That was the question Nikolaus Stemmer brought to us. Once again, we turned the HelloDigital office into a space for honest exchange, this time around what happens to websites when AI increasingly takes over searching and answering.
At the mic: Nikolaus Stemmer, freelance UX/CX Director, researcher and speaker based in Berlin. For more than 25 years he has designed screens, pixels and pages, and now he asks whether all of it still matters.
From destination to source
His thesis: your website is becoming a source and fading away as a destination. First, we went places on the web, and browsers were our navigators. Then content started coming to us, sized and toned for the platform and context. Today, language models talk to us and pull their content from websites. Along the way, Nikolaus said, we are trading trust standards for convenience.
It is not about better pixels
The shift is not about how good something looks, but about who renders it. Designers used to create the page, today AI renders the moment. He walked us through three layers of a digital product: expression, which AI delivers; signal, where the brand lives; and semantics, the foundation that most teams haven't started on yet.
Responsibility stays with us
When the surface comes from an AI, the foundation decides whether the result is any good: what do our contents mean, and how clearly are they built? That is the job of designers, and therefore a question of responsibility. Or, as he put it: if you don't put that there, how should an AI know about it?
And what replaces the page?
He presents four formats, and one of them is, of all things, not digital. He shows which ones best himself:
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