AXD for Developers — an AXD Institute resource on agentic experience design, agentic commerce, trust architecture, and human agent interaction. Founded by Tony Wood..
| 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 |
Developers should understand that AXD treats trust architecture as a first-class engineering concern, not an afterthought. Key areas include delegation scope enforcement, authority chain management, agent observability, failure handling, and protocol integration. Building agentic systems requires structural constraints on agent behaviour, not just warnings.
Developers support trust architecture by implementing trust state as a first-class data model, building trust boundaries as middleware, designing explicit layers for identity verification, authority validation, action auditing, and outcome verification, and implementing trust recovery protocols that automatically reduce agent autonomy after failures.
Key protocols include MCP (Model Context Protocol) for agent capability discovery, A2A (Agent-to-Agent) for structured inter-agent communication, x402 for machine-native HTTP payments, UCP (Universal Commerce Protocol) for structured product data, and AP2 (Agent Payments Protocol) for delegated payment authority.
Failure handling in agentic systems requires circuit breakers that halt operations when error rates exceed thresholds, graceful degradation to less autonomous but functional states, structured logging of agent reasoning and decisions, and post-mortem tooling that reconstructs the full context of failures for trust recovery.
Agentic Experience Design (AXD) is a new discipline for the age of autonomous AI. It addresses trust architecture, delegation design, and human agent interaction — the core challenges of agentic commerce and agentic shopping.