John MaedaFor most of my career I designed the cockpit.
I made the menus and the tabs and the flows. I arranged the dashboards and the confirmation dialogs and the little blinking things that tell you something is happening. I was proud of this work. And the better I made it, the more considered the controls became, the more I quietly assumed that a human would always be the one flying the plane. That assumption is the thing I want to talk about. Because it is ending, and it ended from a direction I never thought to watch.
It came at me from the dark.
What I Learned From (Temporary) Blindness
Years ago, during a layover in Frankfurt, I wandered into a museum called DIALOGUE MUSEUM. The experience begins when the lights go out. Not dimmed. Out. You are led through total blackness by a guide who is blind, through simulated parks and streets and restaurants and one noisy little public square. Within seconds I was gripping the handrail. A moment later I was holding the hands of strangers, all of us shuffling forward like a single nervous animal. And our guide? She moved through it effortlessly. Confidently. Quickly. The instant the lights disappeared, the thing I had filed away as a disability became, right in front of me, an ability. I have carried that afternoon around for years and never quite known where to set it down.
Later I worked alongside a blind colleague who used his iPhone faster than anyone I have ever met. He ran VoiceOver at a speed where the speech was, to my ears, a single unbroken hiss. To him it was plain language. This was years before any of our machines could listen and talk the way they do now. And because he didn’t need any screen brightness, which is, after all, mostly for the rest of us, his battery lasted nearly three days on a charge. Three days! I was lucky to make it to dinner.
At the time I thought of both of these instances as examples of “accessibility.” I had a tidy folder in my mind for them. Now, I think the folder was mislabeled. What I had actually seen, twice, was an early glimpse of AX.
UX, user experience, was the cockpit I spent my life building. You learned how the software worked so that you could operate it. AX, agent experience, asks a different question entirely. Not “how do I work this thing?” but “what do I actually want, and can I just say so?” AX is about teleporting to the goal.
Years ago I wrote the foreword to Erika Hall’s lovely book Conversational Design (2018), and one of her ideas has never left me. Conversation is not some futuristic interface we are busy inventing. It is the oldest interface we have. No baby is born knowing how to use a dropdown menu. A baby is born knowing how to express intent. A cry, a reach, a look. As parents we need to know how to read the feedback that comes back. The breakthrough of chat, then, was not that our computers suddenly learned to talk. It was that intent finally moved to the foreground. We stopped struggling with operating a UI. We started telling it what we want instead.
The Two Gulfs: Execution and Evaluation
That small move changed where the user pain lives. The cognitive scientist Don Norman gave us two terms for the troubled relationship between a person and a machine. The first is the Gulf of Execution. Can I figure out how to do the thing? The second is the Gulf of Evaluation. Can I tell whether the thing got done?
For decades, design was almost entirely a war on the first gulf. It is why Norman is famous for doors: the door you shove when you were meant to pull, the one that shames you in front of other people. All our menus and tooltips and onboarding flows were, at heart, just better door handles. Designers became experts at designing the right kind of doorknobs for users. Also called “affordances.”
Now watch what agents do to that door. The Gulf of Execution collapses toward zero. You no longer need the handle, because you no longer work the door yourself. You say “I’m going outside,” and you are outside.
But the second gulf, the quiet one we underinvested in for forty years, swings wide open. Did the agent actually do what I meant? How do I inspect it? How do I steer it? How do I trust it? The work did not disappear. It moved. From doing to judging.
So the screen does not vanish in this new world, the way some people like to predict. It simply changes jobs. In UX the screen was where the work happened, the surface you pushed and dragged. In AX the screen becomes where judgment happens, the surface you read to decide whether to trust what just got done. The cockpit becomes a window.
And this is why chat, all by itself, is like working with one hand tied behind your back. Language is a magnificent hand. It lets you ask for nearly anything. But asking with no place to inspect the result, no canvas to compare and steer and verify against, is only half a craft. Chat plus a canvas gives you both hands free at last. One hand to say what you want. One hand to see whether you got it. One hand for each gulf. That two-handedness, that ambidexterity, is what I think AX is really about.
It’s Time To Think Differently
Which brings me back to the dark.
The people best prepared for this new world may not be the ones we would guess. They may not be the power users who mastered the old cockpit, the keyboard-shortcut wizards and the dashboard gurus. Research has long shown that many blind users process synthetic speech far faster than sighted listeners. Often at two to three times the pace of ordinary conversation, at rates the rest of us simply cannot follow. Years spent navigating computing through language, structure, sequence, and memory, rather than through visual layout, turn out to be exactly the muscles this moment asks for.
In that Frankfurt museum, the lights went out and expertise turned over in an instant. The ones who struggled were not the ones we are trained to imagine struggling. The ones who led were not the ones we are trained to imagine leading.
The age of agents, I suspect, will feel a little like that room. The lights we are used to designing by are going down. And some of the instincts we long treated as peripheral are walking, right now, to the center of the floor. They are offering us their hand.
—JM
Next: What is AX? Part 2 Where this all began, which is to remember the famous essay by Neil Stephenson, “In The Beginning Was The Command Line”
