I’ve tried the opposite approach. When a client mentions the chatbot, I’ll sometimes open a few smolweb sites, fast, minimal, readable, calm. No pop-ups. No blinking corners. Just content, clear and immediate.
Their eyes change. “Oh, that loads fast.” “That’s easy to read.” “I like that.”
MEGA MENUS was the thing I hated most. I’m strongly opposed to any hidden content.
The quote made me optimistic. It’s a shame that clients followed their own observation about straight-to-the-point websites loading fast and being easy to read, with a degrading remark about the simplicity of such websites. I realize that the point of a web developer job has always been something different than making good websites (as a whole, it’s closer to first making something nice and then trashing it with your own hands), but that’s a dreadful realization.
Yeah that’s why I couldn’t stay in design work. Too many times the client wants you to take your balanced, appealing attempt to express their vision and turn it into clipart.
The pressure isn’t really coming from clients anyway. It’s coming from the web itself, from a decade of bloated pages, dark patterns, and feature arms races that quietly redefined what a “real” website looks like. Clients are just reading the room. The room is wrong, but they’re not imagining it.
The shift might come from users, not decision-makers. It might come when enough people notice that the fast, calm site was easier to use. That they actually found what they came for. That they didn’t have to close three things before reading a single line.
Everyone is to blame here:
clients want flashy websites, not considering user experience
managers don’t translate wants to real needs and pass the problem to devs
devs like to have less work, so they will gladly insert random external dependency to fulfill the growing number of wants
users just accept shitty websites without complaining, even letting themselves take the blame - if X is slow, then it is time to buy a new PC
Then I ask if they’d want something like that.
“Well… but it looks a bit simple, doesn’t it?”
Simple is the word that keeps coming up. And I’ve learned that when a client says simple, they don’t mean easy to use. They mean not impressive enough. They mean what will people think. A lean, fast website doesn’t look like it cost anything. It doesn’t signal effort. It doesn’t say: we take this seriously.
The real irony is that building something genuinely simple, something that loads instantly and says exactly what it needs to say and nothing more, is often harder than bolting on a chatbot. But that’s invisible work. Nobody sees the restraint.
—
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
-Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
