The way users interact with digital experiences is undergoing a profound transformation. The rise of AI-powered interfaces, ambient computing, and conversational design is pushing us towards a new paradigm: the singular interface. This isn’t just a design trend, it’s a fundamental redefinition of how experience is delivered, discovered, and consumed.
The singular interface refers to a unified, intelligent layer that sits above traditional navigation and delivers relevance without friction. It’s the shift from browsing to asking, from menus to moments. Users increasingly expect to ask a question and receive an instant, context-aware response whether through a chatbot, voice assistant, or AI-enhanced search result.
This transformation is already underway. Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE) now delivers curated answers and product recommendations directly within the search result. Users can complete purchases without ever visiting a brand’s website. This is the rise of zero-click commerce and it’s redefining the rules of engagement.
For brands, this shift presents a significant challenge. If the customer never reaches your website, how do you maintain control over the experience? How do you preserve your brand voice, values, and differentiation?
The answer lies in designing experiences that are not only discoverable by AI, but also structured to be delivered through third-party interfaces. This means embracing structured content, schema markup, and knowledge graphs. It means creating brand assets that can be surfaced in voice, visual, and conversational formats and ensuring consistency across walled gardens like Google, Meta, and Amazon.
This is where SEO and GEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) become critical. Traditional SEO focused on ranking in search results; GEO goes further, ensuring your brand is the answer in AI-generated summaries and zero-click environments. Structuring content and metadata for ingestion by large language models (LLMs) and answer engines is now essential for visibility. Without it, branded queries may no longer surface owned content, and product searches may return competitor results.
Ambient intelligence is about meeting users where they are – in the moment, on the device, and in the format they prefer. It’s about creating experiences that are:
This requires a new approach to design systems. Brands must build systems that support consistency and scalability across fragmented touchpoints. They must define clear digital brand rules, reusable components, and system-level guardrails – not just for websites, but for social platforms, shopping results, and voice interfaces.
As Alex Lee, SVP of Experience, noted, “You’re building out your design system for all the different touchpoints, not just for a website, but for Instagram, Facebook, shopping results, and voice.” That’s a huge shift in how we think about brand governance and experience design.
Another key theme is hyper-personalisation. Static, broad-brush experiences no longer cut it. Users expect content, offers, and interactions tailored to their individual needs – in real time.
This isn’t just about marketing automation, it’s about sensing signals, anticipating needs, and orchestrating personalised journeys across channels. Companies using AI-driven personalisation have seen conversion rates increase by 20-30% and profits improve by up to 15%.
To deliver this level of personalisation, brands must unify their customer data, enrich profiles, and activate insights in real time. They must move from persona-based marketing to predictive, 1:1 engagement at scale. This means adapting experiences based on in-session behaviour and historical patterns, and orchestrating individualised journeys across channels and moments.
It’s not just the end-user experience that’s changing, it’s the experience of creating it. As new interfaces emerge, UX/UI will be a growth area. Designers, developers, marketers, and strategists must be empowered with the tools, data, and autonomy to innovate.
But there’s a tension here. Design has become increasingly formalised, with tools like Figma and AI-generated layouts offering speed and efficiency. While this standardisation can be beneficial, it also risks homogenising the web. Everything starts to look the same and that’s a problem for brands trying to stand out.
Designers must be the “fly in the ointment”, the ones who inject personality, disruption, and originality into increasingly standardised systems. They must challenge conventions, explore new formats, and create experiences that are not only functional but memorable.
As Alex Lee put it, “AI can tell me what the thing is now and give me other people’s opinions of the future, but it can’t give me the future – I have to invent the future.” That’s the role of the designer, to imagine what’s next and bring it to life.
One of the most profound implications of the singular interface is the dilution of brand real estate. If 50% of your audience never visits your website, how do you maintain brand equity?
Brands must create an API to their user experience, one that can be delivered in someone else’s interface in a way that’s still unique and has their flavour. This requires a new level of interoperability, standardisation, and control.
Solutions like Feedonomics and other product syndication platforms are beginning to address this, allowing brands to control how their products appear across marketplaces and social platforms. But the challenge remains: how do you maintain brand consistency, relevance, and emotional resonance when your experience is fragmented across dozens of channels?
This is where structured content and metadata become essential. Brands must build authoritative, structured knowledge graphs tied to their identity, and create first-party content that can be “quoted” by machines, not just humans. Embedding brand relevance in zero-click environments like SGE and LLM responses is no longer optional – it’s the new baseline for digital visibility.
In this new landscape, launching a digital experience is just the beginning. Continuous optimisation is key. Brands must measure and refine experiences based on real-time data, behavioural insights, and performance metrics.
This includes conversion rate optimisation, A/B testing, and performance dashboards that track engagement, retention, and ROI. Remarkable’s approach integrates analytics and AI to personalise content and refine customer journeys in real time, ensuring that every experience is not only beautiful but effective.
In the age of the singular interface, experience becomes a service – ambient, intelligent, and deeply human. Brands must be ready to meet users in these moments with relevance, clarity, and trust.
This is the future of experience: not what you build, but what your customer asks for and how well you answer.
