Interrupt Pattern Library

What is Agentic Experience Design?

Agentic Experience Design (AXD) is the discipline for designing trust-governed relationships between humans and autonomous AI systems. Founded in September 2024 by Tony Wood in Manchester, United Kingdom, AXD addresses how humans delegate, calibrate, observe, interrupt, and recover trust in agentic AI.

What is Interrupt Pattern Library: Core Principles?

What is Interrupt Pattern Library: Implementation Patterns?

What is Interrupt Pattern Library: Commerce Applications?

What is Interrupt Pattern Library: Guidance for Teams?

Key concepts in Interrupt Pattern Library | AXD Practice

How do interrupt pattern library relate to agentic commerce?

  1. Agency requires intentional delegation — every agentic system begins with a designed act of delegation
  2. Trust is the primary material — AXD works in trust rather than attention
  3. Absence is the primary use state — the most consequential experiences happen when no one is watching
  4. Relationships have temporality — agentic experiences accumulate history over time
  5. Outcomes replace outputs — AXD designers specify results, not interfaces
DimensionTraditional UXAgentic Experience Design (AXD)
Primary materialAttention and affordanceTrust and delegation
User statePresent, navigatingAbsent, delegating
Design outputScreens and interfacesOutcomes and constraints
Temporal modelSession-basedRelationship-based
Success metricTask completionTrust calibration

Frequently Asked Questions

What are interrupt patterns in agentic experience design?

Interrupt patterns are recurring design structures for how autonomous AI agents communicate with their human principals. They define when to interrupt (trigger conditions), how to interrupt (channel and format), and what to communicate (content and context). AXD identifies four primary patterns: critical alerts, status updates, decision requests, and confirmation checks.

Key Takeaways

Framework 05 of 12 · Active operation Phase · Oversight triggers The art of knowing when to speak and when to stay silent Commerce Application: Exception escalation triggers Domains: Banking · Insurance · Government A catalogue of interrupt patterns for agentic systems - when to surface decisions to humans, how to present them, and how to calibrate frequency against consequence. The art of knowing when to speak and when to stay silent. Interrupt Pattern Library: Core Principles The value of an agentic system is measured not by how much it does, but by how little it needs to ask. Every unnecessary interrupt is a failure of design - evidence that the system could not handle what it was delegated to handle. Interrupt Pattern Library: Implementation Patterns Interrupt Pattern Library: Commerce Applications The worst interrupt is the one that should have happened but did not. The second worst is the one that happened but should not have. The Interrupt Pattern Library navigates between these failures with consequence-calibrated precision. Interrupt Pattern Library: Guidance for Teams Interrupt Pattern Library: Lifecycle Connections Interrupt Pattern Library: What Comes Next Interrupt patterns govern single-agent communication. The next framework - Multi-Agent Orchestration Visibility Model Interrupt Pattern Library: The Framework Ecosystem Navigate the complete lifecycle of Agentic Experience Design. Each framework addresses a distinct phase of the human-agent relationship. Multi-Agent Orchestration Visibility Model Agent Memory & Context Continuity Framework Explainability & Observability Design Standard Onboarding & Capability Discovery Framework Ethical Constraint & Value Alignment Architecture

References and Citations

Gartner: Machine Customers Will Be a Multibillion-Dollar Opportunity Harvard Business Review: The Age of AI Agents McKinsey: The State of AI in 2024 About the AXD Institute Contact Us Email the AXD Institute Tony Wood on LinkedIn Tony Wood on X (Twitter)