Agentic Experience Design (AXD) is the discipline for designing trust-governed relationships between humans and autonomous AI systems. Founded in September 2024 by Tony Wood in Manchester, United Kingdom, AXD addresses how humans delegate, calibrate, observe, interrupt, and recover trust in agentic AI.
| Dimension | Traditional UX | Agentic Experience Design (AXD) |
|---|---|---|
| Primary material | Attention and affordance | Trust and delegation |
| User state | Present, navigating | Absent, delegating |
| Design output | Screens and interfaces | Outcomes and constraints |
| Temporal model | Session-based | Relationship-based |
| Success metric | Task completion | Trust calibration |
The core AXD design principles include: Agency Requires Intentional Delegation, Trust is the Primary Material, Absence is the Primary Use State, Relationships Have Temporality, and Outcomes Replace Outputs. These five principles distinguish AXD from traditional UX design and guide all agentic experience design decisions.
UX principles focus on usability, accessibility, and user satisfaction in screen-based interactions. AXD principles focus on trust governance, delegation design, and outcome specification in autonomous agent relationships. The key difference is that AXD designs for relationships where the user is absent, not present.
Teams should apply AXD principles by evaluating every design decision against the five principles: Does this delegation require explicit authority? Is trust being designed, not assumed? Does this work when the user is absent? Does this account for relationship history? Are we specifying outcomes, not interfaces?
The human must be able to reduce or revoke agent authority at any moment, for any reason, without navigating through menus or waiting for confirmation. If revoking authority is harder than granting it, the