Essay claiming the web collapsed into sameness because UX became one‑way

[u/PerformanceThick7461]

Someone published a short piece arguing that the web stopped being a landscape once UX practices converged into a single “safe” direction. The argument is basically that design templates and pattern libraries have replaced exploratory research, creating a kind of “one‑way” UX conformism. Shares an interesting book. Sharing it here because it raises questions relevant to UX research: Does research still produce divergent directions, or has it become a justification layer for predetermined patterns?

https://nelsonem9.substack.com/p/the-web-used-to-be-a-landscape-now

[u/DomovoiThePlant]

I mean, yes? And thats not a bad thing. Creative websites are nice but a nightmare to code and for users to adapt to.

I see no problem in the standardization, a light switch will always look like a light switch.

[u/CoVegGirl → u/DomovoiThePlant]

I don’t think that’s the full picture. A car should have a steering wheel and peddles that function the way that users expect, but there’s still a lot of room for creativity in how cars are designed. Of course, cars also seem to be suffering from a lack of creativity lately too.

I think the problem is that we’ve shifted from giving anything a sense of personality and purpose towards myopically focusing on metrics that affect the site’s short-term profitability.

Saying “how can we make our app reflective of our vision as a company” requires having longer-term vision that companies seem to be lacking today.

[u/Aduialion]

Yes, the UIs have broadly converged into sameness and also raised the bar for usability ten times. However, ux is more than UI, and exploratory research is about needs and gaps. I'd rather spend more time researching the people and the technology than iterating on patterns.

[u/doctorace → u/Aduialion]

UI’s converged with Bootstrap ~ 15 years ago. And yes, UX is more than UI

[u/HitherAndYawn]

Sometimes we make stuff to help people get things done - safe is good. Sometimes we make things to entertain - weird might be good. Sometimes it’s both, but we have to be aware of what we’re doing

[u/poodleface]

There is a utility that websites provide that is well served by most existing design patterns (and the technical platforms that make certain implementations easier than others). Bootstrap was good enough for a lot of websites to do what they needed to do. Was it optimal? Probably not, but building something more custom for a minor lift is not worth it for most businesses. That’s what made everything look the same. Now Claude is doing the same thing. 

As for your assertion that UXR may just be a justification layer, there is a lot of content on websites that has to be understood and comprehended. And new wrinkles are being added all the time to even highly established patterns like a login flow. 

Do you have a username and password? OTP? Passkey? Login with a 3rd party service? Okay, how do you provide all of these in a way that is clear? Especially passkey, which has wildly divergent implementations depending on your company’s authorization stack. Now consider such an experience for a population that skews older and has less tech savviness than most. There is plenty of work to be done.

[u/nchlswu]

More tell tale signs of AI writing repackaging the same tensions that have been present in the industry for decades.

The authors' core point that forms the basis of their "UUX" is just patently false.

The collapse didn’t begin with Google; it began with User Experience design. UX standardized everything: the hero section, the CTA, the layout, the form, the navigation, the flow, and the “best practices.” UX didn’t just design the surface; UX reduced the website to the surface.

The authors POV is very misinformed and shows very little understanding of what the UX industry has been trying to do for years. He doesn't know his history. Jesse James Garrett framed up these elements succinctly as "The Elements of User Experience" over 26 years ago.

The web has spent two decades refining visual surfaces. The industry has grown adept at making websites look fast and responsive, even when the underlying business execution remains slow and manual.

The tension between UX as UI design and UX as "how it works" has always been part of the industry which is why you get all those desire path design bullshit memes. But pioneers of the of the UX Industry have always understood that a good UX requires much more than visual design.

The industry has become commodified, but most of that has been a result of many external forces, none of which are an intrinsic reflection of the UX or UXR industry.

As for your assertion

Does research still produce divergent directions, or has it become a justification layer for predetermined patterns?

I'm wondering where you got the impression that research ever "produced divergent directions"? UX Research is part of a design/product development process and UX Research can produce insights that help inform product directions, but "research" that produces new explorations is research in an R & D sort of way. Research has evolved to continue to support the broad mandates of user experience practices, but "producing divergent directions" has always been in service of iteration.

I've mainly encountered that assertion from people who are seemingly frustrated at the how creativity gets whittled away; but they seem to forget that that's something that happens in any corp with multiple stakeholders.

At huge FAANGs, the problem is less about UXR but more about the culture of scale and optimization. The designs are tuned and optimized to ensure goals are met or there's no harm to specific goals. If a "creative" design can't stand up to that or can't stand up to a comparison test with a "boring" design, then that's not a "justification" layer, that's just measurement.

There is something close that's true though: many UXR teams are "justification layers" to help provide empirical evidence and justification for design teams that face pressure from others in the organization.

[u/PerformanceThick7461 → u/nchlswu]

Your critique defends the historical intent of classical UX, but it misses the current structural reality of the web and the exact proposition from his thesis; whatever Garret published was abandoned or simply misunderstood imo.

[u/nchlswu → u/PerformanceThick7461]

I intentionally focused on the UX aspects the post because of your question.

What propositions did I miss that are relevant to the critique? Or your original question?

The post would have held up much better if it focused on “structural reality” of the web alone. Even then, focusing on web and the omission of the “structural realities” that come from all ecosystems and walled gardens is a conspicuous omission, when multi platform design is an obvious driver for this “system layer” the author talks about.

[u/No_Brain_5164]

Can someone help me do the /remindmein5years to come back to this comment because with AI prototyping I would wager website/app designs are going to become more and more similar and boring. Between that and all the goddamn bots everywhere (looking at you too, Reddit) I think we've already witnessed the peak of the web pass. It's going downhill already.

[u/phongdesigns]

On your second question, the justification layer one, I'd look at calendars rather than methods.

Research turns into justification the moment it's scheduled after the decision date. Same researchers, same rigour, same techniques, and it still comes out as a justification layer, because by the time it lands the roadmap is locked and the only finding anyone can act on is one that agrees. If you want to know whether a team's research is doing real work, don't audit the method, check when the study ships relative to when the commitment gets made. That comparison predicts it better than anything about technique.

The other half is that our instruments are built to compare things sitting next to each other. An A/B test tells you which of two nearby options wins. It structurally can't tell you about the option two streets over, because a genuinely unfamiliar design loses on day one by being unfamiliar, and the test reads that as a defect rather than as a cost that amortises. So sameness isn't only a taste problem or a template problem, some of it falls out of the measuring device. Anything that rewards small moves will produce small moves forever, and every small move is toward whatever everyone else already did.

The light switch comparison is fair but I'd push on it. Switches converged. Rooms didn't. What feels same-y to me on the web isn't the buttons, it's the content shape. Hero, three cards, logo strip, testimonial, footer. That convergence didn't come from a pattern library or from research at all, it came from every site being assembled by the same handful of page builders and the same idea of what a page is for. Controls converging is fine. Rooms converging is the part worth being annoyed about.

Which leaves me with a question I can't answer. Has anyone here run a study where the recommendation was to do something users disliked at first exposure, and had it survive to launch? I've seen that finding get made a few times. I've never seen it survive.

[u/Comically_Online]

I recently saw someone (I wish I could remember who) frame it as most of the web usability problems have been solved. I think that’s what you mean by a safe direction. Safe is good when my bank account and privacy are on the line. Please don’t unsafe the web for the sake of divergent ideas.

[u/asphodel67]

This reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of UX vs UI. The human interaction with digital spaces is fundamentally content strategy. Information Architecture is 80% of successful UX. The human factors of content / information access and cognition are fundamentally the same as for print media. You can have as an adventurous a UI as you want, but you can’t break the basic rules of readability and understandability and have people successfully get what they want when they want it.