When There Are No More Users
Design in the age of agents after the reign of UX
Dear Designer,
Even though I have designed, art directed, and built hundreds of websites over the course of my lifetime, I bristle at the thought that I am an information designer.
The concepts of usability, accessibility, information architecture, user interface, content strategy, and user pathways have defined the modus operandi of design. For twenty years, I, along with most designers have had to put “UX” somewhere in our job description. Dozens of students who I have had the honour of mentoring have told me that they want to be better at “UX.”
According to the International Organization for Standardization, this means they want to get better at human-system interaction; ISO 9241 defines user experience as a “user’s perceptions and responses that result from the use and/or anticipated use of a system, product or service.”
Am I user experience designer? Is my role and, by association, the mandate of design, to support information architecture and user pathway engagement? Is that what you, dear designer, want, too? To be a better information architect so that “users” can interface with machines better?
Before I go much further, let me qualify these questions. Starting in 1997, with the late coder and poet Michael Barrish, I have been thinking about and building highly usable and accessible websites for clients around the world. I’m an active proponent of creating an open and accessible web — a worldwide digital environment in which anyone and everyone can perceive and respond to the information presented to them. I currently work at a digital agency that specializes in and promotes accessible products based on various universal design principles. I celebrate the late Ronald Mace of North Carolina State University, who, along with numerous architects and engineers, crafted the 7 Principles of Universal Design, which include equitable use, flexibility in use, tolerance in error, etc. These have been invaluable over the course of my career.
We need digital information to be alive to everyone.
However, I also have long believed that design has been hijacked by the user experience community, by technologists and corporate shills, by the academy and by industry, in order to foster “human-computer” interaction — and, spoiler, my fear is humanity is the net loser here.
Today, we can choose from thousands of courses on user-centric design. Young design students are taught how core visual elements and systems are constructed to engineer user-friendly experiences. Designers are hired based on their understanding of user journeys, audience behaviour, user interactions and prompt responses. We talk about calls to action, personalized content, and reducing friction to increase conversions.
The Interaction Design Foundation states that a “UX designer is concerned with the entire process of acquiring and integrating a product, including aspects of branding, design, usability and function.” That pretty much describes what most of us designers do everyday.
For the past twenty years, User Experience has become the dominant model for our design work. But I contend that we have lionized UX at our peril.
In our hyper-competitive and hyper-kinetic marketplace, good UX is most often a form of capital extraction — from the consumer to the corporate office. We buy toothpaste online. We also buy houses, cars and investments through visual interfaces. We have become UX experts because of the hard work of UX researchers, technologists and managers — but also the demands of a marketplace hell bent on selling products and selling our data.
Even in the nonprofit space, where I am fortunate enough to spend most of my time, websites and digital tools are driven less by the traditional tasks of communications (building community, developing connection, making a case) and more by marketing and fundraising (increasing donations, creating conversion systems). These nonprofits need younger and younger donors to support their mission, which is an online affair.
There is nothing wrong with any of this — designers are captured by capitalism in the same way that all other professionals are. A UX designer’s job today represents decent and engaging work.
But. We are now at a stage in technological evolution in which the user (a hateful term to begin with) is also a computer. Agentic AI means that the computer is now the agent of the human user. Already, we are seeing how an ordinary user can ask an autonomous AI agent to book travel (Expedia is worried), buy groceries (Loblaws is accelerating), set up your day (Wirecutter got it), or otherwise code an app (me and Claude Code) — with the AI agent doing that work with speed and increasing precision.
As agentic AI is rolled out, what happens to the user?
Over time, the human user actually becomes the agent. And the computing agent, in turn, becomes the user. The roles reverse.
Humans become agents again — living and breathing operators of commands and requests, hopeful and desirous of outcomes to meet their unmet physical and emotional needs. Meanwhile, as a user, the computer willingly and willfully directs and redirects, supporting, questioning and even sometimes undermining the human agent.
So, how does this relate to UX design?
If we draw this out to its ultimate conclusion, we are talking a far less visual experience for us computing human beings. We will be, and are already, typing or talking. We use our keyboards or our microphones to request, cajole, demand or query. And the computer responds.
In this future, UX goes away. The graphical user interface (GUI) disappears. And, alas, so does the designer. We won’t need (as many) websites to manage our affairs — AI agents (or users) will take care of information retrieval, communications, commerce and content.
With a web that is less graphical, we will need fewer UX designers. Coding, too, will become more regimented and behind-the-scenes, a fiat of the user (or agent).
In many ways, I think there will be two future webs. The commercial one will be built by computer authors that serve the demands of consumers. It will be agentic, analytical and algorithmic in nature, controlling what we experience and what we buy, who we relate to, and how we connect. It will consist of a chat field like current AI interfaces and with much more direct oral inputs. Already, we are seeing this shift from written to spoken language, as Joe Wiesenthal points out.
The other web will be independent, social, authorable and authoritative, replete with original ideas built by individuals who are authorized in communities that are protected. It could be more like the untamed digital wilderness of the 2000s with its own GeoCities, anti-social social platforms, and it will be both darker and lighter in nature. I think we are already seeing this with the slow growth of Mastodon, Ghost, and the fediverse, an interconnected system of local networks that cooperate instead of compete.
Where does that leave us designers? Well, we don’t do UX so much. And maybe most of go back to being artists again but not in the joking, snarky way that the AI overlords suggest. We become designer-artists, in the grand footsteps of the earliest designers.
We would take “UX” off our LinkedIn profiles, delete our micro-credentials and create things again. Things that require all of the other skill sets that have been lost or deprecated over the past few decades: the emotional, psychic, spiritual and even mythical work that we were made for. We create digital products, tools, platforms that help us and others. But we also create objects that are analogue and atavistic.
We redefine our roles, dear designer, for a new era of autonomous user experience that we have largely nothing to do with.
As I wrote last April in Design and Mystery, we might also take design seriously again — not as a tool for enterprise or a system for conversion but as a form of aesthetic endeavour and a thoughtful vehicle for direct communications.
Yours,
Quote of the Week
“Staying good isn’t about staying young. It’s about staying porous — open to randomness, willing to learn, prepared to look foolish, and brave enough to try something that might not work.”
— Cat How (via TypeQuote)
I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below. And if you have the means and interest, consider supporting this odd endeavour with a paid subscription. It would mean so much to me. (Yes, I am planning on moving to Ghost soon and subscriptions will carry over there when I do.)
Considering how terrible we are at naming things ("user" being just one example), I wouldn’t be surprised to see AX (Agent Experience) emerge as a name soon.
I see it as a transitional phase, though, until agents themselves start taking control of that space too.
I don’t think we’re fully prepared, or even fully aware, of the implications all of this carries. For the UX field itself, but also for society at large.
Out of everything you describe, the only thing that gives me a slight sense of relief is knowing we’ll build (and already are building) that independent web. And the idea that being a designer-artist could actually become a real possibility.
This was an excellent read, thank you