**UX Roundup — September 29, 2025** **AI Music and Video Upgrades** Suno, a leading AI music tool, launched version 5. Comparing it with Suno 4. 5+, Jakob re-created his “Forward Deployed Engineer” song to evaluate improvements. While Suno 5 allows remastering existing songs—enabling reuse of lip-synced video and saving costs—he chose to generate a new song from scratch to better test its capabilities. This required new lip-syncing and additional footage for a 21-second AI-generated dance break, created using Kling 2. 5 Turbo, which also released recently. AI video, notably progressing faster than other media types, is highlighted by tools like Kling and upcoming Sora 2 (Seedream 4). Notably, AI-generated avatars showed some inconsistencies, like differing boots during dance sequences, due to limitations in character consistency across generations. Jakob appreciates Suno 5’s richer instrumentation and expressive vocals but prefers the older melody. Both versions were created using the same prompt, which may have favored the earlier model due to prompt refinement over time. **Shorter Surveys Yield Higher Validity** The golden rule for user surveys is to reduce the number of questions aggressively. Long surveys suffer from high abandonment and self-selection bias, primarily attracting only highly motivated outliers—superfans or detractors—thus skewing results unrepresentatively. Effective surveys rely on ruthless prioritization: every question must lead to distinct, actionable outcomes; otherwise, it should be cut. Short surveys (five questions or fewer) generate higher response rates and more valid, generalizable data. Each added question typically decreases responses by 5–10%, harming survey effectiveness. **Waymo’s Autonomous Car Safety Update** Waymo, Google’s self-driving taxi service, has driven 96 million miles with full autonomy, resulting in a 91% reduction in serious injury accidents compared to human drivers. Pedestrian injuries dropped by 92%, cyclist injuries by 78%, and motorcyclist injuries by 89%. With roughly 40, 000 annual U. S. traffic deaths, full replacement by Waymo could save about 36, 400 lives per year.

Globally, with over a million annual traffic deaths, AI driving could save more than 900, 000 lives. Competing service Robotaxi, affiliated with Tesla, has begun commercial operation but has not disclosed safety stats; although it may currently underperform Waymo, its faster rollout could ultimately save more lives despite a slightly lower safety rate. Jakob’s thought experiment shows even a marginally less safe but faster-deployed AI service could prevent more fatalities than a safer but slower one. The emphasis is on scaling autonomous adoption swiftly to maximize lives saved. **Economically Valuable AI Benchmarks** OpenAI introduced “GDPval, ” an AI performance benchmark focused on 44 knowledge-based occupations and 1, 320 typical tasks, covering roles from nurse practitioners to inventory clerks. Tasks simulate realistic job functions, evaluated by human experts against AI. In published results, Claude Opus 4. 1 performed best, winning 43. 6% of tasks and tying 4%, versus humans winning 52. 4%. GPT-5-high scored well (35. 5% wins), while GPT-4o and earlier models showed rapid improvement over 14 months, with AI tripling task-winning rates since mid-2024. Though humans still slightly outperform on quality, AI executes tasks about 100 times faster at around 1% the cost, offering practical benefits especially in underserved regions lacking expert access. The GDPval benchmark likely will be relevant only for a few years due to rapid AI advances, with superintelligence anticipated by 2030. Future benchmarks will be needed to track AI’s growing superiority and economic impact. **Amazon Dark Design Lawsuit Settled** Amazon settled a Federal Trade Commission lawsuit alleging use of dark design patterns to complicate unsubscribing, agreeing to pay $2. 5 billion and improve its unsubscribe interface usability. Jakob had rated Amazon’s practices moderately severe, awarding 6 out of 10 “skulls” for dark design; dividing the settlement, that implies $417 million per “skull. ” While not the worst offender in dark pattern abuses, Amazon’s settlement acknowledges responsibility and will hopefully lead to fairer UX in subscription flows. Jakob previously created a related song and video on dark patterns highlighting the issue creatively. --- **About the Author** Jakob Nielsen, Ph. D. , is a renowned UX pioneer with 42 years of experience, founder of UX Tigers, and originator of key usability heuristics and Jakob’s Law. Recognized globally as “the king of usability, ” he has contributed extensively through books, patents, and research, including the best-selling *Designing Web Usability* and foundational *Usability Engineering*. With numerous accolades and a lasting influence on human-computer interaction, Jakob continues to shape the UX field. - Subscribe to Jakob’s newsletter for new articles - Follow Jakob on LinkedIn - Read a career overview of Jakob Nielsen in UX