AI Can Build the Website. It Still Takes a Human to Think About the User.

As someone who does design, I often get people who enthusiastically show me their websites, wanting to get some brief at-a-glance feedback. Recently, I had two folks show me AI-generated websites they were in the process of building. Both looked fairly modern and sleek (for a first draft). But both had pale gray text on a black background, setting off my internal design radar. The contrast was so poor that I didn’t even need the contrast checking tool I use when auditing websites to tell there was a problem.  

This reminded me of a worrying pattern that I’ve been noticing recently with AI-assisted website development and design: that we are starting to outsource our judgement to AI to the detriment of the user. Before I continue, let me say that I’m not here to hate on AI. I don’t hate AI. It can be an amazing tool (and is one that I use regularly). However, you wouldn’t use a hammer to stitch a wound (I mean, owww!), and likewise, you shouldn’t use AI as if it were an expert designer. Think of AI in design as your assistant. It works for you, not the other way around.

As AI use in website design becomes more and more the norm, we need to start asking ourselves: Is what (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini) is outputting, making our websites user-friendly and accessible? And this question should be one we ask every time we use AI to design or build something for our websites.

Accessible and user-friendly websites ARE good design. Whether or not your website has a legal obligation to meet web accessibility standards is entirely besides the point. When you make websites more accessible, they are generally a better experience for everyone. Add user-friendly design on top of basic accessibility, and you have a site that people actually want to use, (or at least one that’s not so frustratingly difficult to use that people want to leave). 

I had dinner with my parents the other day, and my dad paused to look something up on his phone. He squinted, zoomed in on the text, and placed the screen three inches away from his eyes, struggling to read the text. As an older American, his eyes just don’t work like they used to, but that’s hardly an experience unique to him. I should mention that the website in question didn’t look AI-generated at all. It was a pretty standard news article, with black text on a white background (the kind of web design we’ve been seeing for years). 

The point is, a website can look sleek, modern, pretty, etc., while being entirely frustrating to downright impossible to use (I’m thinking of the last time I tried to use a coupon at my local ice cream shop that had light pink text against a sky blue background).

In order to get good results out of AI, we need to ask it the right questions, double-check it’s work, and be willing to push back. Yes, that takes time. But building trust with your customers always does (and it’s always worth it). Having a well-designed website that centers on people having a good experience using it is a big part of building trust for your brand.

What kind of things make you frustrated enough to leave a website? What are some amazing website experiences you’ve had lately?

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