Summary: AI is expanding UX beyond human users to agents acting on their behalf. Experience design names this broader field, which still centers on people’s goals.


I am not one for new terms. When NN/G changed its job titles from “user-experience specialist” to “experience specialist”, I was skeptical. The article we published to explain the change did not convince me either: yet another name for the same thing. I now think the new title was right, but for a reason we did not think of at the time. Our field is no longer only about people directly using digital products. It also includes agents that act on their behalf. UX is not disappearing. But AI is expanding the field in several directions at once.

UX Has Always Been More than UI

Don Norman helped popularize the term "user experience " in the 1990s because "usability" and "user interface" were too narrow. He wanted a name for everything a person experiences with a product, from the packaging to the support call. The term widened the object of design. Yet, the idea of a broader object of design did not really hit home until the 2010s, when modern smartphones rose to ubiquity, and people started using multiple channels to accomplish a goal. As a response, UX and design professionals began creating customer-journey maps and service blueprints to help them understand and track all the possible ways in which a user could interact with the organization while trying to achieve a goal. At that time, we began to understand that a good experience meant that all the touchpoints worked together coherently.

But throughout all these iterations of the work, one assumption stayed constant: that the human was the user — the one who interacts with the company directly, through one of many possible channels.



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