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Writer's pictureJakob Nielsen
2 days ago5 min read

Top 10 UX Videos of 2024

Summary: Jakob Nielsen’s top videos from 2024 include both old-school live humans in front of cameras and AI-generated videos. AI video progressed immensely during the year, and some videos were made in multiple versions throughout the year to take advantage of new capabilities and improved image quality.

 2024 was truly the year of AI video creation: progress was immense from the primitive videos we could create in the beginning of the year to the quite decent videos that became possible toward the end of 2024. We’re still not at the level of, say K-pop music videos or full-length Hollywood feature films. But creative advertising agencies are already producing credible commercials that hold their place against much of the advertising video pumped out by traditional agencies — and often at 10% of the production costs.


Most of my top videos from 2024 were made with rapidly-improving AI video tools, though some were shot the old-school way with live human talent in front of a camera. (Leonardo)


I’m not at the level of these cutting-edge agencies, but I think you’ll agree that my videos have experienced a big jump up in quality during 2024. Compare some of my earliest AI-generated videos with some of my most recent ones:



The image quality and video resolution are much higher, the animation is immensely better, the singers are now decently lip-synched, and the music is even a little better. (Though the progress in music generation has not been as significant as the progress in video generation.)


Here are my top 10 videos from 2024 in 5 different genres:


Keynote Presentations

UX: The Past, Present and Future (59 minutes, including Q&A)

Keynote presented at the Y Oslo conference in Oslo, Norway, October 2024.


10 UX Insights Explained (65 minutes, including Q&A)

Keynote presented to ADPList, July 2024.


I also had several popular short-clip videos based on my presentations at various events. The top ones were:



Podcast Conversations (With Live Humans)


This was my most-watched video of 2024 because Ansh Mehra has such a huge audience for his podcast. The podcast is also available with our conversation dubbed into French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish by AI-generated voices. I love this ability for AI to create content in other languages, for wider worldwide outreach.


Embracing Change in UX, Insights Unlocked with UserTesting.com CEO Andy MacMillan (34 minutes)


Podcasts (AI-Generated)


This podcast was made with Google’s NotebookLM, which was the surprise AI hit of 2024. The conversation between the two hosts is remarkably realistic. Unfortunately, NotebookLM only generated audio podcasts in 2024, so to make a video, I had to set it to some AI images generated by Midjourney.


Design Leaders Should Go "Founder Mode" (8 minutes, December 2024)


I made this podcast with ElevenLabs’ GenFM model, which was clearly inspired by NotebookLM. Since ElevenLabs is a leading voice-generation tool, it’s not surprising that they also only generate the soundtrack. This time, I added a more compelling video side, making lip-synched hosts with HeyGen and more engaging B-roll with Kling 1.5.


I made this second podcast three months after the AI Metaphors podcast, and it clearly benefited from the advances in AI video during that period. But Google’s head start in generating natural conversations held up!


Avatar Explainers


Interestingly, this avatar video has been watched 3 times as much as my original keynote presentation video. I made it with the D-ID AI avatar tool, based on an image made with Midjourney and enhanced by B-roll made with Kling 1.5



Service as Software (4 minutes — published on Instagram)


I made this avatar video with Hedra, experimenting with yet another avatar service. I mostly prefer HeyGen which produces higher video quality and more accurate lip synchronization. However, Hedra has an interesting feature: the ability to reskin the avatar, or “stylize” it as they say. Here, I changed the avatar from photorealistic to a crayon drawing. Which version do you prefer? Let me know in the comments. I’m especially interested whether you think that the drawing alleviates the “uncanny valley” effect present in the limited animation of the photoreal avatar.


In a “real” educational avatar video (i.e., one made for the purpose of teaching a course instead of my purpose of experimenting with AI), I doubt one would change the presenter’s looks multiple times during a video. You would pick the best look and use that throughout.


Music Videos


I made the music for this video with Suno version 4 and the animations with Kling 1.5 This version of my song was published in December 2024 and was a major improvement over the earlier version from June 2024 with music by Suno 3.5 and animation by Luma Dream Machines. (Both animations were made as image-to-video, using a base still image made with Ideogram and upscaled with Leonardo.)


Dark Design (2 minutes)


For this music video, published July 2024, I made the music with Udio 1.5 and the animation with Runway Gen-3 Alpha. It was a substantial step up, compared with the first version of the song I released in April 2024, made with Udio 1.0 and animations from Leonardo. (And I could make it even better today!


Bonus Video: Jakob Nielsen Career Overview

It turns out that my second-most watched video was Jakob Nielsen 41 Years in UX: Career Overview (8 minutes). This is the video I made as an acceptance speech when the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society presented me with the “Titan of Human Factors” award.


However, I didn’t want to include it in my official top-10 list for two reasons:


  • First, I think it would be too self-centered of me to declare a video about my career progress to be a “top video.”

  • Second, the view count for this video has probably been increased by the fact that I link to it from my biography. (Which is a highly appropriate link, since the video is indeed about me.)

 

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