A lot of AI website designs aren't very usable

Most of my WordPress dev work this year has changed: I’m often building new sites or pages from designs created (or assisted) by AI. There has been a big discrepancy in how usable those designs are.

It comes down to the context in which those designs were created. I see 3 general tiers that these designs are falling into:

  1. Very usable - High context: The best, and most usable, designs I’ve worked with were driven by a human designer who carefully curates alongside what AI is creating. (Hi Erin Pitts!) If the designs are new pages or modules for an existing site, they account for the existing design and styles. And if they are a new site, they maintain consistent styles and design principles. They are straightforward and usable by humans. They understand how the content hierarchy of a website works, and the design accounts for that.

  2. Usable - Medium context: These designs are usually consistent in design and thoughtful in layout. They are generally created by a designer who understands how websites work. Often, they are add-on pages or content for existing sites, but they are created in a vacuum and now aware of the existing site. They don’t utilize existing styles or elements from the site for efficiency in development. And they often don’t account for the content hierarchy of the site, especially when loading dynamic content from elsewhere on the site.

  3. Messy - Low context: These designs are usually driven by someone chatting with AI with little to no design experience. They often don’t understand how content hierarchy works, and they don’t direct the AI to maintain consistent styles. (I wonder if primary instruction usually is “I want my site to look or work like X site does.") These designs have little connection to the existing site. They think their new design(s) should be a simple addition to their site. They aren’t.

The TLDR: Context really matters. AI can help design, and help develop, websites more quickly. But that doesn’t mean it is more efficient or making them better.

The takeaways, even for a non-designer who might be trying to design a website with AI:

  • Provide as much context as you can for what the current site looks like and is capable of. Give it access to the existing styles and design, even if you are just asking it to review the existing site carefully. Tell it to be specific about maintaining layout sizes, styles and colors.

  • Make sure you explain how the website will be built, or what it is already built on. (Assuming, of course, you know already.) If it is going to be a WordPress site with WooCommerce, it needs to know that so that it can design toward that functionality.

  • If you can include an experienced designer or developer in the process… then do it. It’s about a lot more than having a set of colors or fonts that you like.

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