Tools vs Agents - "Know Your Product" Edition

Is your product a Tool or an Agent? The difference between the two is crucial, and if you don’t capture it in your product design, you’re doomed to failure (or, at the very least, sub-par user engagement).

So, what’s the difference? Well, a tool help you do a task, while an agent does a task for you. Or, to put it differently, think Hammer vs Concierge.

Tools are, effectively, part of your body. They are ready to hand, and you use them almost unconsciously, with immediate feedback. 
Think of the way you use a hammer — it is, effectively, an extension of your arm, no? You’re not guiding the head of the hammer to the nail, you just swing your arm, and thwack the nail in.
Towards this, the product design for Tools should be focused on keeping you “in the flow”, on removing any externalities that get between you, and the thing that you are doing.

Agents, on the other hand, are external to you. Out of band, and possibly out of sight, using them requires conscious consideration on your part.
Consider your interactions with the concierge, something like “Alice, could you get me reservations at the #HipsterRestaurant next door?”. Once you’ve figured out who the concierge is, and what they can do for you, you tend to only work with them when you need them.
Towards this, the product design for Agents should be focused on setup, with actionable touch-points to keep the agent on track (if needed).

When designing your product, keep the above difference in mind. The usage — and dynamics! — of the two are fundamentally different, and the design should reflect this!

As Chris Noessel puts it, as we continue to evolve this skin of technology that increasingly covers both our biology and the world, we don’t want it to add to people’s burdens. We want to alleviate them and empower people to get done what needs to be done, especially when we don’t want — or need — to do it ourselves!

(Note that Automation is orthogonal to all of this. The goal of automation is to remove the human from the loop. Tools and Agents might have automated components, but Automation doesn’t replace either one of them!)