Your next user isn’t human

Hey – it’s Fiona!

If we’ve not met before, I’m a UX/UI designer who’s been helping teams build digital products for over a decade. Lately, I’ve been obsessed with a question I can’t stop thinking about:

What happens to design when we’re creating for two audiences — humans and AI agents?

AI is no longer just a behind-the-scenes tool. It’s starting to use our products on behalf of humans — searching, booking, buying, recommending. That means our designs need to work for real people and be structured so AI can understand, interpret, and act on them.

For years, “the user” has always meant a person. Someone who scrolls, taps, gets distracted, hesitates, comes back later. A living, breathing, unpredictable human.

But now there’s a second kind of user creeping in.
One that doesn’t get emotional. One that can read your entire site in milliseconds. One that may decide whether a human ever sees your product at all.

I’m talking about AI agents.

I was working on a client project recently and we were talking about their future customers. High-value, time-poor professionals. People who will probably lean heavily on AI assistants to handle repetitive tasks.

And it hit me: if one of those assistants is responsible for researching and recommending products, it’s going to pull together a shortlist based entirely on what it can understand and verify.

If our product’s value wasn’t crystal clear to the agent, we’d never even make it onto that list. The human wouldn’t know we existed.

That’s when I realised: we’re not just designing for humans anymore. We’re designing for humans and their AI agents.

Humans and AI agents approach the web in totally different ways.

Humans notice design details. They care about the vibe, the flow, and whether it feels right. They’re drawn in by strong imagery, good storytelling, and little touches that build trust.

AI agents care about facts. They read your site’s structure, not just what’s on the surface. They scan for complete, accurate, machine-readable information they can instantly compare with other options.

If you only design for humans, you might have the most beautiful site in your industry, but if the agent can’t parse it, you’re invisible to half your audience.

Here’s where the shift really shows up:

Your homepage still matters to humans. It’s the hook, the headline, the imagery, the promise above the fold. But AI agents don’t “see” above the fold. They take in everything at once and rely heavily on structured signals like headings, meta descriptions, and schema markup.

Navigation is still important for humans — clear labels, predictable paths.
For agents, navigation menus are almost irrelevant. They use sitemaps, APIs, or structured markup to jump straight to the facts.

Copywriting becomes a two-layer job. For humans, it still needs to be persuasive and conversational. For agents, it needs to be precise and consistent, with no ambiguity.

Picture an AI agent visiting your site. It:

It skips over your hero video.
It ignores clever headlines with no clear information.
If your product images have no alt text, they might as well not exist.

You don’t need to re-engineer everything at once. Pick your homepage or your top-performing product page and look at it through both lenses.

If you stripped away all the visuals, would it still make sense? Could an agent quickly find and trust the facts it needs?

Then make one or two small changes:

These tweaks won’t hurt the human experience, but they’ll make you far more visible to AI agents.

This reminds me of the shift from desktop-first to mobile-first design. At first it was a headache. New patterns to learn, new priorities to balance. But once you got the hang of it, it opened up new creative possibilities.

The same thing will happen here. In a few years, designing for humans and agents will be second nature. But right now? Hardly anyone’s talking about it. Which means there’s a huge opportunity for designers who get ahead of the curve.

Take one page you’ve designed (anything from a landing page to a product detail page) and strip it back to just the HTML and text.

What’s left? Is it enough for an AI agent to make an informed decision? If not, you’ve just found your first improvement.

Next week in Beyond the Screen, I’ll walk you through exactly how AI agents “read” the web and the most common design mistakes I’m already seeing.

Until then, I’d love to hear your thoughts:
Do you think of AI agents as part of your user base yet?

Hit reply and tell me.

— Fiona