We Are Designing for Eyes, But Your New User Has None
Apple spent a recent keynote telling developers to make apps more beautiful.
They introduced new transparency sliders and refined edges. If you use the latest tools, your app adopts this new look automatically.
Then, Apple talked about App Intents.
They showed how Siri can find your content and act on it using plain language. They showed how coding agents from Google and OpenAI can work inside Xcode.
The message is clear.
Make the screen look good. But also, prepare for a user that cannot see the screen.
For years, the screen was the product. You designed buttons and tested animations. You fought for every pixel.
That is changing.
The new front door is an agent. Siri, Claude, or Copilot acts on behalf of your customer. These agents do not care about your hero animations. They care if they can understand your functions and execute them.
I saw this with my own payments company. We built an MCP server so an agent can process a refund without a human opening a dashboard.
In that moment, our beautiful dashboard was not the product. The machine-readable data was the product.
Some people think adding an llms.txt file makes you future-proof. Do not fall for that trap. It helps agents read your site faster by using markdown instead of heavy HTML. But it is not a magic SEO trick. Most major AI crawlers do not even use it for citations.
Instead, focus on these three things:
- Treat machine-readable data as a primary product. If a screen matters, create a clean text version for agents to read.
- Use summaries. Put two or three lines of plain text at the top of your pages. This helps humans skim and helps models decide if your content is useful.
- Expose actions. Agents want verbs. They want to "refund," "book," or "show." Use App Intents or APIs to make these actions clear.
The teams that win in this era will not have the prettiest apps. They will have the apps that work without a human in the room.
Ask yourself this: If an agent is your new user, what does your product look like to something that cannot see?
Optional learning community: https://t.me/GyaanSetuAi