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Why did every website/product start looking the same?

12 points by ardabulut ↗ HN
Every day, I'm seeing a new product or website that clearly had direct design influences from companies like Notion and Linear instead of actually contributing something new. Is this the end of web design?

25 comments

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perrygeo
Because visual design is both a) very hard/expensive to do well from scratch and b) not a differentiator for most products. For the vast majority, it's just more cost effective to use a standard template and focus on your core product instead.
ardabulut
I would disagree. The designs I'm talking about are actually extremely polished. They spend an hour just to make sure the animation of a single component flows a certain way. And yet, they spend all this time and money only to make something that someone else already championed.
behnamoh
This is much more obvious for meal kit plans websites. They all use the same template and it just sucks because it's not a user-friendly UI either.
an_aparallel
wasnt this spearheaded by a combination of web frameworks (most famously ones like bootstrap) ?

It's easier for a programmer without design chops to cobble together something using boostrap than actually design a site from scratch

gardenhedge
does bootstrap dictate how a site looks? isn't the point of it to be a framework that is customizable?
an_aparallel
well yes - but it has templates. And you can chose not to change those templates. And lots of sites dont change anything. Sure, a colour, sure a logo...but there was a period, and idk if I still notice it now or if im so numb to it that i dont - that seeing 3 big company statements in a row while scrolling made me groan in agony...
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mikewarot
Because end users don't want to have to learn to deal with yet another "clever" interface, and a consensus as to what works has started to gel.
atoav
That is a nice side effect of the phenomenom at hand, but it is not the cause.
atoav
My guess is: people are unable to write CSS, won't bother to write CSS and will not pay the people who would write CSS enough to be bothered to do it.

On another note: the most common prompt a webdesigner nowadays gets is "make it look like x". Finding a own visual identity is just not in these days (this does not only affect the web but actual real worlds design as well).

quickthrower2
They also sound the same. Those cutesy headlines inspired by old iPhone ads I am guessing.

The ones that are trying to use language to sound they are changing the world and you will infinitely satisfied if you buy, when you are getting I dunno an API key or some such tiny feature.

That is more for the MVP consumer side.

Otherwise for B2B it is large bullshit bingo wording where it is really really hard to figure out even what they do.

dazc
Web design is still going to be in demand at the high end but most businesses these days will settle for a Facebook page or free WordPress theme. If this looks the same as every other site then, from their point of view, it's validation of sorts that they are doing the right thing.

Regarding eCommerce, you really don't want your visitors to do anything other than add products to the cart and checkout so a simple, universal design is preferable to something that's going to win awards for aesthetic appeal.

mike_hearn
I'm just about to start on a project to redesign my small company website, and I'm planning to make it look like every other product website out there. So I reckon I can provide some insight as to why this happens.

Our current website advertises a desktop packaging tool, and is modern looking with a slightly unusual visual design (https://hydraulic.software/). It's an adaptation of a SaaS landing page template appropriately called Basic, and I chose it somewhat arbitrarily because it had animated bubbles (https://preview.uideck.com/items/basic/) which fit with the whole water-power theme of the company name, plus I liked the organic wavy look. Later I decided the bubbles looked unprofessional and turned them off.

To be clear, the template is fine for what I paid for it (very little) and the support I got is fine too. I have no complaints with UIdeck. But we've grown out of it.

The big problem is that it's too hard to add content. The template is really just a hand crafted landing page, it's not based on any sort of component system like React. Extending the template to support non-landing pages was an exercise in CSS frustration. Modern product website designs are oriented around a stack of similar sized blocks arranged vertically. The Basic template does this too but blocks are all individually unique and none of them are generic, which makes it hard to extend a page to advertise the whole feature set. This means I'm always torn between linking to the landing page or linking direct to the developer docs, because the latter explains all the features whereas the first looks nicer, but that's a stupid issue to have. We should be able to easily add content to reflect new features without hitting visual design issues.

Second problem - changing anything without breaking layout is too hard. The background images are SVG so if the browser window resizes the wave image rescales too, and this can mean white text ends up getting pushed out of the way and becoming invisible. I've wasted way too much time on layout bugs that only appear at certain screen sizes on certain pages. The more standard type of generic SaaS website doesn't have this issue because they avoid organic shapes that can move around in complex ways. It's all straight lines and 90 degree gradients.

Final problem - adding content involves writing markdown and HTML manually. I use a little home grown template system to help but that's unjustifiable (it was an experiment that didn't pan out). For the new site I'm not quite sure whether to go for something that's a totally visual CMS like a hosted WordPress, or do a bit of RDD and use it as an excuse to brush up my JS framework skills. Whichever I pick it's going to be focused on finding a template that gets all the awkward web design details out of the way (in particular for mobile support), and then tweaking it to fit our needs.

Why not hire someone to do a totally bespoke design? Maybe when we're bigger but my guess is that it'll have the same general structure as other sites simply because otherwise we'd need to go back and ask for more bespoke design work every time we launched a new feature and wanted to advertise it. You can do that but it's expensive and not justifiable at the current size.

KodyBerns99
These days people are more towards getting the product out as soon as possible rather than spending time in designing it. I really dont think it is wrong in anyway if the product is valuable.
GunjanKarun
One reason for this trend could be that these popular tools have set a new standard for user experience and functionality, and many companies are trying to emulate their success.

With the rise of design systems and pre-built UI kits, it's easier than ever for developers to skip designers and build something fast. This lack of customization of UI kits results in similar design elements across different projects.

_tom_
Many good answers already. I'd add "maybe it's a bit like cars, which also now all look alike". Cars look alike because they all share functional requirements.

Websites need to collect and convert users, somehow. You can use styles that are known to work, or you can go off and create something new that might fail. Unless your company's product is user interfaces, the choice is obvious.

tsuujin
An answer I haven’t seen yet is that making your website look and act like other websites is fairly well established UX principle for avoiding user friction. It’s known as Jakob’s Law.

https://lawsofux.com/jakobs-law/

cloudking
It's faster and cheaper to use an off the shelf framework and template than building something original from scratch these days.