Simplicity and Agentic Experience (AX)
We find ourselves these days at a fascinating intersection where simplicity and agency are converging. As I’ve explored in my previous work on the Laws of Simplicity, the quest for simplicity is never straightforward — it requires thoughtful reduction, organization, and an appreciation for both the emotional and contextual dimensions of design.
Traditional interfaces have often functioned as obstacle courses, requiring users to navigate complex pathways to achieve their goals. With each click, scroll, and menu selection, we’ve created elaborate labyrinths and obstacle courses that users must traverse. But as I’ve often emphasized, the simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction — removing the unnecessary to emphasize what truly matters. How do you do that? I wasn’t entirely sure until LLMs started emerging on the scene.
Agentic experiences represent the ultimate expression of this principle. Rather than forcing users to learn and master complex interfaces, agents allow a userto directly express their intent and have the system handle the complexity behind the scenes. This shift from user experience (UX) to agent experience (AX) embodies the essence of my tenth law: “Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful.”
The relationship between simplicity and complexity has always been symbiotic. As I noted in my fifth law, “Simplicity and complexity need each other.” Agents demonstrate this principle perfectly — they present a simple interface while managing a great deal of complexities underneath. The user needn’t understand the intricate operations; they need only trust that their intent will be fulfilled. The agent thrives on complexity in ways that we humans really … cannot.
Trust, as outlined in my eighth law, becomes central to this relationship.
In simplicity we trust.
When we interact with agents, we place our faith in their ability to understand and execute our intentions. This trust allows us to lean back and relax, knowing that the complexity is being managed on our behalf. That creates risk. How do we mitigate it? It’s the big question of the AX revolution—which if it goes unanswered, progress in AX is certain to be delayed.
What makes these agentic experiences so powerful is that they don’t merely hide complexity — they transform our relationship with it. They allow us to focus on what matters most: the outcome we seek rather than the process of achieving it. They let you teleport to the goal, instead of navigating an obstacle course.
The evolution toward agentic experiences doesn’t eliminate the need for thoughtful design — it transforms it. Designers become orchestrators of experiences rather than crafters of interfaces. They must consider how agents understand intention, how they communicate their actions, and how they build trust with users. They need to get more comfortable with knowing how to articulate the job to be done.
In this new landscape, simplicity can still remain a north star, but the path to achieving it has changed. The challenge now is to create agents that understand us deeply enough that the technology itself seems to disappear, leaving only the effortless accomplishment of our goals. A large part of that will require advances in agentic memory architectures—so keep on the look out for so-called “long term agent” to get a lot better in the near future. —JM
