The 100 Most Common UX Design Methods, Ranked by Value

Jakob Nielsen ranked 100 design methods by value and put AI prototyping first, while warning that a working demo argues as hard for a bad idea as a good one.

Jakob Nielsen, a usability researcher who writes on his site UX Tigers, scored the 100 design methods that teams use most. A method's value is its breadth, the importance of the decisions it feeds and its power to persuade, minus twice its cost. AI prototyping, in which an AI model turns a written description into working software, came first.

• Cost counts double, so expensive methods have to earn their place. Design sprints, week-long team workshops, rank 76th, and Nielsen calls a sprint run as a quarterly ritual "a week that produces souvenirs".
• Cheap methods for deciding what to build fill most of the top ten, including problem statements in third place and jobs-to-be-done framing in fourth.
• Nielsen warns that a working demo looks finished while it leaves out error handling, edge cases, permissions and performance. He advises using AI prototypes to test a direction cheaply and then throwing the code away.
• User stories rank 25th, design review 39th and design critique 48th. He says a design review should judge work against the brief and the problem statement, not against taste.

A team that prototypes with AI can write down the problem and the expected benefit before the prototype exists, and judge the demo against them. Using the written problem as the test for a prototype is an inference and is not the author's claim.

Derived by Working Surface from the article. Source line: a working demo argues exactly as hard for a bad idea as for a good one.

19 September 2026: AI makes prototypes, apps and comparisons cheap, and their worth depends on what is settled first or can be checked.