World's Fair 2025
UX Design Principles for Semi Autonomous Multi Agent Systems — Victor Dibia, Microsoft
Overview
This talk explores the design principles for creating effective user experiences in semi-autonomous multi-agent systems. It emphasizes that while multi-agent systems offer powerful capabilities, their complexity requires careful consideration of user interaction, observability, and control. The presentation highlights a practical approach to building such systems, starting with defining the goal and tools before agent development, and advocates for an evaluation-driven design process.
Who should watch
- AI engineers and builders working with multi-agent systems.
- Product Managers and designers seeking to understand UX for autonomous systems.
- Developers interested in building complex AI workflows and tools.
- Those exploring agentic approaches for tasks requiring planning, diverse perspectives, extensive context processing, or adaptive solutions.
Key takeaways
- A multi-agent approach is not always necessary; carefully assess if the problem space truly benefits from multiple collaborating agents, as it can increase the surface for errors.
- When building multi-agent systems, prioritize defining the goal, establishing a baseline, developing necessary tools, and creating an evaluation testbed before focusing on agent creation.
- The development process for complex agentic systems should be evaluation-driven, starting with simple loops and iteratively adding components like verification and planning agents based on measured improvements.
- Key design principles for semi-autonomous multi-agent systems include:
- * Capability discovery: Clearly itemize what the agent can reliably do.
- * Proactive suggestions: Offer relevant actions based on user context.
- * Observability and provenance: Stream activity logs and provide debugging tools.
- * Interruptibility: Allow users to pause, checkpoint, and resume agent processes.
Notable quotes
Victor Dibia states, *the space is just too early for that* when discussing exact design principles for multi-agent assistants.
*Academic benchmarks are great, but they're not your task.* This emphasizes the need for task-specific evaluations.
Unofficial community note. Prefer the recording for nuance.