Goodbye to design: websites will become blank pages
"Artificial intelligence is changing the way we search for information while eliminating the aesthetic experience of the web. For this reason, I believe we will unfortunately replace websites with empty text fields."
Do you remember when we awaited the results of the Awwwards like we wait for Sanremo? I often found myself stopping in front of every homepage as if it were a painting in a museum. It wasn't just professional curiosity; it was the pleasure of seeing something beautiful. Layouts that made you forget you were on a web page, animations that looked like choreographies, typographic choices that alone told the story of an entire brand. It was pure design, visual experience, identity. It was a challenge to technique, an experimentation to push the technology of the time to its limits.
Now I open a website and more often than not I find myself facing a chatbot asking if I need help. WhatsApp integrates Meta AI, many sites have assistants that pop up as soon as you land. They do not yet replace traditional navigation, but they are getting people used to another mode: asking instead of searching, navigating. And as I see this habit spreading, I wonder: how long until websites are just blank pages with a text field? When will we say goodbye to hypertext?
Design is still fundamental, fortunately. A collection of statistics from Digital Silk shows that 94% of first impressions on a site depend on its visual appearance and that an average user forms an opinion in milliseconds. A significant portion of users considers aesthetics among the main reasons for not returning to a page. But the risk is that fewer and fewer people will see these designs. They will ask AI directly for what they are looking for and receive a text response, without ever landing on a homepage, without ever scrolling a page, without ever seeing a layout. And before long, even if they arrived on the homepage, they would find yet another text field to ask questions, perhaps against a flat background. Doesn't that remind you of the old Google? Logo, text field, answers. Only we won't have lists of links to click.
According to Market.us, the global market for AI-based browsers is worth about $4.5 billion in 2024 and is expected to grow to $76.8 billion by 2034. An entire industry is betting that the future of browsing will no longer consist of clicks, menus, and pages, but of questions and answers. Or of automated navigation.
Is this what we want? If the future is this, what sense does it make to still invest in elaborate homepages, curated interfaces, complex visual experiences? If the user arrives, asks a question, and leaves without ever seeing the rest, why continue to build that rest?
A traditional site is made of choices: colors, fonts, arrangement of elements, visual hierarchy, narrative rhythm. Every decision communicates something. Every detail builds identity. A well-designed homepage lets you understand who you are, what you do, how you do it. It is visual branding, it is experience, it is positioning.
A single question interface is the exact opposite: a text field on a neutral background. Almost no personality, almost no immediate visual identity. All tendentially the same. All reduced to the same empty box in which to type a question. How do you distinguish one brand from another if the only thing you see is a blinking cursor? How do you communicate values, positioning, tone of voice through a prompt? It becomes difficult. We are building a future where aesthetics no longer matter because aesthetics are no longer visible. Sites are turning into text terminals, into command line interfaces dressed in good UX intentions. And we do this in the name of efficiency, speed, and reducing friction.
But friction is not always negative. Sometimes friction is what makes an experience memorable. Clicking, scrolling, discovering something you weren't looking for, getting lost in non-linear navigation: all of this has value. It is not a waste of time; it is experience. It is the reason why some sites remain in memory and others do not.
Contemporary UX culture has placed the elimination of friction at the center of everything. Every click saved is a victory, every second saved is a success. But simplifying does not mean nullifying. If everything becomes pure function, where does beauty end up? Where does identity end up?
And then there is the issue of control. AIs can invent information, confuse data, mix sources. An AI that responds on your behalf can say things you do not want to associate with your brand. The control we needed to regain from external platforms risks slipping away from us even within our own home.
Designed friction creates memory. For example, I am creating interactive sites that simulate old interfaces, hiding easter eggs, integrating interactions that force exploration. A bit out of nostalgia, a bit to resist. They are digital gadgets more oriented towards entertainment than pure business, but I see people wide-eyed, happy. Not everyone wants just efficiency. Some still want “beauty.”
In a few years, perhaps, there will still be awards for beautiful websites, impeccable homepages, extraordinary interfaces. But they will be almost museum objects, testimonies of an era when the web was still a space to explore, to look at, to experience. They will no longer be work tools; they will be artifacts. And we will continue to visit them with nostalgia, as one visits paper magazines in a library: beautiful, curated, relegated.
We will have learned to ask instead of searching, to receive instead of discovering. And the web made of colors, layouts, animations, and visual identity will have become a memory. The question is not whether it will happen everywhere, but how much of digital beauty we will be willing to trade for a few seconds saved.