Something I am learning about whilst working at Activate Intelligence is how to design and build AI with a person-led design ethos. This means that every agent we build must not be intended to demonstrate something complicated and clever. Our first design question is simple: does this help a real person finish a real task faster or better?
We won’t always get it right, but this is the bar we set.
A good example of this is our new email-based agent. As I’ve spoken about before, the idea of this is to seamlessly integrate into an existing workflow. How can someone access multiple agents for different tasks without having to get to lots of different interfaces? Rather than saying, hey we’ve designed all these different things for you — now you have to learn how to use them, we’ve worked on the basis of making life easier. We’re actually saying: you know all those different tasks that would take a lot less time using AI? Just send an email. Our agent will do the work for you, and it’ll land in your inbox in no time.
The essence of this is we will work this out for you. We being the team, the agent, the prompts, the LLMs. The ultimate end goal is to design something that is useful, impactful and pleasurable for the user. Or, perhaps more than that, to design something that at the end of the day feels a bit like magic.
In our email product I’m working on the response from the agent. I want to add a flourish that enhances the user experience. I guess the question is: how can something be useful and fun? At the moment, the prompt replies with how it constructed the response — picking out an interesting detail that gives the user a glimpse into the “thinking” behind the answer.
For example, in a recent translation task, it added a note:
“I chose ‘sostenibilità’ instead of the more literal ‘durabilità’ here, because the surrounding context was about environmental goals, not product lifespan.”
Or in a rewrite, it might say:
“I kept the tone informal as you’ve preferred in previous emails, and added a summary sentence at the top like you requested last time.”
Why include this? Because transparency builds trust. And yes, it can be fun, too. It’s a small touch, but it reflects the ethos behind everything we’re building: focus on the person, not the tech. What do they need? What helps them feel seen? How can we add clarity, delight, or confidence?
Our design ethos is about how people interact with products, and what they need and want to get out of it. Whether or not we are achieving this yet, it feels like a worthwhile challenge to set ourselves — one that can benefit both us and anyone we meet along the way.
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