Designing for Users Who Cant See
Apple spent their keynote telling developers to make apps more beautiful. They introduced new transparency effects and refined edges. You cannot opt out. If you update your code, your app adopts the new look.
But they also talked about App Intents. They showed how Siri can find and act on your content using plain language. They showed Xcode running coding agents from Google and OpenAI.
The message is clear. Make the screen pretty. But prepare for a user that cannot see the screen.
For years, the screen was the product. You designed buttons and tested layouts. Now, the front door is becoming an agent. Siri, Copilot, or Claude will read and act on your behalf. These agents do not care about your animations. They care if they can understand your functions.
I saw this at my own company. We are a payments firm. We built an MCP server so an agent can process a refund without a human opening a dashboard. In that moment, our dashboard was not the product. The machine-readable data was the product.
Do not just add an llms.txt file and think you are safe. While clean text helps agents read faster, it is not a magic SEO trick. Most major crawlers do not even use it for citations.
Instead, follow these three rules for the agent era:
Treat machine-readable data as a primary product. If a screen matters, create a clean text version for agents to consume. Do not make them guess by scraping your code.
Add a summary block to every page. Write two or three lines of plain English explaining what a page does. This helps humans skim and helps models decide if the content is useful.
Expose actions, not just words. Agents want verbs. They want to "refund," "book," or "show." Use App Intents or documented APIs to make your features actionable.
The teams that win will not have the prettiest apps. They will have the products that work with no human in the room.
The UI is not dead. It is just demoted. It is now just one interface among many.
If the agent is your new user, what does your product look like to something that cannot see?