Thoughtful design with AI

We’re developing Aleido Platform at unprecedented speed thanks to AI, delivering 10,000 lines of code a day. Giving an AI-agent a sketch of how to add a nice design to it sure is tempting, given the efficiency. No doubt it would look good on the surface. But would that be enough for a state-of-the-art user experience?

Never losing sight of the goal

We are living through an incredibly exciting, defining shift with agentic AI. It is so easy to get swept up in promises of exponential productivity, forget to pause and ask: What are we actually building, and why?

Aleido is developing an entirely new, relatively complex system, an information lifecycle solution. A fully integrated CCMS and CDP, with a core of agentic AI and a range of AI-supported capabilities. It is also designed to be fully modular. We call it Aleido Platform and it is built on many years of experience working with technical information. Thanks to AI, we’ve been able to speed up the development dramatically. But as it’s now possible to run faster than ever before, we need to make sure we set the right course.

Finally solving common needs

Most systems we have encountered suffer from the same fundamental issues: Either they fail to meet real user needs, or they are so complex that they become obstacles in themselves.

User studies usually show the same results, with recurring wishes to:

Get a clear overview of the entire process
Use content in more formats and from various systems
Shorten time to publish content
Have less repetitive manual work
Not having to context-switch between applications
Hide complexity and increase intuitiveness

Some argue that this is simply the price of functionality, that systems look the way they do for a reason, and that difficult complexity is unavoidable. Users get used to it.

We stubbornly believe otherwise, that it is possible to build something better. Something that genuinely saves time, delivers real impact, and feels intuitive while still being powerful. In short, a good user experience.

Stronger focus on a shared vision

We have an exceptionally strong team, spanning concept development, business development, product development, UX, design, front-end, and back-end. It is not often you get the opportunity to work with a team of this calibre. But individual excellence is not enough to succeed. Everything must align across every detail, every discipline, and every AI specification.

AI is changing the conditions. We will not be able to, or want to, work the way we used to. As development speed increases dramatically, a shared direction becomes more important than ever.

Defining our core values

That is why we chose to slow down. Despite the pressure to quickly showcase interfaces and functionality, which is easier than ever today, we made a deliberate decision to start from the foundation and allow it to take time: to define our core values.

From these, we developed a set of design principles for the user experience. Only once these were anchored across the entire team did we begin designing the system.

These principles span areas such as collaboration, automation and agentic AI, speed, flexibility, transparency, and integration. They also define how the system should feel in practice: how typography, colour, iconography, and motion are used, and how personalisation and agentic AI should behave.

Guided by our principles

In hindsight, this has proven crucial to our ability to succeed. Interaction design and building a design system are well known to be demanding, but by doing the foundational work thoroughly, we have saved significant time. Every idea, every prioritisation, and every compromise is tested against the same foundation. This also means we sometimes have to say no to features that appear powerful on the surface but break alignment. We rebuild what does not meet the bar, even when it costs time.

When AI agents are also trained to operate according to these design principles, the result is a production that is far more cohesive and consistent, delivered at remarkable speed.

Open for changing needs

At the same time, we do not assume that the direction is automatically final simply because it looks promising today. What appears right in practice still needs to be tested, challenged, and refined over time. We frequently run user tests so that we can adjust the principles gradually wherever needed.

Building trust

The user experience is critical for our customers to truly realise the value the system makes possible. Capability is irrelevant without trust. In the context of agentic AI, trust determines whether the technology becomes a tool or a barrier. A user who does not understand what the system is doing, or why, will not use it to its full potential.

That is why we place such emphasis on our design principles. By working consistently with transparency, clarity, and predictable behaviour, in both interface and AI, we create the conditions for a system you can trust.

10,000 lines of code and agentic design created in milliseconds has no value. But code and design with a clear direction, in service of a well-considered user experience, is something else. It doesn’t require any added bells and whistles, no make-up. It simply feels intuitive, beautiful in its simplicity.

Fredrik Håkansson is a UX Lead designer and Specialist at Aleido. With the user in focus, interfaces feel more intuitive and advanced information can be simply understood.