked on them. But it was not clear to me how much it would enormously expand. I mean, I expected it to expand, but I didn't expect it to expand as much as it has as much impact on the world as it has had. So I think that there's one of these sayings as this luck favours the prepared mind, and there are certainly in some sense luck in various things happened that made what I did extra important, extra valuable, had larger take up of what I did than I predicted. But at the same time, the reason I was able to pursue or take advantage of those events in the world was that I had already before then done things that positioned me to take advantage of them.
So for example, you mentioned an introduction. I wrote a book on hypertext two years before the web. In fact, Tim Earn Lee is one of the many things, many inspirations I can claim to be his main inspiration, anything like that. But it's one of the books he read before doing the web. And so I was kind of there pushing on that idea of online information. So I was ready when the web came. Secondly, I was pushing make Computers Easy, so the websites came out and they were too difficult. I kind of had the background and I was also pushing this point about let's make the methodology more broadly accessible. So I was also there in that regard. So all those three things, it was like, oops, now there's a demand for it. I was always pushing, but I was always pushing through something that gave away so to speak, and made it vastly bigger than I would've thought, to be honest.
Brendan Jarvis:
Picking up on that idea or that saying of fortune favours the prepared mind, and this may be an example of it, it may not be, but someone else that who's been a previous guest on the show and that people listening will know very well as well as Don Norman, right. And Don and yourself, at least from around the mid to late nineties have been closely associated with one another.
Jakob Nielsen, PhD:
Definitely good.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah. Yeah, right. In terms of the company that you co-founded, he was at Apple across the time that I believe that you were at Bell and also while you're at Sun Microsystems, but when and how did you come to meet Don?
Jakob Nielsen, PhD:
Well, I actually met him before then probably back in 1983 when he was giving a keynote. I think the first real user interface research conference that I was at. Though, to be honest, I was kind of a very junior person at the time, and he was even back then one of the senior people in the field. So I think I remember him more than he remembers me from back in those days. But no, I mean it's always been the case. It used to be very small field. Now I say there's about 3 million UX people in the world. I don't even know half of them. I don't know a percent of them really, including very prominent people with good jobs. I don't know them, but if you spool back time to 40 years ago, we were a little bit more than a handful, but not much more than a handful of people.
And so basically all of the top people, we all knew each other from variety of things. We would all go to the same very few conferences. Now there are so many events, but back then there were not a lot. So we'd constantly bump into each other and talk about things. And I was on a panel discussion with Don. I was at Sun. We had a project that was called the Anti Macintosh. Of course he was with Apple, so he was the pro Macintosh. And so we had a debate about that at the conference and many, many times we would meet for various things. So I think back then the field was so small that we all knew each other. How
Brendan Jarvis:
Would you characterise your relationship with Don over time? You spoke about early on you met him when you were a junior person in the field, and of course that changed as your own influence grew. But if you think about maybe the time from when you founded your previous company onwards, how do you characterise that relationship? Well,
Jakob Nielsen, PhD:
I think certainly more friendship. We are getting more together. I mean, it became was more like no, than it was discuss, and then it became more and working together. But an interesting point about me and Don is actually that we've discovered that quite often we will agree on in some sense big insights and disagree on what they mean or the interpretation or the specifics of the tactics or what should be done. And I've always been very orange, what's what should be done? Because my goal has always been to have this effect of that kind of two layer effect of I influence the designers. The designers influence the users, therefore I help humanity indirectly. So I want to get my things out. And that only works if I can tell people, what should you do? What should you do? As opposed to like, oh, here's the grand philosophy.
And so we actually have quite a large number of disagreements that when you then drill into them to out to more be a case of different relative weighings of now versus the future. I mean, there's always design. The reason it's called design is that have trade-offs and we have to design go this way or go that way. And some of these criteria we may weigh differently, so will explain a lot of these things. But usually if we actually talk through something, it's kind of like the things behind these decisions turn out to quite often be very similar, but maybe the specific representation of this could be different.
Brendan Jarvis:
You've got a good relationship with someone when you can disagree on those points and then dig deeper into them to see exactly the reason for the disagreement. Thinking about the future now, you've obviously been publishing a lot lately on AI and clearly throughout your career you've had a number of firsts and a number of things that you've contributed that have been foundational to many practitioners in the field. Things like Jakob's Law, for example. Are you hoping for more of the same when it comes to your thinking and work around ai?
Jakob Nielsen, PhD:
Well, I can always hope, of course it is of course more and more difficult the more things become very indirect and advanced and driven by these kind of invisible large language models that nobody actually understands. Even the people make them don't understand them. So it becomes harder. But that will obviously, that would still be my goal, but I think I sometimes have a little bit more modest goal than to necessarily make a really fundamental new contributions. I think I have this more pragmatic goal of pushing and changing direction of, this is kind of like a super tanker ship. I mean ai, it's kind of like the best analogy is like the industrial revolution and introducing AI in a company is similar to let's say, introducing electricity. These are enormous, much bigger than the changes of introducing e-commerce websites in the.com bubble or changing or adding mobile phones or mobile computing compared to only desktop computing.
Those were relatively small changes. I think that AI is really the third paradigm for using computers. If we just go back, spool back more narrowly, talk about owning our own field. So we used to have command based interaction where you would tell the computer what to do. And the beauty of computers is that they're very obedient. If you say, do this, the computer will say, yes, sir, and it'll do what it's told, which is beautiful compared to so many other parts of life where things don't happen the way you say. But the downside is that computers are very literal minded and does exactly what it's told, which is often not what you want. And so AI changes that paradigm around to become intent-based interaction. So outcome specification. So you say what you want to achieve, I want the picture of such and such, not in Photoshop, new sematic want, select this, make it green, make all these tweaks and changes which are command based, which is the old paradigm.
New paradigm is intent-based outcome specification. So that's a huge switch in how we do computers. And that's also therefore a huge switch in how we design because you have to design for more for this intent-based interaction. And you have the foundation models, the ais that combine with what you design to form the user experience. And so part of the user experience is think you don't really control. So you got to figure out how the AI works. And I saw one person write that when doing user testing of an AI product, it's almost after you're testing two intelligences, you're testing the actual user test participant, and you're also testing the foundation model behind the AI of how it's thinking about the problem. So you're trying to get the two merging together a little bit similar to how you would do usability study of some kind of social media collaborative computing type of system with more than one user.
That's also different than just testing a word process or e-commerce website with only one user. So there's a lot of changes that are going on there. So it's a huge thing, but the biggest is actually how it's changing the world economy, and that is an enormous change. So my analogy is if we go back and think about the industrial revolution, and we had introduced inventions like they say, the steam engine and things like that, just having machine power instead of muscle power. Today we have machine cognition rather than only brain cognition. So it's an equivalent type of thing. That workload is being offloaded to make some machine, and therefore we can be much more strong and powerful and get more things done. But go back to the industrial revolution. Some smart person thought, what if we take a steam engine and put it on wheels and on tracks or rails and now you invent the locomotive and the railroad industry.
So I mean, I'm not saying I'm going to invent the railroad for ai, but I mean those may be levels of ambitions that one can contribute kind of a new way of thinking or some element. I actually think it's not possible. Just when the AI started, I wrote an article where I thought, well, who will be the Jakob Nielsen of the AI era just as I did for the.com era, and really changed the thinking of the internet industry of usability. And now I've revised my, that was my hope. I had some people actually thought might be able to do this. No, that has been a failure. That didn't happen. I actually don't think so now, I don't think there's going to be one person capable of really changing ai. Each of us can push in a certain direction and I'm pushing for the human centred direction. That's my push. Other people will have other pushes and together we'll create the new world. I think it's just too big for one person to have a truly revolutionary impact anymore.
Brendan Jarvis:
One of your pushes, and it's at the more individual level was to UXs specifically. And it was in a piece you wrote on UX Tigers, which was titled UX Needs a Sense of Urgency about ai. And you used in that piece used a metaphor from a former boss of yours, a gentleman by the name of Scott McNeely, to summarise your thoughts. What was Scott's metaphor and why do you feel that it's valid here?
Jakob Nielsen, PhD:
Well, Scott Neely was such a great guy and he had the metaphor saying, you are either the windshield or you're the bug. And the thinking thought is that if you have a car that's driving down the freeway at high speed and you have an insect of some kind and to meet the windshield of the car will smash that bug out of the way. So you can be this little, and I'm flying around having my happy time, or you can be, I am the movement that's changing the world. And I feel like too many UX people are the little fly that's just going heavily buzzing around in their own little backyard while the world is changing under them. And they will be squashed like a bug if they don't get with the programme. And they will be unemployed in five years, actually maybe less than five years.
Because one of the things AI does, it does a lot of things, but one of the things it does is it vastly increases knowledge, work of productivity. And right now it's by about 40%. But if you can think about five years from now, it's probably going to be about double, about a hundred percent productivity improvement. And so if you have two people and one has, let's say they're the same talent, and so one is gets twice as much done in a day as the other person who will you hire, the one who gets twice as much work done, it's very, very clear. So if you refuse to use the tools that are that much more powerful, the old school way of doing things, you're just not going to have a job. And the other thing I also point out in this article is now we are thinking five years ahead.
Well, there's a lot of value not just in using the tool, but being good at using the tool and having experience because these things is incremental. I mean, you learn by doing. That's so important. You learn by, you can go to a lecture, it'll give you some tips, you can read article, maybe even my article, it'll give you some tips, all very good. But it's mainly actual experience from doing things that helps you. And so the people who start using AI now will in five years have five years experience. By definition, the people started last year will have six years experience and be even better. So it's too late now to have started last year if you don't use your AI in your daily work, but you can at least start now. And then another one of my slogans is start small, but start now. So you start with a little bit, not a hugely ambitious project because then you're going to be stumped and you're going to be scared and it may go wrong and you're going to destroy a big thing. Start small, but start now. So start today actually, just if the people who are listening to this recording start now, if you have not used AI yet, start now, the only way you'll have five years experience and five years will be mandatory to be experienced in using AI and UX.
Brendan Jarvis:
Can you think of any valid excuses as to why UX people can't start now?
Jakob Nielsen, PhD:
No. I mean I can feel that there are certainly reasons why you cannot do everything with the current AI systems. Absolutely, they can't do everything. And in fact, I don't think it'll ever be able to do everything because there's sort of some fundamental things like for example, in user research, it's very fundamental user research that you actually have a user or person or the customer, whatever you want to call them, because it is a reality check. That's a reason to do user of research, whatever the various methods that's important. The most important is it's an actual customer. It's another person and yourself. And so that I think is fundamental and we're not going to have a computer and ai, even if it's super intelligent. And I believe in superint intelligence. I mean, we already have many cases where AI is more intelligent than humans, not just in the average human, which is not such a hard barrier, but more intelligent, the best humans.
So for example, chess is kind very classic example. It's also very measurable who wins a chess match? And so it's long ago actually that we can forget about even the world's best brand master cannot beat a good chess playing computer. So we will have super intelligent computers that will be able to do better than humans at many tasks. But on the other hand, fundamentally speaking, there are certain things they can't do. And so one of them is just predict what will happen in the unpredictable, I mean fundamentally unpredictable case of what a customer do next. I mean, that's why we have to observe it. We have to watch them. And so there are definitely things that AI cannot do. And we also know that current AI has various other problems such as the infamous hallucination, but it depends on what you're asking to do. So for example, if you're going to do a thematic analysis on qualitative statements, so if you have hundreds of thousands of millions of statements, which they will have in big companies, it doesn't matter if the AI will misclassify a few of them, what matters is it's able to pick out one set to serve attention.
And maybe it's not going to pick out every single one only 90%, but that's good enough because you don't have time to read more of those anyway, other cases, if there's a 10% error, that would be bad and that's when you have to double check and you shouldn't just published a use what you get out of the AI without reviewing it first. So it depends on what you're doing, whether or not a small degree of error is acceptable or unacceptable, it depends on what it is.
Brendan Jarvis:
And that's that notion of AI as co-pilot rather than ai, as superseding the role of the human. I want to come back to what you were saying though there about the unpredictability of human behaviour. And don't let me put words in your mouth here, but my sense of listening to you talk about this previously and here now is that you feel that it's beyond the bounds of AI currently and perhaps into the future to simulate what a real human might do in any given situation just because of the complexity of people and our various differences. But I've been wondering about this and wanted to put this to you here. If that unpredictability is somewhat of a known and unknown, then if the system could model the unpredictability of humans as a result, could that then be translated into some sort of model where you could, for argument's sake, see variations on behaviour introduced into a study and then modelled into an outcome for specific populations?
Jakob Nielsen, PhD:
I think some of that may be possible. And I think my own previous comment that this may can combine to bite me, which is, is it acceptable to have let's say 10% error or is it not acceptable? And I think you could definitely imagine cases that first of all, with a future ai, its capability was up to the point where it was maybe 90% correct, and maybe there are design cases where 10% wrong would be acceptable, and in that case maybe you should do it. And it's actually very similar to one of my own methodologies, which is heuristic evaluation using the 10, famous 10 heuristics to evaluate the user interface. That's actually a very similar phenomenon. So the heuristics are packaged up lessons from years of serving real users use real user, and we see that there are certain big things that characterise how people do things, and we can use those insights to analyse a user interface, but not a hundred percent accurately.
But so what I have always argued was you can use heuristic evaluation as part of iterative design. And so iterative design could be that we just keep doing user testing all the time, or it could be we do some user testing and some heuristic evaluation. And so it becomes a way of saving users because you can have, if you have let's say 10 iterations, maybe two or three of them are heuristic evaluation, and so you've saved those users, it can be hard to come by in certain applications. That would be an example from my own work where being not a hundred percent right is acceptable because we have a correction methodology, which is that we do do some user testing. Maybe that could be the same here, that maybe we rely on AI simulated users to some extent, and we also do some user testing, or maybe we're designing something where it's not so crucial to be correct, because again, you can never have a perfect user interface anyway.
So if you could have one that's fairly good for a lot of cases, that's enough for other cases where very large amounts, ammonia, many lives are at stake. You want to be more accurate. So that's another thing. Usability is at hand. Fundamentally, it's a risk reduction methodology and depends on how big is the risk and what is the consequences of only getting it, let's say 90% correct. And maybe sometimes it's completely fine. So I do believe that, I do believe we can get in those type of situations where we can rely on methods that are not perfect, but are adequate for the circumstances.
Brendan Jarvis:
This is possibly something that ties right back into the core of discount usability and the reason for it being a thing, which is that there's still a perception out there, rightly or wrongly, probably rightly in some cases, that research in itself is time consuming and costly, and that makes it a plumb target for movements to try and economise if you like, for 90%. Yeah,
Jakob Nielsen, PhD:
And that's actually another area where sometimes I've been criticised, but I think that UX is a luxury, and that's something people don't like to hear me say. It's always fundamental, and I believe it's fundamental too, but at the same time, it is also a luxury because it's relatively expensive. It's not as expensive as it used to be, but it's still relatively expensive, and that means that a lot of companies cannot afford it. And that has been one of my big career goals for my entire, well, almost my entire 41 years, not in the very, very beginning, but for almost the entire career. My goal has been to make it cheaper. And this is a basic thing from economics, is that if something is cheaper, more people will buy it. And so if we can make usability cheaper, less of a luxury, it'll be applied more cases, and therefore quality will improve.
And so that's what I've been pushing for a very long time, make it cheaper. That's also, by the way, why I'm not worried about, let's say unemployment based on ai. So I just said before that I think in five years from now, we'll double the productivity of us of UX people so we can get the same work done in half the time, and therefore we can fire half the people. But that is a wrong interpretation because we can make the work or the product, the outcome cost half as much. If it costs half as much, many more people will buy it. And therefore, and there will be many new types of design blossoming and coming out. And so if we only ever had the same things done in the future as we had today, but this is called a fixed work fallacy. This has been wrong for 10,000 years ever since the agricultural revolution that all the people who used to be hunters and gatherers, they were now out of a job because you could make food much more efficiently on the farm than go out and shooting it.
But in reality, they did not become unemployed hunters. They became employed farmers. And then industrial revolution comes around, you don't need as many farm workers. They're not unemployed farm workers, they're employed industry workers or then manufacturing goes down. We get service industry now old services go down, new services come up. It's the same for 10,000 years. It's been the same old way of doing things goes away. You don't need as many people do the old things. That does not mean they're unemployed. It means they do the new thing instead. And that's what I think will happen too, whether it's UX or other types of knowledge work, is we will be doing more things in the future. And that is very heavy to me because I think we need more UX. And one way of getting more UX is to just hop on it and say, you got to do more. You got to do more. And this has been a failed strategy actually, not a completely failed strategy because there is more done, but the better strategy is make it cost half as much and then more companies will be able to afford it.
Brendan Jarvis:
There's a few things in there. One of the things is this idea of making UX cheaper and we'll do more of it, but there's also a hidden side to this argument, which is you've used an anecdote actually to somewhat address this in the past, and it's actually from the united of its currency in the seventies, which you've used to highlight resistance to improving a systems user experience and all the dragging of heels that went on before, eventually after decades, the UK brought it in and found, I'm just summarising now, found that it was wildly successful and people didn't struggle with it at all. It was a superior experience. But the hidden part of this argument for UX is the cost of perpetuating a system that doesn't have a great user experience, which some reason, and maybe you have insight into this, given your experience both as a consultant and more broadly, why is it that some even a systemic level, but at an organisational level, executives for example, or successive boards, can't seem to see the costs that they're carrying by not investing in UX?
Jakob Nielsen, PhD:
Well, again, that's that argument that we've got to push harder for it and explain it better. And there's absolutely something to that. And one of the reasons is that the intuitive way of thinking about design and about usability is that we want to be user friendly. Now, this is already a big step up in thinking compared to the really old school thinking, which was that people should be grateful they even had a computer that was like the 1960s thinking people had to completely adapt to the computer back then. Nowadays, the enlightened thinking I think is the case most places is, oh no, we want to be friendly. We want customers to have a good experience. Then the next step after that is that you, the person, the decision maker, they will look at this design and say, do I think it's good? That's the way you judge whether things are good.
In general, people rise to high level management positions because usually that judgement has been sound because most of their decisions have been right, not of course, everyone, but usually, right? And so therefore, they think that they can judge whether or not a user interface serves these goals that they do have. And the fact is just that they cannot, because you cannot wipe your brain and pretend not to know what you do know. And if you have all this conceptual knowledge from just basically working at the company or being an executive at the company how things are supposed to be, and therefore you interpret what you see relative to what you know, and therefore you interpret it more or less correct, and therefore you think it's easy or you watch a demo, somebody comes in and gives a demo, this is our new product, and the person giving a demo knows exactly where to click at any given point, they can make up a plausible story for why that's where people would click and why that's a good thing.
I mean, the designs don't come from complete stupidity of making locks to users. The designers or the engineers who make a design quite often think it's the logical or good way of doing things, but it's because they know too much. And so we can make this argument. And that is a true argument, and that is in fact one of the reasons why UX has become more and more used over the years, despite still being rather expensive. So another reason is that it works. I mean, if you follow the methodology, your product will in fact be better. And when I say it works, again, I'm just generalising because you can also have cases where you follow the methodology and the product fails, but on average it'll succeed. And that's another reason. By the way, if you think about the management hierarchy, a company particularly in a big company, the people who at the higher levels are the ones who caught their way up that management ladder over many, many, many years.
It means that back when they were firsthand, they had hands on some product development. That was back in the days before, there was a lot of UX work because this is a new field. I mean, I've done it for 41 years, but it's been very accelerating over that period. And so if you think back, let's say 20 years, it was a fraction of what it is today, which means that a now high level executive who 20 years ago or 30 years ago was let's say a product manager building, actually building a product, getting it out the door, that person would tend to not have hands-on experience with having a substantial UX effort on his or her team. Now, the people who today work in a lot of these areas today are kind of like a low level first level product manager. They actually often have that experience because not every company, but a lot of companies actually do have some amount of UX, not as much as I would like, but they do have some.
So you'll think about this person of today, it's a low level, okay, five years from now, a little bit higher level, 10 years from now, a little bit higher level, 20 years from now, chief information officer chief, this or that high level big boss kind of thing, they will then, now we're talking in 20 years, but they will then have that personal experience with, yeah, UX really did help my product back in the day, and therefore they will be more likely in 20 years to want to invest more of that budget in that. And this entire process has been taking place for 40 years, but just it's an acceleration movement and it's exponential growth movement. And when you have exponential growth, if you think back 20 years, it's a tiny percentage of what it is today. If you think ahead 20 more years, it'll be vastly bigger than it is today, about 10 times bigger.
So my rough rule of thumb is that UX expands by a factor of three every decade. So 10 years ago, there was 1 million people. Now there are 3 million people. In 10 years, there'll be about 10 million UX people in the world. And so when expanding like that, that's very nice. But it does mean that there were very few people doing it 20 years ago compared to now. And therefore today's level bosses 20 years ago, they were low level bosses of hands-on managers. They didn't have that experience. And that I think is another reason that today there's not as much emphasis as I would say, we would say that that should be.
Brendan Jarvis:
You mentioned a lower level product manager in that example, and you've previously also spoken about role that AI plays in helping UXs to upskill. And you used a term which maybe we need to define, which is a UX unicorn, and correct me if I'm wrong, but this is someone who can do many things in UX to a high standard, maybe not to a world-class standard, all of them, but many thanks to AI to a high standard. The argument you made was that AI can help with that acquisition of adjacent skills, but just listening to you talk about that then couldn't help. But thinking product management in particular seems to be quite aggressively acquiring UX skills for argument's sake, particularly when it pertains to research or at least some of the research in the field. Could we be looking at a wild redefinition of the UX field if we think about reflecting product management, for example, their ability to also use AI to acquire adjacent skills?
Jakob Nielsen, PhD:
Oh, absolutely. I mean, it works for everybody. Everybody will be able to be upskilled. Again, this goes back to maybe my position. Now, I don't have to defend a certain type of consultancy. That's to sell a certain type of product. I don't care who does it as long as it gets done. My belief or my goal in life is to help the users. Who are the people who do that that I don't really care about? What degrees of education do they have? I don't care. Maybe they come from a bootcamp, maybe they have a PhD. What do I care if they do the right thing, if they make technology easier for humans? That's what I want to see happen. Those cases where I've actually changed my mind, because I used to say that unicorns usually did not work, and the reason it's called unicorn is because that's a very rare animal. In fact, it doesn't even actually exist at all. So it's very, very rare. So it used to be very, very rare that one person could do a lot, had a lot of skills at let's say sufficiently good level to be good. You cannot just study and study and study and get so good at everything. So that used to be virtually impossible. That few people who actually were so talented, they could do it, but it was very difficult.
Brendan Jarvis:
Not enough time, right? It's just not enough
Jakob Nielsen, PhD:
Time. It's time to learn all those things, right? So you would say, I can do everything, but in reality for most, you would do a terrible job. Now, what we know about AI is it does many things. So one of the things I already mentioned is that improves productivity. It also improves quality, which is very interesting that the studies show you get this work done in less time and the outcome is better. And then the third thing it does is that it narrows the skill gaps. So it helps everybody. It helps the really brilliant talented person, they get even better, but the amount of uplift you get is actually higher for the less skilled person. And that means that the difference between a very high skilled and a less skilled person is not as big anymore with ai. AI is also a great training vehicle, and this is one of the things I really hope for.
We'll get dramatically better education in the world at all levels from elementary school up to what we are talking about now, which is professional skills, so you can learn things easily. And then when you perform them with AI help, your quality level is close to not actually as high but close to the best people. And so this goes back to then we can ask again, does everything has to be to the very highest standard? That's kind a dream that some people would like to have pragmatic. I'm like an engineer at heart in that regard, as in no, everything is a trade off, including a cost benefit, trade off return on an investment trade off. How much am I going to pay for a certain level of quality? And so there's some projects where the absolute best design is necessary for that. I think you still have to have a team of specialists, each of whom is superior in their one little narrow thing.
But for a lot of other things, if we can do better design, that's the goal. And you can actually get better design by somebody who's quite good at all the different things, even if they're not perfect or the best in the world at each individual thing because they've been uplifted, they've been able to learn more, and then they've been uplifted in their quality by ai. And so that means that what used to be a rare unicorn becomes a common unicorn. Maybe it just becomes like a horse, like a normal animal that you just have in large numbers. And so I think that's a big, big, big, big difference. And then we have to remember that there's a huge advantage to the unicorn, again, going back to that known word, which is somebody who can do a lot of different skills. If the same person does all the things, communication overhead, poof out the door, credibility problem, poof out the door.
In fact, with current UX or traditional old school UX, the amount of time a UX person spends on actually exercising whatever superior skill and talent they have in that little narrow thing is actually a small percentage, much more time is spent communicating with the other expert or other specialist and in convincing, persuading, arguing for why this should be done, all that goes away. Because if I'm doing the thing, I know what I did. So communication overhead zero, if I did it, I believe it was done. I believe it was done right. I can trust my own judgement , I believe. I mean this is almost, people do it too much, but in any case, people do believe in themselves. And so if the same person does, let's say the user testing and the design, then the designer will believe the usability findings. So a lot of this ovate we have today will go away, which makes it very superior approach.
Brendan Jarvis:
You mentioned judgement , and that's one of the main things that I wanted to cover with you today, and that is one of the perceived risks of AI is that it's going to lead to a reduction in critical thinking, sort of a dumbing down of the people that are using the tool because it's so easy. You can just plug something in framed to a reasonable degree and you're going to get something back that's of a reasonable quality about this. You've previously said, and I'll quote you again now, you've said, well, of course there's always a risk. And the risk is mainly if you don't engage your own human creativity, your own human judgement , because judgement becomes more important actually when you get a lot of ideas to choose from because how do you make that choice? Now, I was thinking about this question or the statement that you've made and thinking about the technology and thinking about your career as well. I mean, you're clearly an expert. You've been doing this for 41 years. You've developed your judgement through decades of practise and reflection and improvement. What risk, if any, do you see that AI has actually become so easy that it has a negative impact on our ability as people to actually through the grunt work, I suppose, or through the experience to develop our own sensibilities, our own sense of judgement ?
Jakob Nielsen, PhD:
Yeah, I mean, I can see the risk potentially being there, but I don't think it's pragmatically speaking such a big risk as long as we keep one principle in mind, which is that we need to have a collaboration or synergy between the human and the ai. So if you abandon responsibility and just let the AI do something, then you are right that anyone loses the ability to have a good sense of good judgement . And there will also be whatever mistakes it makes. And it does make mistakes. They'll just go out the door and be inflicted upon customers. But if you have a review, if you have the critical thinking about what the A has done, you can shortcut a lot of things by having the a. I do a lot of that grunt work for you. And I think by ways of analogy, I mean there's plenty of analogies to this in history of technology.
I mean, one that comes to mind personally is calculators because when I was a kid, there was a big debate about if we allow children in high school, students in high school to use an electronic calculator, they will stop being able to do math. But in fact, what's important about math is not really the ability to add two 10 digit numbers together, multiply two four digit numbers together, any of those type of very mechanical mass skills. It's the understanding of magnitudes of what a big number versus a small number of cumulative change, like compound interest is the most classic example of that. It grows a little at first, but then it starts becoming a lot those type of insights, which is the more deeper insights I think you can get. I mean, I would certainly count on myself personally. I mean, I had had math in high school and I had a calculator, and I'm sure that my ability to do those add a big number together is probably less than otherwise it would've been, but it didn't impede.
I mean, it leaves more time to understanding the deeper things to think about things, the bigger thoughts if the smaller thoughts are being handled more automatically. I mean, again, we only have so much brain power. We only have so much time. And the more you have to allocate the time and the brain power to lower level considerations, the less you have available for the higher level considerations. Now, if you abandon all of those, then I think you're right. Then I think there's this distinct risk, but that's just not what I think you'll see. I think you'll see the best results come from the collaboration. And if I may kind of cycle back to, I mentioned the point about the super intelligent superhuman intelligence, which we are already seeing in several fields such as chess playing. But what's interesting about that field is that the data actually shows that the very best chess playing comes from combining a human grandma and a computer.
So the two together will play better than the computer alone or the human alone, but the two together will play even better chess. And so that's the type of effect I think we are seeing in UX and many, many other knowledge work areas as well, is that the computer or the AI can do more of the grunt work, more of the low level work, therefore free the humans up to be more creative, more deep thinking, more strategic thinking, more oriented towards exercising judgement because creating each individual thing becomes easier, therefore you have more to choose from and you can exercise your judgement in making that choice.
Brendan Jarvis:
Thinking about that super intelligence and just high intelligence in general, and you've used an analogy or a metaphor previously for AI as it's a forklift for the mind. And you also spoke about earlier in our conversation how that's actually great for people of relatively lower intelligence because it lifts them relatively higher than it does the people that are already at the top of that intelligence pile, which I imagine when it comes to hiring people in that top one to 2%, it actually makes it more difficult to discern who's actually truly there. Speaking about hiring people that are in that top one to 2%, your previous company faced some criticism, and I think you did personally around some of your previous job advertisements for staff that focused in specifically on these very, very intelligent people. And that drew the IR drawing back to the beginning of our conversation of some people within the field, one in particular per axe bomb who's the host of the UX podcast, and he labelled them and he wasn't mincing words here, elitist and ableist. Did he have a point?
Jakob Nielsen, PhD:
Yes and no because I think yes, I've always been very elitist and particularly when it comes to who you want to have do work for you. I just don't think that's negative. I think it's positive. You want to have the best people, particularly in the past before ai, the person who's in the top 1% can do a lot more than the person who's in the top, let's say 10%. I mean, in sort of a normal daily conversation, you would say if somebody is in the top 10% of iq, you would call 'em a smart person. But in terms of what they actually do in terms of let's say, observing new interaction patterns, if you're doing usability studies, the people in the top 1% can do more, and the people in the top 0.1% can do even more. And the people in the top 0.00, whatever, how far you want to go on the decimal points, the higher you can go up in that ability to do the pattern matching, to recognise what's going on, the better you are positioned.
So I am completely an elitist, and I think that would be the advice to anybody who is hiring for almost any job, any knowledge job is you get the smartest people you absolutely possibly can. I just always tended to set it at about 1% because also you can't set it so high that you're not going to get any applicants. So I tended to say if you're in the top 1% of the population, that's probably what's good for being able to do obviously advanced UX work. But now again, one of the things is it is becoming easier to do and it is possible for people to do a lot of design without being at the very highest elite level. And it's corrected AI makes, it makes the hiring process harder because a lot of the old days, we could give people an assignment like write up something or other, and you could check on this writing, was it good or bad?
And today they all get it written up by TPT. And so some of those exercises that used to be great at discerning who's the smartest and who's only cut reasonably good, they become harder to do. So maybe that you have to do more real time with the person in the room as opposed to just saying, here in a week, give me this back because you don't really know how they did it. And it's hard to discern the insight level if you don't really know if it's personal produced. But then on the other hand, you can also argue what does it matter? I mean, I actually argue that you want job applicants to use AI because you want people who are skilled at using the tools just as if you were hiring, say, a graphic designer, you wouldn't say, I'm going to prohibit you if you use Photoshop, you cheating.
If you give them an exercise to create some visual, I mean, you would say use the best available tools. And today the best available tools are AI tools. And therefore the question becomes who's good and who is bad at doing that? So that's really what you want to investigate if you are hiring. But going back to the general point, you actually want to hire people who are the best you can find at executing on whatever the job entails, which of course is different for different type of jobs, what they entail doing, but wherever it does entail doing, you want people who are the best you can possibly find at that. So yes, you should be elitist. And one of the good old lessons is that the output from the best is so much higher than the output from the medium. And it has been started more so on programming than in UX, but in programming, the best programmers are about 20 times, not 20%, but 20 times better than a normal programmer. So if you're hiring software, if you can actually hire the best, you can hire one extremely good person or 20 average programmers and not just that as the best person, 20 times more productive, but their code tends to also be of higher quality as well. So being elitist is incredibly important for these kind of advanced knowledge work skills.
Brendan Jarvis:
Is it unfair to summarise that perspective of yours as if you can? Why wouldn't you?
Jakob Nielsen, PhD:
That's also true. And also to follow up on that, of course, not everybody in this position. I mean, you can really hire the world's best programmer unless you are one of the world's most prestigious software development companies. If you're, it's like an insurance company, let's say, you can still get good programmers, but you probably cannot get the absolutely very, very best. And similarly, if you're doing user experience, if you're one of the world's most famous user experience companies, you can aspire to a higher sliver of that population. And again, if you're an insurance company, I mean honestly, it's great work and it's so valuable to the work to the world to create better user interfaces for people to file insurance claims. I mean, if you can make that 10 times each easier, which you can't because they tend to be terrible, those designs, it's well worth doing. It's just that pragmatically speaking, those companies are not going to be able to hire as good designers as let just to say Apple as a competing example of where some of those top, top talents might more aspire to go to. But that doesn't mean you should take the dregs. I mean, you can still get at any given level, there's a difference between the better and the less good, and you always want to get the best you can given your circumstances.
Brendan Jarvis:
You recently spoke with Felix Lee, who's the CEO and co-founder of a DP list. And you shared a perspective that kind of dovetails into what we've just been discussing here, which is, and correct me if I'm putting words in your mouth, but you believe that UX has reached its peak as it pertains to big tech or the technology industry probably more broadly, and that the growth opportunities exist in other industries like insurance, like you were just mentioning there. Does that mean then that practitioners in those companies can get away with a less sophisticated set of skills?
Jakob Nielsen, PhD:
It probably does because they're probably not solving as cutting edge problems. So the people inventing a new technology, a new user interface technology, let's take as an example, that currently is kind of a new one, which is a lot of the augmented reality. We don't necessarily have very strong guidelines for what would be a good user interface there. And so that requires a very advanced level of person to work that out and to actually create the examples and the guidelines for the largest set of people who will be implementing applications for that platform. If it's successful. And it's only successful if the people who work on it are like supreme talents for a lot of other products, you are creating really design number 10,000 in the world that solves that problem. You're solving a little bit differently, which is why you can't just copy some existing thing, but you can rely on a large number of guidelines.
For example, if you're designing an e-commerce websites, you can go to something like the Bay Mart Institute and read. I think they have about 10,000 guidelines. I mean, it's incredible how detailed they have worked over the years to develop the details of what makes for a good bestselling e-commerce site. So that's kind of known. So you still need to interpret that relative to your specific products you're selling, but you can rely on this body of knowledge that other people have spent 20 years already developing. And so if you're doing something completely new that doesn't exist, you've got to invent that from scratch. So the difficulty of the design problem definitely, definitely changes. But I think my more general point was that UX is winning. I mean, it's not one as much as we like those of us who are in this field, but in general, it is broadening.
It's good in more and more places. It started in high tech, it started actually at Bell Labs back when they did the touch tone, the push button, telephone, that design. So those early projects were some of the first to actually be done based on user testing and not even all the methodologies, but the foundational methodologies. And it's been broadened and broadened ever since. And so it used to be very focused on high tech, the telephone business, the computer business, software, business, internet platform style of things. But there are really a small percentage of the overall economy. And UX applies to everything. I mean, brand is experience in the digital age, so your interaction, your user experience becomes your brand. And everybody has that. All companies have that. All government agencies have that. They all should have UX. They also have a big amount of UX, do they?
Not quite yet, but more and more. And that means if you think do some kind of pie chart and say what percentage of that pie, what slice is in high tech, it used to be almost everything and it's smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller. And so if somebody is sort of saying, oh, what's the state of UX? And say, well, there are not as many jobs in UX jobs in high tech as there used to be because they overhired during the covid period, and therefore they had to let a lot of people go. Now I feel sorry for the specific people who were fired, but for the field at large, this is just a blip and the growth potential is in other places. And so I don't think people should have it as their career goal to, they had to work at what they sometimes call FANG or the Facebook and the Apple and the Google and whatever have you.
That shouldn't be your goal. I mean, some people should work there and some people should invent the next generation of user interface, but a lot of people should work on making everyday life easier and more pleasant for the vast majority of humanity. And they're using so many other designs in the world than just Gmail and those type of things. And so that's where we'll have the majority of the growth. And there's actually a second implication of that too, which is what I call the pancaking of the UX field. So it used to be very hierarchical, so like this, and it used to be that your career goal or some people's career goal anyway, was to be promoted from, okay, I'm an individual designer. I'm managing a design team. I'm the director of a big thing. I'm a VP of an even bigger thing. So that's a pyramid.
You go up, up, up, up. That's your career goal. But remember that if you have a group of 500 designers, only one of 500 can be that big boss. So now we are seeing UX being more and more and more places flattening out smaller teams because again, they can be more efficient with ai. So that goal of being like the VP of 500 designers was always small just by the mathematics of the thing, but it's even less so can be the career goal of people from now on because we will have a more flattening spread out UX field rather than centralised big teams kind of UX field. UX is going to be everywhere. To me, this is beautiful. That's what I've always wanted, UX everywhere. It just means that certain things either go away or they at least become very, very small relative to the field at large. There's still going to be probably a few people who are big shut executives, UX people, but that's going to be such a small minority. The vast majority is going to be everywhere, UX everywhere. That to me is happy.
Brendan Jarvis:
Some people would call that a commodity, and I get the sense you don't feel that's a dirty word.
Jakob Nielsen, PhD:
I don't feel a dirty word. I actually feel it's a happy word because it means you UX everywhere. It means that UX is the way things are done. It's just the basis. It's like water. It's like air. It's like it's permeates it everywhere. And again, for the old school people who used to be I'm special, I have this secret knowledge about how to make things easier to use, that may be a hard thing for them to no longer be special and exceptional. And the place you had to go to if you wanted to do a good product. Now there's millions or tens of millions of people who will be knowing how to do it. It'll be embedded everywhere and it'll take away some high price jobs like what I used to do. There's no longer be a need for that type of place that's sort of like, Ooh, why we know what you don't.
Because everybody will know and everybody will have AI to help them learn and to execute on it. But again, I actually think the goal is not to have a few people who are so, so special and paid extra much and they sit off in the corner. The goal is to have it be integrated and permeating and be the norm and not be special. So I think that not being special is what I've actually always wanted for UX. I've just wanted for UX to be the norm, to be a commodity the normal way things are just done. It's not special, it's not secret. It's not only a few places who know how to do it as everybody knows how to do it.
Brendan Jarvis:
Jakob, I could ask you many more questions today, but I better just ask you one final one, just being mindful of time, and that is that you are a pioneer of our field. You've spent 41 years of your life in it and bound to be spending many more judging what you're doing with UX Tigers. You've made some notable outstanding and also some controversial contributions to the field in that time. And if you fast forward from today, from us having this conversation to whenever that day may be, when you close your laptop for the last time, what is it that you hope that you'll be most remembered for?
Jakob Nielsen, PhD:
Well, I hope I'll be remembered for making technology suitable for humans. I mean, of course, not totally me personally doing it, but for helping make that happen. I mean, that has always been my goal. Humans should not have to submit cut to computers. Computers should have to submit to humans, adjust to the way humans are, and people are the way they are. That's another very, very foundational point of mine is that we design for the way people are not the way we hope they are. So this idealism has to go away. We have to be pragmatic and think about the world the way it is. And I feel like if I consider my career, I think we've come a long way in those 41 years. Computers used to be actually terrible. Back when I started, UX used to be very oppressed. So people today say, oh, I get no respect.
They should think about how it was back then. Then there was not just no respect, but what's the opposite negative. I mean, people actually used to detest us and think we were just a nuisance. And that has kind of gone away. It's kind just broadly accepted if not always done the way we would recommend it done. But we've kind of achieved that first level of at least acceptance. So that's a big step forward. Already, the actual quality of computers, of ease of use is dramatically better than it used to be. Is it still how it should be? A computer is still easy, truly easy. No, I mean if one judge compared to where it should be, and I don't think if we say it from where it was to where it should be, if that's like a hundred percent mark, I think we are less than the 50% mark.
Actually, I don't know if we are 30% of the way there or something like that. Maybe 20 to 30% of the way there may be in terms of how much better can quality technology quality become over the next, let's say 50 years compared to what it was 41 years ago when I started. I think we are less than halfway there, so I think there's a lot more to come. I do think that us brave pioneers from the early days, we went through a lot of hardship to overcome the true resistance that was back then. I think people going forward still have, I mean, it's not going to be easy, but it easy year. And that's also why I believe that if we've seen this increment, I see we can see a bigger increment in the future because actually the impediments are less now than they used to be.
So we should be able to make more progress. And that means that just realistically speaking, I probably will not actually experience how computers will be in 50 years, but I do think in the younger people in the audience, I mean, you can look forward to when you get to be like an old person because by then, for example, design for old people will probably become more respected than it is now where it's still not really considered to be a good thing. So I think we can go a lot further than we have today. And what I really hope that I'm remembered for is I was one of the people who really pushed that and accelerated that and made my part to making technology better for humanity, though that's all I can really hope for perfection's not going to happen in my lifetime. Probably never actually. But it's a long way to go. But that's again, for all the people listening today, that's going to be your job is to go that next path, and we who went before you paved the road so that you can now move on that road.
Brendan Jarvis:
Jakob, this has been a lively, candid and valuable conversation. Thank you for your four decades of service to the field and also for sharing your stories and insights with me today.
Jakob Nielsen, PhD:
Well, thanks Brendan. I thought it was a really exciting conversation. Thank you.
Brendan Jarvis:
No, my pleasure. My pleasure. Jakob, if people want to keep up to date with you and what you are contributing to the field, where is the best place for them to go to do that?
Jakob Nielsen, PhD:
The best place is my website, UXtigers.com. But actually even better would be to subscribe to my email newsletter, which comes out on Substack every week. So just go straight into your inbox and there's a subscription field at the bottom of the page on UX Tiger. So that's one place you can subscribe. So yeah, I hope you'll get my email every week because that's the true way to keep up with my news thinking.
Brendan Jarvis:
Great. Thank you Jakob, and to everyone that's tuned in, it's been great having you here with us as well. Everything that we've covered will be in the show notes, including where you can find Jakob and UX Tigers and all the things that we've spoken about.
If you enjoyed the show and you want to hear more great conversations like this with world-class leaders and UX research, product management and design, don't forget to leave a review, subscribe. So the podcast turns up every two weeks for you and tell maybe just one other person who you feel would get value from these conversations at depth about the show.
If you want to reach out to me, you can find me on LinkedIn, just search for Brendan Jarvis, or there's a link to my LinkedIn profile at the bottom of the show notes or head on over to my website, which is thespaceinbetween.co.nz. That's thespaceinbetween.co.nz. And until next time, keep being brave.

Jakob Nielsen

Plainspoken, Hard-hitting and Unorthodox

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Who is Jakob Nielsen, PhD?

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