Designing Beyond the Glass

I have spent the better part of my career designing products and building the teams that ship them. I have stayed pretty quiet on the writing front. For a long time, it felt like the work could just speak for itself. Ship it, iterate on it, move on to the next one. But lately, I have been feeling this constant nudge to say something. The world is changing so fast that just "doing the work" does not feel like enough anymore. I keep having the same conversations with designers I respect, and they all end up in this same uneasy place. Not panic. Something quieter. More like the feeling you get when you realize the room you are standing in has been slowly rearranging itself around you, and you are not sure when it started.

So this is me, trying to put some shape around what I have been thinking. I am not coming at this as someone who has it all mapped out. I am coming at this as a designer who keeps staring at the ceiling at night wondering if the thing I have been building my career around is about to become something very different.

If I am being honest, it is also a little bit intimidating to write this.

The Identity Crisis No One Is Talking About

Let me address the thing I think a lot of us are feeling but not saying out loud.

There is a real fear creeping in. We spent years, some of us a decade or more, mastering the "rules" of the screen. We learned how users think, how products should be structured, how to make complex things feel simple. We got good at the craft and then many of us grew into leading teams, shaping strategy, and earning a seat in rooms we were not originally invited to. We got really, really good at designing for a rectangle of glass that a person holds in their hand or sits in front of at a desk.

And now those screens are starting to fade into the background.

Not disappear. I want to be clear about that. But fade. The screen is becoming less of the main event and more of a status report. And that shift, even if it is gradual, is enough to make you question whether the skills you spent a decade building still matter.

I think they do. But not in the way they used to. And that "not in the way they used to" part is the thing that keeps me up.

Here is what I think is actually happening. Our "user" is splitting in two. And each half brings a completely different kind of design challenge. And a completely different kind of anxiety.

The Proxy: Designing for Something That Does Not See

The first new user is the AI agent. I have been thinking of it as "The Proxy." It is the one that actually does the work. It books the flight, sorts the data, compares the prices, fills out the forms. It acts on behalf of a human, but it is not human itself.

And this is where designers start to feel a little existential. Because the proxy does not care about your beautiful interface. At all. It does not see your color palette. It does not notice that perfectly balanced card layout you iterated on for a week. It does not feel the satisfying weight of that button animation. It does not care about the user flow you simplified or the product decisions you made along the way. It interacts with your product through data, through structure, through logic. APIs, content models, field names, response formats. That is its world.

The fear here, the one I keep hearing from other designers, is that this makes our work "boring." Or worse, irrelevant. If the thing using our product does not even look at the screen, what are we even doing?

But here is the thing I keep coming back to. If your product's underlying structure is messy, the agent fails. If your data is inconsistent, the agent gets confused. If your content model has ambiguous labels or contradictory logic, the agent makes bad decisions on behalf of the human who trusted it.

That is a design problem. It is just not a visual one.

We are already seeing frameworks that let agents build their own interfaces on the fly, generated from whatever data your product exposes. The agent does not use the UI you designed. It creates its own. And the quality of that generated experience depends entirely on how thoughtfully you structured what is underneath.

So yes, the proxy does not look at our screens. But it absolutely depends on our thinking. We are building the invisible layers that allow the technology to actually be useful to the person who deployed it. That is still design. It just lives in a different place now.

The Governor: The Fear of Letting Go

The second user is still a person. You and me. The one who sets the agent in motion and then has to live with whatever it does.

I have been calling this one "The Governor." And this is where the real empathy work lives.

Think about the first time you used a self-driving feature in a car. Or the first time you let an app automatically invest your money. There is always this moment, this visceral little clench, where you think: "Is this actually going to work, or is it going to ruin my day?"

That feeling does not go away just because the technology is good. It is a human feeling. And in a world of AI agents, it is going to be everywhere. Because the governor is no longer the person doing the task. They are the person supervising something else doing the task. They went from driver to passenger. And being a passenger requires a very specific kind of trust that you cannot fake.

This is where I think our craft becomes more important, not less. Our biggest job now is designing a feeling of safety. And that is harder than it sounds.

Here is what I have realized. The moment that builds trust is not when the agent gets something right. It is when something goes wrong and the system is honest about it.

Picture a small business owner who lets an agent manage her weekly supply orders. She wakes up Monday morning and sees: "I placed three orders last night. One was paused because the supplier's price jumped 18% and crossed the limit you set. Tap to review." That is trust being built. Not because the agent was perfect. Because it was transparent about a problem and asked for help.

Now imagine the alternative. The agent places all four orders silently. The price spike goes through. She finds out Thursday when the invoice looks wrong. Same agent. Same capability. Completely different experience. And the only difference between those two outcomes is a design decision someone made about when and how to communicate.

In traditional design, getting this wrong meant a user was frustrated. In agent-driven design, getting this wrong means a user loses money or trust or both. The stakes just changed.

Moving Beyond the Glass

So if the screen is fading into a status report, and the real product is increasingly invisible, what are we actually designing?

I have been wrestling with this question for months. And I think the answer is something like: we are designing the rules of a relationship.

Not a user flow. Not a layout. A relationship between a person and an autonomous system that acts on their behalf. The person needs to feel safe. The system needs clear boundaries. And someone needs to decide how those two things talk to each other. What the system is allowed to do on its own. What it needs to check first. How it explains itself when things go sideways. How much rope it gets as trust builds over time.

That is not engineering. That is experience design. It just does not look like what experience design has looked like before.

I want to be honest. This shift is uncomfortable. If you have spent your career understanding users and designing products around their needs, the idea of designing "logic chains" and "escalation rules" can feel like starting over. It feels like being a junior again. Like the expertise you earned does not transfer.

But I do not think that is true. I think the core of what makes a great designer, the ability to understand how something feels from another person's perspective, transfers directly. We have always been the people who ask "but what does this feel like for the person on the other end?" That question has not changed. What is on the other end has changed. And how "feeling" gets expressed has changed. But the muscle is the same.

What I Think This Asks of Us

I am not going to pretend I have a clean framework for all of this. I am still figuring it out in my own work. But here is what I keep coming back to.

We need to care about what is under the interface, not just what is on it. Data structures, content models, how information flows between systems. I am not saying we need to become engineers. But we need to have opinions about these things. Because the agent's entire experience of our product lives in that layer, and if we are not helping shape it, we are designing a storefront for a building with no plumbing.

We need to get comfortable designing behaviors instead of screens. "What should the agent do when the data looks contradictory?" That is a design question. "How aggressively should the agent act before checking in?" That is a design question. They look like product decisions or engineering specs, but they are really experience decisions wearing different clothes.

We need to treat language as a primary material, not an afterthought. The words an agent uses to explain itself, to surface a failure, to ask the user for a decision. That is not UX writing that gets done in the last sprint. That is the interface. In many cases, it is the only interface the person ever sees. And the quality of that language determines whether someone trusts the product or walks away from it.

And maybe most importantly, we need to learn to design for things we will never see. Invisible moments. Background actions. Decisions made at 3am while the user sleeps. There is no screen for these. No mockup. No prototype. But there is still an experience happening, and it still needs to be designed with intention and care.

It Is Okay to Be a Beginner Again

I want to end here because I think it is the thing that needs to be said the most.

It is okay to feel like you are starting over. It is okay if the vocabulary feels unfamiliar. It is okay if you read an article about "AI agent UX patterns" and thought "I have no idea what half of this means." That does not make you behind. It makes you honest.

Every previous era of design had a moment like this. When the web first arrived, print designers had to figure out what "designing for a browser" even meant. When mobile happened, web designers had to rethink everything they knew about screen real estate. Each time, the designers who thrived were not the ones who already had the answers. They were the ones who were willing to sit with the discomfort of not knowing, and work through it anyway.

This is our version of that moment. And I think the discomfort is actually a sign of something good. It means you care enough to pay attention. It means you are not sleepwalking through a transition that is going to reshape the entire industry.

We are not disappearing. We are expanding. The scope of what "designer" means is getting bigger, and that is scary because the edges are blurry and the job description has not caught up yet. But the core of what we do, understanding how experiences feel from the perspective of another person and shaping them to be clear, safe, and human, that has never been more needed.

We are moving beyond the glass. Away from screens as the main event, toward the invisible layers underneath. Away from designing clicks, toward designing trust. Away from "make it easy to use" and toward "make it safe to rely on."

I am still figuring out what this looks like in my daily work. I am still wrestling with these changes myself. But I think it is time we start talking about it openly, even if we do not have it all sorted yet.

This is my first post. It will not be my last. And if any of this resonated, or if you are sitting with the same questions, I would genuinely love to hear from you. Because I think we are all going to figure this out together, or not at all.