CMSWire: User Experience Design Tips ... For the Agentic CX World
This article was written by Greg Kihlström for CMSWire. Read the full article here.
Since User Experience (UX) has been a discipline, the "user" has been synonymous with a human being for obvious reasons: humans were the consumers of software tools, websites, mobile apps and all the other experiences that fall under this umbrella. Designers optimize interfaces for eyeballs, thumbs and dopamine receptors, crafting interfaces that guide human behavior through visual hierarchy and emotional resonance.
While this design for humans won’t go away anytime too soon, a new type of UX is becoming increasingly necessary: Agent Experience, or AX. This means that direct human user engagement is evolving (in some cases at least) toward delegation, giving rise to a host of “machine customers” that act as proxies for their human counterparts.
As users begin to assign complex tasks—booking flights, researching software, ordering groceries—to autonomous AI agents, product teams face a new imperative: they must transition from designing solely for Human Experience (HX) to designing for Agent Experience (AX). As AI agents increasingly become the primary interface for digital transactions, companies that fail to make their digital estate "agent-ready"—prioritizing structured data and logic over visual aesthetics—risk becoming invisible in the new economy.
Who (or What) Are We Designing for?
Creating experiences for a different audience means that what might traditionally be considered good design needs reconsidering.
Traditional UX relies on a concept called affordance, which factors in visual clues like shadows on a button or the placement of a menu, that signal functionality to a human user. Since an AI agent interacts with an interface via code, DOM elements and APIs any aesthetic cues are not only lost on them, but some visually pleasing design elements including animations and videos can actually provide unnecessary barriers for a bot.
We are also at the very beginning of a point where websites are still very much built for informational purposes, and those that support transactions are generally used after at least some search and discovery. Yet, with more humans researching with the help of AI assistants and chat interfaces, this shifts the dynamics. More and more, a brand’s website grows more focused on the end transaction, while external sources provide information, research opportunities and guidance.
This article was written by Greg Kihlström for CMSWire. Read the full article here.