Product Designer

Working with agents

Agents can help produce interface drafts and variations. Designers still need to understand the user’s task and check whether the result is clear, usable and accessible.

Provide useful examples, states and constraints, then review what gets built. Use feedback to improve both the interface and the guidance used to generate it.

If a product also serves agents that navigate or act on its interfaces, Agent Experience (AX) covers that additional interaction. Test the tasks each kind of user needs to complete.

Experience to discuss

Use portfolio examples to discuss research, interaction design, visual craft and testing. Ask what changed after feedback and how the person worked with engineering and product. Where agents help produce interfaces, discuss how they would guide and review that work.

Responsibilities and skills

Purpose

Help the team design and build interfaces that people can understand and use, with clear guidance for agent-generated work.

Responsibilities to discuss

• Maintain design-system components, values and examples that people and agents can use
• Review generated interfaces for usability, visual consistency, tone and interaction behavior
• Provide reusable design values and component specifications alongside visual examples
• Design individual interactions and improve the shared guidance they depend on
• Address Agent Experience (AX): flows that work for human users and for agent actors operating on the same product surfaces
• Run design audits at scale—sampling and reviewing agent-generated UI across features to catch consistency and quality drift early
• Include accessibility requirements in design specifications and verify them in the interface
• Partner with the QA Engineer on design-system compliance checks in CI so violations surface before release

Skills for this work

These role-specific skills complement the five shared competencies. Choose examples relevant to the work and support people as they practice.

• Design system architecture — Maintain reusable components, design values, states and examples at the detail implementation needs.
• Design governance — Set clear review standards, check generated work and use findings to improve the design system.
• Machine-readable specification — Expressing design intent in structured forms (token JSON, component APIs, interaction specs) agents can execute against.
• UX judgment at volume — Review generated interfaces for task flow, timing, spacing, visual hierarchy and tone.
• Accessibility engineering — Design for accessibility and combine automated checks with keyboard, assistive-technology and user testing where needed.
• Cross-functional collaboration — Agree requirements and constraints with engineering and product, using examples to resolve ambiguity.

Signals that need more context

Use work examples alongside these signals; none is a complete measure of someone’s ability.

• Pixel-perfect production speed as the main proxy for ability
• Portfolios judged primarily on screen count
• Design-tool fluency without examples of the decisions behind the work
• Expectation that one designer personally produces every screen in a feature
• Visual trends without evidence of usability, consistency or user needs

Questions to discuss

Adapt these example questions to the role and the person’s opportunities to do the work.

• Design system evaluation — "Here is a design system. An agent produced these five screens. Which pass our quality bar, which fail, and why?"
• Specification challenge — "Take this pattern and write the spec an agent needs to reproduce it—tokens, spacing, interaction behavior, accessibility."
• Governance scenario — "Your team generates ~80% of UI via agents. How do you keep quality high without reviewing every component?"
• AX design — "Design a flow that serves a human user and an agent that must complete the same task programmatically."
• Quality audit — "Review these ten agent-generated components. Where is the system degrading subtly?"

An example day

Illustrative scenario. Use this example to discuss how the responsibilities fit together.

Several generated screens use different spacing for the same button. You find an ambiguous design value, correct it and review the affected interfaces with engineering.

For a new interaction, you document loading, error and success states, along with focus order and copy. You test the resulting flow and update the example where people misunderstand the next step.

Related HELM guidance

The Product Designer responsibilities connect to Layer 2: Quality and the Verify phase. Check design-system use, accessibility and the experience of completing the task.

Use the Decision Rights Matrix to agree who approves design-system changes and quality standards.