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 |
A metric is something you measure after the fact. A material is something you design with from the beginning. AXD treats trust as a material because it is the structural substance of every human-agent relationship - it must be architected into the system from the first design decision, not measured as an afterthought. You cannot retrofit trust into an agentic system any more than you can retrofit a foundation into a completed building.
In UX, trust is one principle among many - alongside usability, accessibility, and delight. In AXD, trust is the primary material that subsumes all other considerations. An agentic system that is usable but untrustworthy will never be delegated to. An agentic system that is trusted will be delegated to even when its interface is imperfect. Trust is not a principle in AXD - it is the foundation.
Trust can and must be designed. While trust ultimately accumulates through experience, the conditions for trust formation - predictability, agency, communication, and evolution - are designable properties of the system. AXD provides the frameworks for designing these conditions intentionally rather than leaving trust to emerge (or fail to emerge) by accident.
For three decades, digital design has worked in a single material: Agentic AI invalidates this assumption. When an autonomous agent acts on behalf of a human - negotiating a contract, managing a portfolio, purchasing goods - the human is In this condition, attention is irrelevant. The only material that holds the relationship together is This is why AXD exists as a parallel discipline to UX, not a specialisation within it. UX works in attention. AXD works in trust. The materials are different, and therefore the methods, the metrics, and the design patterns must be different too. If trust is a material, it has properties - just as steel has tensile strength and concrete has compressive resistance. Understanding these properties is the first task of the AXD designer. It is slow to build and fast to destroy. A hundred successful transactions build a certain level of trust; a single catastrophic failure can collapse it entirely. This asymmetry means that A human may trust an agent to book a restaurant but not to negotiate a mortgage. Trust is not a global property of the agent; it is specific to the domain, the consequence level, and the history of the relationship within that domain. AXD designers must design trust architectures that are domain-aware and consequence-sensitive. It accumulates over time through repeated interaction. The first delegation is qualitatively different from the hundredth. Trust has a history, a trajectory, and a momentum. Systems that treat every interaction as the first - resetting trust to zero - waste the most valuable asset in the relationship. When the human cannot observe what the agent did, why it did it, and what happened as a result, trust erodes even when the agent performs well. Opacity is the enemy of trust. Observability - the agent's capacity to make its actions legible - is a structural requirement, not a nice-to-have. Unlike some materials, trust can be repaired after failure - but only through designed recovery mechanisms. Spo