{"id":4079,"date":"2026-10-15T16:33:09","date_gmt":"2026-10-15T20:33:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vanshea.com\/blog\/?p=4079"},"modified":"2026-10-15T16:45:35","modified_gmt":"2026-10-15T20:45:35","slug":"human-agency-design-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vanshea.com\/blog\/human-agency-design-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Human-Centered Design, Second Phase: Centering Human Agency"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In July I wrote Human Agency Design<\/a>, a commitment to designing systems that increase human agency, and I ended it on the ground that technology should leave people more informed, more confident, and more capable than it found them.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

To make a bigger claim:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Human-centered design, the discipline so many of us built our careers inside, has entered a new phase, one where centering the human is no longer enough unless we are centering the human’s capacity to act and learn as enhanced individuals.<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

We spent decades of practice learning to put people at the center of the product, and now the product can think, decide, and act on its own, which means the question has shifted under our feet from “is this easy to use?” to “who is actually doing the choosing here, and are -we the people- coming out stronger or weaker for it?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What the first phase got right<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The first phase of human-centered design was a correction, and a necessary one. Systems had been built around the machine, the org chart, the database schema, and we pushed back with research, empathy, journey maps, and usability testing until the person on the other side of the screen finally had a seat at the table.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It worked. We crafted banking apps people could actually depend on, made taxi cab lines non-existent (almost) made services that once required a phone call and a fax machine feel almost effortless.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the measure of success we inherited was mostly about removing effort: fewer clicks, less friction, faster task completion, higher satisfaction scores. Ease became the proxy for care, and for a long time that proxy held, because the person was still the one doing the thinking and the system was just getting out of the way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why AI breaks the old frame<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

AI changes this deal. When a system can summarize the document, draft the reply, recommend the loan, rank the candidates, and take the next step on our behalf, removing friction stops being neutral, because the friction we remove is often the exact moment where a person use their logic and intuition to have understood, weighed, and decided.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A frictionless experience can now hollow out the person inside it, eating away at our attention, eroding our judgment, snatching the small decisions that build confidence, until we are satisfied users who can no longer explain how we got where we are or what we would do differently.<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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