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Designing for people and their agents

The best products of the next decade will be designed for people and the agents that act for them: clearer, calmer and easier for everyone to use.

Principles for great product experiences

Helping humans and their machines

  1. 01

    Evidence over opinion

    Base decisions on what users actually did: the screen, the step and their own words. Behavior tells you more than how someone says they felt, and anyone on your team can check it.

  2. 02

    Clarity with purpose

    Give each screen one job, one primary action and one point of emphasis. Show the context people need, such as timestamps, steps and status, so they can decide and act.

  3. 03

    Calm and quick

    Help your customers get to what they need, when they need it. Keep the interface steady: motion only where it explains something, instant responses to the keyboard, and red only for real failures.

  4. 04

    Accessible to people and agents

    Label every control, support the keyboard and make state clear to screen readers. The same structure lets agents understand and use your product, so one piece of work serves both.

Branding

How customers reach your product is changing

Until recently, customers used software directly: they read the screen, clicked and typed. Now more of them hand the task to an agent that signs up, books and buys for them. The customer still has a goal, but they are no longer the one at the screen, and most teams cannot see how their agent gets on.

How AI changes user-centered design

What shifts for your team when people and agents use the same product.

  1. 01

    Design for intent, not devices

    Behind every agent is a person with a goal, a budget and a deadline. Design for what they are trying to do, whether they or their agent is at the screen.

  2. 02

    Accessibility benefits everyone

    Proper labels, focus order and semantic markup take extra work, and that work now pays twice. Agents read a page the way a screen reader does, so every accessible control is one they can find and use too.

  3. 03

    Design as code

    Design files and codebases can now read each other, so designs are no longer handed over once. They move into code, come back for review and go round again.

  4. 04

    Design for systems

    Agents building screens use what your design system names and guess the rest. Clear names, tokens and mapped components decide what they ship.

  5. 05

    Ideas are cheap

    Anyone can prototype an idea in an afternoon. The hard part is knowing whether the idea is any good, and that takes insight into what people and their agents actually do with the product. So test every change, not only the final one.

  6. 06

    People make decisions

    Agents can build any screen you describe. They cannot tell you which screens deserve to exist. Taste is the skill now: deciding what to make, what to cut and how the product should feel. When anyone can ship a screen, design is what sets your product apart.

Design is your best differentiator

It’s easier than ever to build a competitor, but design can set you apart.

  • Visual communication

    When features are easy to copy, how your product looks and explains itself is what customers remember. Clear, confident visual communication builds trust in seconds and makes your product recognizably yours.

  • Extended experiences

    Your product is more than its interface. The onboarding email, the notification, the receipt, the support reply and the summary an agent reports back are all part of what customers buy. Design every one of them.

  • The service layer

    Customers buy the whole service, not the screen: how you price, deliver, support and follow up. Design the business service behind the product, and it becomes the part a competitor cannot copy overnight.

Keep reading

For humans and their machines

User-centered design in a world with AI agents.

Test your product for agent users

How to find out where an agent gets stuck in your product.

Stunt Double Index

How agents experience real websites, measured and ranked.

Get started

Put your next design in front of an actor

Point an actor at a Figma prototype or a preview URL, and see every step it took.

Test a prototype