Frictionless user experience is the next wave of AI

Frictionless user experience is the next wave of AI.

Testing all these new AI tools is starting to feel like carrying around a wallet full of loyalty cards: one for coffee, one for groceries, one for gas… and none of them talk to each other.

From a user’s perspective, this fragmentation is exhausting. Even worse, after testing all these tools for a few months, you’re left with a pile of credits sitting in limbo. Too many to ignore, but not enough to actually finish a project. Frustrating and wasteful.

We need a universal AI wallet: one balance that is spendable anywhere. Whether it’s Claude for coding, ChatGPT for writing, Nano Banana for images, etc. It seems that companies like Stripe (hint, hint) already have the pieces to make this a reality.

This could be the next generation of micropayments. Maybe it’s a use case for crypto. Or maybe it’s something entirely new. Either way, the next wave of AI won’t be about raw intelligence. It’ll be about sanding off these kinds of rough edges to unlock mainstream adoption.

Everyone has a robot. So what?

“Everyone has a robot, so it’s not an advantage.”

Scott DeLong’s quote has been bouncing around in my head ever since I read it.

At first, it sounds almost dismissive—like AI is just table stakes now. But the more I sat with it, the more I realized: he’s right. Everyone has AI. Everyone has agents running in the background. Everyone will soon have their own fine-tuned personal LLM. So what?

The Real Advantage Isn’t the Robot

The tools aren’t the differentiator. What matters is how you use them. More importantly, how humanity shows up in the experience you’re building. How well you understand a user’s motivation, where their friction lives, and what it takes to satisfy their needs.

AI is making it easier than ever to duct-tape bad experiences together at record speed. You can patch, automate, or script your way around flaws. But zoom out, and what you often find is still a mess: rage-clicks, dead-ends, squinty eyes at the screen, and frustrated users.

Building a bad experience quickly still results in a bad experience.

The Danger of Complacency

AI tricks us into speed. Build fast, ship fast, fix fast. That’s great… until you realize all you’ve done is accelerate the pace of mediocrity.

Pixels, components, and color palettes are being commoditized. Design systems are now plug-and-play. Anyone can spin up something that looks “designed.” But that doesn’t mean anyone can craft an experience.

And that’s where the opportunity lies.

Experience as the Differentiator

The advantage isn’t having a robot. It’s having the discipline to zoom out and see the full end-to-end experience. To ask:

• Where is the user starting? Where are they trying to go?

• How easy (or hard) is the journey?

• What is their motivation and needs? How do they feel along the way?

These questions are harder to automate because they’re human at their core. They require empathy, systems thinking, and an obsession with outcomes, not outputs.

Better than a robot…

If everyone has a robot, here’s how you create an advantage:

1. Focus on the seams. Users don’t think in features; they think in journeys. Map the handoffs, the in-between moments, and the edges where most frustration builds.

2. Build for emotion, not just function. Tools can meet a need. Experiences earn trust and loyalty when they respect feelings along the way.

3. Use AI for scaffolding, not as the structure. Let AI speed up exploration, prototyping, or iteration. But the architecture—the experience itself—has to be intentional.

4. Zoom out regularly. Step back from the pixel or the sprint. Look at the entire arc of the user’s interaction with your product. Does it flow? Does it make sense? Does it feel cohesive?

5. Make humanity the advantage. The way you show up in design decisions, storytelling, and product craft—that’s the edge.

Closing thought:

We’re already at the point where AI won’t make a difference. Everyone will have it. The difference will be the people and teams disciplined enough to look beyond the duct tape, beyond the patchwork, and focus relentlessly on the end-to-end experience.

That’s where the real advantage lives.

Links for Week 4, 2018

Building New Organizational Models to Achieve True Digital Transformation
“People have been shown by Amazon, Google, and even Twitter, how easy things can be. So, they just expect things to work and to be relatively simple.”

Outline
A new (and beautiful) documentation tool. Looks promising.

The UX of AI
“If you aren’t aligned with a human need, you’re just going to build a very powerful system to address a very small—or perhaps nonexistent—problem.”

How to design An Innovation Culture
A webinar video of Alex Osterwalder (Strategyzer co-founder) and Dave Gray (XPLANE co-founder) talk about intentionally designing your corporate innovation culture.

Want To Build A Culture Of Innovation? Master The Design Critique
Successful design critiques is based on honesty and trust. It reminds me this tweet from John Maeda:

“Assume best intent. Ask: ‘What led you to think that?’” —from day 1 of @Automattic leadership training pic.twitter.com/mBitflHm9u

— John Maeda (@johnmaeda) January 24, 2018