The UX of AI: Making AI-Powered Apps Your Users Don't Hate - Kathryn Grayson Nanz, Progress Software
Jul 18, 2026 · 35:59
Kathryn Grayson Nanz, Senior Design and Developer Advocate at Progress Software, argues that the success of AI-powered applications now depends on user experience rather than model performance. She identifies five pillars—trust, clarity, control, transparency, and meaningful benefit—and provides concrete patterns: citing sources to build trust, streaming text for clarity, allowing undo and version history for control, requesting granular permissions for transparency, and offering templates and next-step actions to ensure meaningful benefit. She emphasizes that developers must design these patterns themselves because AI can only remix existing interfaces, and that users need gradual introduction to AI features to avoid disengagement. The talk stresses that without addressing these UX challenges, users will abandon AI tools after a few failed attempts.
