Designing better agents
A customer-first guide to agentic UX, and how to build AI agents that earn trust, drive adoption, and deliver lasting value.
Getting an AI feature to work in a demo is easy. Getting people to trust it enough to change how they work is not. Most agentic products currently sit in that gap, and it’s a design problem more than a model problem. Assistants answer questions. Agents act on them. They reason toward goals, use tools, coordinate steps, and return outcomes. That shift changes how we design the software around AI at the level of first principles.
This paper draws on Mantel’s work building AI-powered products since 2017, across retail, financial services, and B2B SaaS. The focus throughout is the user: what they need, how trust gets built, and what it takes for an agent to become something people depend on.
Key takeaways: what you’ll learn
This guide helps product and technology leaders understand where agentic products lose users, and what it takes to design agents people trust enough to change how they work.
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Why capable AI and useful AI are not the same thing
How the gap between a working demo and real adoption is a design problem rather than a model problem. -
What makes an interface genuinely agentic
The components of a well-designed agentic solution, and why how they connect matters more than each part on its own. -
How to design across three modes of agentic experience
Why reactive, contextual, and proactive interactions need to work as one continuous journey rather than three separate features. -
Why most agentic products disappoint
The failure patterns behind stalled adoption, from the add-on trap and the blank canvas problem to the “God agent” anti-pattern. -
What good looks like, and how to build it
Six design guidelines with examples from products already in market, plus four build fundamentals that determine whether a well-designed agent actually ships.
Build agents that your customers trust. Download the full guide now
Access the frameworks behind Mantel’s agentic UX practice to move from products that demo well to agents people trust enough to change how they work.
