How to design AI products that users trust - Nina Olding (Gemini, Meta, Weights & Biases)

12 snips

Nov 19, 2025

Nina Olding, a Staff Product Manager at Weights & Biases with a rich background in AI trust from Google DeepMind, dives into the intricacies of designing user-friendly AI products. She introduces her framework of the three A's: Awareness, Agency, and Assurance, emphasizing how essential user trust is as AI integrates into everyday technology. Nina explores practical design strategies to help users understand when AI is at play and how to control its functions while ensuring they feel secure in its reliability.

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INSIGHT

Three A’s Trust Framework

Users need contextual clues to decide whether to trust AI-driven features.
Awareness, Agency, and Assurance form the core trust framework for AI UX.

INSIGHT

Invisible Versus Magical AI

Invisible AI creates user confusion while magical AI can disorient without context.
Make AI's role visible so users don't invent explanations for product behavior.

ANECDOTE

Uber Conversation Shows Public Confusion

Nina recounts an Uber driver asking what AI actually is, showing public confusion.
She contrasts The New York Times' clear disclosures as a model that builds user trust.

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In this episode, Nina Olding, Staff Product Manager at Weights & Biases and formerly at Google DeepMind, working on trust and compliance for AI, joins Randy to explore the UX challenges of AI‑driven features. As AI becomes increasingly woven into digital products, the traditional UX cues and trust‑signals that users rely on are changing. Nina introduces her framework of the three “A’s” for AI UX: Awareness, Agency, and Assurance, and explains how product teams can build this into their AI‑enabled products without launching a massive transformation programme.

Key Takeaways
— As AI features proliferate, the UX challenge is less about the technology and more about how users perceive, understand and trust the interactions.
— Trust is based on three foundational dimensions for AI‑enabled products: Awareness, Agency, Assurance.
— Awareness: Make it clear when AI is involved (and when it isn’t). Invisible AI = risk of misunderstanding. Magical AI without context = disorientation.
— Agency: Give users control, or at least the option to opt‑out, define boundaries, choose defaults vs advanced settings.
— Assurance: Because AI can be non‑deterministic, you must design for confidence—indicators of reliability, transparency about limitations, ability to question or override outputs.

Chapters
00:00 – Intro: Why AI products are failing on trust
00:47 – Nina Old’s journey from Google DeepMind to Weights & Biases
03:20 – The UX of AI: It's not just a chat window
04:08 – Introducing the Three A’s framework: Awareness, Agency, Assurance
08:30 – Designing for Awareness: Visibility and user signals
14:40 – Agency: Giving users control and escape hatches
21:30 – Assurance: Transparency, confidence indicators, and humility
28:05 – Three key questions to assess AI UX
30:50 – The product case for trust: Compliance, loyalty, and retention
33:00 – Final thoughts: Building the trust muscle

Featured Links: Follow Nina on LinkedIn | Weights & Biases | Check out Nina's 'The hidden UX of AI' slides from Industry Conference Cleveland 2025

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Our Hosts
Lily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.

Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A...