Agentic products are rewriting the rules of digital product design as we know it
We’ve been spending time focused on what user experience and interaction patterns the next era of AI-native digital products will be defined by. One thing’s for sure: agentic products are changing the rules of product design as we know it.
Unlike traditional digital interfaces that wait for instructions, agentic products learn from you, anticipating your needs and acting on your behalf, redesigning the relationship between people and technology. We’ve been building our own agentic product called Proxy, a context-aware system that serves as your personal AI by learning your preferences and managing your information to create real value. In doing so, we’ve developed a set of design principles that have helped us as guardrails to play within when making design decisions.
What are Agentic Products?
Beyond traditional apps and websites, agentic products are digital entities that act on your behalf, learning your preferences, anticipating your needs, and proactively solving problems. They’re not just responding to a user navigating to pages or completing tasks; they’re engaging in a dynamic, adaptive, and evolving relationship with the user. Importantly, agentic products are not products that replace much of the user experience with a chatbot to engage. They are holistic systems that understand your context, adapt, and act intelligently.
Creating these experiences demands a different approach to product design, one that puts trust, adaptability, and clear communication at the centre. The following design principles illustrate how we’ve approached this challenge through our work designing and building Proxy, a portfolio venture of ours that was a winner of the Financial Review’s Most Innovative Company Award 2025.
Design Principle 1 — Adapt to Context, Not Just Commands
Let the product do the adapting. Traditional digital tools are often rigid, requiring the user to adapt to the interface. But true agentic products flip this dynamic, defined by their ability to learn from context, anticipate change, and step in proactively, shifting the burden of adaptation from the user to the technology itself. They anticipate needs and deliver value before the user even has to ask. This generative, adaptive quality is what makes agentic products feel like true partners rather than just another layer of technology.
Design Principle 2 — Empower User Control
A defining trait of successful agentic systems is their respect for boundaries. Users need simple, flexible ways to adjust how much autonomy they delegate, and should always feel able to step in, take over, or redirect the agent as their needs or comfort levels change. Proxy allows users to scale autonomy up or down, ensuring that the agent remains a supportive presence, never an intrusive one. Building in these controls is critical to fostering a sense of partnership, putting people in charge of how they want to work with their digital collaborators.
Design Principle 3 — Trust-Gated Autonomy: Design for Gradual Autonomy
Allow your users to treat your agentic system like an intern. Initially, onboarding an intern requires significant investment — understanding their skills, assigning tasks, and providing guidance. However, as the intern grows and becomes more independent, they become an invaluable asset, capable of tackling complex challenges and driving innovation. Agentic products follow a similar trajectory, guided by a principle we’ve coined as ‘trust-gated-autonomy.’ Instead of granting full freedom immediately, the agent’s autonomy is ‘gated’ by the user’s trust, which the agent earns over time through reliable behaviour and transparency. As confidence and understanding develop, the agent gradually earns greater autonomy, eventually becoming a reliable collaborator you can delegate to with confidence. This gated approach helps users feel in control while allowing the agent to grow more valuable over time.
Design Principle 4 — Make Logic Transparent
It’s very difficult to get users to trust a black box. It’s not enough to focus solely on the user interface; you need to consider the entire communication flow between the user and the agent. The goal is to make interactions natural, intuitive, and transparent, almost like a conversation with an expert. For Proxy, we achieved this by prioritising transparency, users can see how the system is thinking, understand the context informing the generation, and intervene as needed. This open communication builds trust and ensures the agent is always aligned with the user’s intent.
An Agentic Future
We’re heading towards a world where agentic interfaces become our main gateway to information and services. Instead of jumping between websites and apps, we might well simply ask our agents to get things done for us. This shift will redefine not just product design but the way we experience the digital world, demanding a multidisciplinary approach, grounded in empathy, imagination, and courage.
At Josephmark, building Proxy has challenged us and led us to develop these principles as we put them into practice. We don’t see agentic products as technology for technology’s sake; for us, they’re about giving people genuine agency — letting users decide what to hand over, what to keep, and always making it clear where the boundaries lie. The goal isn’t for tech to take centre stage, but to quietly handle complexity in the background, freeing people to focus on what matters most. In the end, the most meaningful digital experiences aren’t loud about their presence; they’re the ones you can rely on, even when you barely notice them.
