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Linear’s CEO recently confirmed that for the first time ever, issues created through MCP officially surpassed application created ones, arguing that Linear is now a product that serves both agents and human users.
Their Chief Product Officer, Jori Lallo, put it pretty bluntly, saying that MCP usage is “through the roof”:
As agents and MCP usage continues to increase, this poses an interesting strategic question for product teams and product designers especially: if the users of your product are a hybrid of humans and agents, what does this mean for your product’s strategy and how do you approach design-led development in the future?
Linear isn’t alone in this, either, with plenty of companies shifting their strategies towards supporting a growing volume of agents.
Shopify’s Hydrogen framework is now built “agent-first”, Square now supports sales bought through Google Maps agents and HubSpot became one of the latest products to build a CLI (command line interface) designed specifically for agents.
Netlify now even offers a toggle on their homepage to flip between the human and agent experience:
The Six Emerging UX and Design Themes for product teams
Headless, agent-first design is just one of many ways traditional design thinking is being disrupted right now and in this Deep Dive, we’re going to take a closer look at this along with other UX and design trends worth knowing about.
We’ll explore what the new emerging and potentially disruptive themes are in UX / product design, together with some areas of contention where different companies and leaders have different perspectives, all grounded in real world examples from companies including Linear, Square, HubSpot, Netlify, Webflow, Figma, Miro, Runway and more.
1. Headless-first: designing for agents as users with MCP
MCP is now a firmly established protocol for companies who want to enable usage by AI agents.
Leading product-led companies like Figma, Miro, Runway, Perplexity, Docusign, Square, PayPal, WorkOS, and Lovable have all released MCP servers in recent months and some companies are now shipping version 2.0 of their MCP products. Webflow, for example, recently shipped MCP 2.0 which gives users’ agents full access to their design systems, CMS and permissions systems.
For designers who work in companies with MCP connectors, this means user experience is now extended to both agents and humans. To reflect this shift, some companies have even started to publish documentation that is specifically dedicated to serving the “agent experience”.
The traditional interface is becoming optional
In practice, this means that product teams (including designers, PMs and developers) must now work together to audit and re-think their existing user journeys to figure out which ones are suitable candidates for MCP connectors that are specifically designed for agents.