Kate Moran
VP of Research & Content, Nielsen Norman Group
- Episode
- 08
- Design Leader
- Kate Moran
- Role
- VP of Research & Content, Nielsen Norman Group
- Runtime
- 00:14:16
- Date Posted
- 3.13.25
- UX Design
- Artificial Intelligence
- Featured
Kate Moran is VP of Research and Content at Nielsen Norman Group, where she's about to hit ten years. She got there the long way, through technical writing, content management, and front-end development, shadowing UX people at IBM and picking up a master's degree along the way. The thesis she was convinced no one would ever read is what got her recruited: Jakob Nielsen found it and wanted to publish it.
That research-first instinct shapes how her team has handled AI since 2023. NNG has stayed deliberately slow to comment on emerging patterns without evidence behind them, and Kate is blunt about what they found when they started testing the tools flooding the market. A lot of the claims are false. Research can't be replaced by asking a chatbot whether your site is good, and Figma is not dead. What generative AI does do is speed up a hundred small things in a day, which is a real gain and a very different claim from replacing a researcher.
On the UX of AI itself, Kate points to studies from Pew and Anthropic suggesting most of the American workforce still isn't using these tools day to day, and argues conversational interfaces are far less intuitive than designers assume. An empty text box hands the user all the work of figuring out what it's for. Her fix is narrower scope: Spotify's AI playlist generator can't write you a sonnet, and that constraint is exactly why people understand it on sight. For designers entering the field now, her advice is to stay flexible and not panic, since the confident predictions being made about AI and design jobs are educated guesses. Newcomers may even have an edge, because they're learning this once instead of unlearning a decade of habits.
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