In early 2025, the buzzword dominating in corporate circles is agentic artificial intelligence (AI). Many organizations are now creating new departments and special initiatives; and any article that talks about AI regularly includes the term. But what exactly is agentic AI, and how do we, as UX designers, approach it?

Agentic AI represents a significant evolution from traditional AI models. Instead of merely automating individual tasks, agentic AI systems can operate semi-independently, executing a multitude of tasks that require decision-making, analysis, and adaptation. This shift allows businesses to assign AI agents to collections of functions and even to cover entire roles with minimal human intervention.

But the transformation goes beyond automation. It signals a fundamental shift in computing itself. We are progressing from a world of fixed, app-based user experiences to a dynamic, learning-driven ecosystem in which AI agents proactively assist and respond to users and evolve over time. Read More

When thinking about service design, we might envision seamless customer experiences, digital products for consumers, or frictionless interactions. But what if the customer isn’t a consumer but a refugee seeking asylum, a scientist trying to communicate his research, or a volunteer struggling to find a meaningful role within a nonprofit. In the corporate world, service design can be a huge competitive advantage. In the nonprofit world, service design can be a force multiplier—yet organizations often overlook its value.

Magda Jagielska, a Customer Experience System Manager at Rockwell Automation, joins me for this column. We’ll take a rare detour outside the large, for-profit, enterprise environments that my columns typically cover. I believe that Magda’s insights can benefit any UX design professional, working within any context. Magda will describe her experiences applying service design within two nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) focusing on science communications. Her goals were to enhance customer engagement, reduce inefficiencies, and create lasting impact. Magda will take it from here. The rest of this column is in her words. Read More

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) dashboards play a crucial role in business management: transforming raw data into actionable insights. ERP dashboards let users monitor key metrics and efficiently make well-informed decisions. However, a poorly designed ERP dashboard can lead to confusion and hinder users’ productivity—thus undermining its primary objective.

In this article, we’ll look at the essentials of effective ERP dashboard design, highlighting strategies and best practices for ensuring an easy-to-use experience. Whether you’re designing dashboards for internal teams or customizing them for clients, the principles I’ll share can help you create dashboard designs that are both highly functional and visually appealing. Read More

Poor user adoption causes 70% of digital-transformation initiatives to fail. Despite their making heavy investments in enterprise software, many organizations struggle with user adoption because employees find their systems too complex or hard to learn and use.

Enterprise software must cater to diverse user needs while providing powerful functionality. Without a well-designed user experience, businesses risk low engagement, reduced productivity, and costly implementation failures. In this article, I’ll explore why UX design is the driving force behind successful enterprise-software adoption, covering some essential design principles, implementation strategies, and the measurable impacts of easy-to-use software on employees’ performance and business efficiency. Read More

In the digital world, social proof is a powerful and effective way of boosting sales and expanding a service’s user base. People naturally look to other users for cues on how to behave—especially in uncertain or unfamiliar situations. The financial industry—particularly creators of mobile-banking apps—has embraced this strategy to drive growth. Banking is highly sensitive to trust factors, so social proof plays a critical role in customers’ decision making by providing reassurance and validation for their choices.

Popular approaches to social proof include ratings, reviews, and customer testimonials. However, online-banking services do not universally apply these common techniques, and their effectiveness varies across cultures. In this column, I’ll explore how cultural differences influence users’ behaviors relating to social proof within the context of online-banking services. Plus, I’ll provide examples from both Western and Eastern perspectives to illustrate the role that social proofs play. Read More

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly woven into the fabric of our daily lives, from recommendation engines to large language models (LLMs) that assist with our professional tasks. However, there is a growing concern that our reliance on AI systems promotes cognitive offloading, diminishes critical thinking, and disrupts the development of human mastery. As users delegate reasoning to AI systems, bypassing traditional methods of developing expertise, they reduce their critical engagement with their tasks. All of these factors warrant a deeper exploration to understand the implications of AI on human cognition, creativity, and innovation.

Current research into the influence of AI across different age groups and contexts is beginning to expose the full impact of cognitive offloading. Gerlich’s 2025 study, “AI Tools in Society: Impacts on Cognitive Offloading and the Future of Critical Thinking,” [1] provides valuable insights into this phenomenon. Through a mixed-methods approach to research, involving 666 participants, Gerlich found that heavy AI use significantly reduced users’ critical-thinking skills, mainly because users offloaded cognitive tasks to AI tools rather than engaging deeply with problems themselves. Younger participants, in particular, exhibited a higher dependence on AI tools and lower critical-thinking scores, emphasizing the need for strategies to mitigate these cognitive costs. Read More

In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into user experiences is becoming increasingly prevalent. As UX professionals, we believe that understanding and leveraging human-centered AI (HCAI) is paramount in creating AI systems that are not only innovative but also ethical, inclusive, and put the human user first. Augmenting rather than replacing humans is a critical goal of HCAI. By focusing on ways in which humans can interact and collaborate with AI in an ethical manner, we can ensure that the intent of AI-driven technologies is to work for people rather than replacing them.

This article in our series on UX research (UXR) for GenAI delves into the principles of HCAI that are most applicable to UX research and provides practical insights on how to apply them when designing and researching AI experiences. Understanding and using these principles can help you to understand how to create ethical AI experiences that both are human centered and make AI work for humans. Read More

In the ever-changing field of UX design, Generative AI (GenAI), has proven to be a twin enemy. While it can guarantee efficiency, scale, accuracy, it can also quickly become so depersonalized that it threatens to steal the heart of design. As UX professionals, we need to grapple with an important question: How can we harness the potential for positive change that artificial intelligence (AI) promises without its compromising the human-centric approach of our profession?

After more than 24 years working at the crossroads of UX design, technology, and human nature, my focus is now on the intersection of AI tools and human creativity. From scaling design systems to creating enterprise workflows, I’ve worked at the nexus of bringing AI into UX design, without violating principles of inclusivity or usability.

In this article, I’ll describe some guidelines and provide examples of how UX designers can leverage AI—not as a competitor, but as an enabler—by delivering faster, more robust, and more inclusive design systems. Read More

Business success lies in a product’s gaining popularity among a vast user base, across locations and boundaries. Generative AI (GenAI) solutions have disrupted the commercial landscape by personalizing the user journey and breaking the monotony of standard technologies and redundant marketing strategies. GenAI can predict what people might need or prefer in the future, unleashing personalization at a large scale and enhancing our ability to meet customer expectations across different platforms.

By leveraging GenAI-driven personalization, marketers can create impactful content strategies and offer unique experiences that match distinct customer preferences. Let’s consider some examples of the use of GenAI that showcase how it can personalize the user journey and offer the user an immersive experience. Read More