AI promised to make everything easier, simpler, more powerful. So why do AI tools feel so complicated? Because we’re designing the AI experience all wrong.
From a UX and CX perspective, we need to embrace subtractive design.
What We Lose When We Keep Adding AI Features
Here’s the problem: AI features on apps and websites are typically additive. Companies love to keep rolling out the next new awesome, intelligent feature. But sometimes these features duplicate existing functionality. Or they’re added without consideration for how they affect the user experience.
This additive nature increases the cognitive load of the user: more features to learn how to use; more decisions to execute a task or figure out where to go; more uncertainty about whether a human or an AI chatbot should handle a task, and so on.
An already-complex experience gets even harder to navigate.
Subtractive Design: Why Less Is More in AI Experience
AI-driven experiences need a different design ethos: subtractive design, which entails using AI to help reduce complexity and the cognitive effort needed by users.
When we design the customer experience in ways that are subtractive, we take out superfluous functions that the AI can handle and provide users with the essence of what they need the tool to do.
Focusing on Jobs to Be Done, with a New Twist
At Tendo we start every experience design project by working to understand the jobs to be done: What does the user need to achieve and how do we get them there? The same is true for any content strategy project: Begin with understanding your audience and goals.
But in the AI era, we need to determine which of those jobs to be done should be handled by AI, and then subtract those jobs from the design.
Maybe the user initiates a task and AI completes it, or the AI does the pre-work, or guides the user. In many cases, if the AI can handle the basics, the experience is going to morph into one that is supervisory or directional for the user, rather than mechanical with complicated steps for the user to initiate.
Look at a banking app as an example. Today, to make a payment, the design needs to address multiple steps: selecting the account, choosing whom to pay, setting the amount and date, and helping the user understand where they are in that flow.
In a future AI, subtractive world, the AI should understand most of the mechanics and the user sets the direction: “Pay Bob on Friday.” The AI knows who Bob is, what you owe them, and which account to take the money from. So the typical payment interface, flow, and management screens are no longer needed. This substantially reduces the size of the banking app and changes its structure and flow.
Subtractive Design Shifts How We Approach Customer Experience
Ultimately, the real benefits of the AI age are not going to come from adding endless new “intelligent” features to every application, but from learning how to orchestrate AI tools and workflows. We’ll remove effort for the user and deliver outcomes without all the overhead.
We can get there with subtractive design, which is more than just a tweak to the design process. It’s a shift in how we think about elevating the customer experience.
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The UX designers at Tendo can help you solve your toughest customer and digital experience challenges. Learn more about our services and our audience-first approach, or get in touch to discuss a project.
