There’s something quietly unsettling about a product that works without asking for your permission.
Things just happen.
Screens update.
Statuses change.
Tasks get completed — sometimes, before you even know they were pending.
It sounds like magic.
But magic without trust? That’s a problem.
We’re already here.
In our own product, we’ve started building agentic experiences — a swarm of specialized agents working behind the scenes to handle complex workflows.
The user doesn’t always press a button to trigger them.
The agents collaborate, pass tasks, resolve conflicts.
And the system updates on its own.
It’s fast. It’s powerful.
But it also raises a question:
How do you design for something that the user doesn’t always see?
UI has always been a trust-building layer.
When you interact with buttons, loaders, confirmation messages — they don’t just help you do things.
They help you believe that things are being done.
In agentic systems, those classic signals shrink.
There are fewer loading states.
Fewer confirmations.
Fewer chances to “feel” the system working.
But trust doesn’t go away. It just moves.
It hides in system feedback.
It shows up in transparency.
It’s baked into how we explain what’s happening, and what to expect.
Designing for trust looks different now.
In the future — and honestly, even now — designing trust will rely less on traditional UI and more on:
Predictable patterns: Do things happen the same way every time? Consistency builds confidence.
Proactive signals: Can the system tell the user what’s happening before they get confused?
Fail-safes and reversibility: Can users fix or undo things if the agents misfire?
Explainability: Can we make the system legible, not just efficient?
Agentic doesn’t mean invisible.
Just because something happens behind the scenes doesn’t mean the user shouldn’t know about it.
Design still needs to:
Shape the rhythm of updates
Craft thoughtful summaries
Offer the right level of detail when the user chooses to peek under the hood
The design layer may get thinner, but its responsibility gets heavier.
The next frontier
As we move toward autonomous, agentic systems — maybe even toward agent-to-agent experiences — design’s job will be less about the buttons we draw and more about the trust we design.
Sometimes, the best interface is no interface.
But trust? That always needs designing.