Soulless Design

Have you had one of those days where your mouse stops working and you're forced to navigate using your keyboard by tabbing through every element or using alt + underlined shortcut key?
I'm sure that this is a more rare case today due to touchscreens but still someone somewhere had to resolve to navigating the interface the old caveman way.

Today I'm seeing more and more clearly obvious UX design flaws on large business websites, something that used to be rare. Gone are the days where you could rely on a fancy UI framework which already had tons of accessibility work done for it. Today you can replicate every well-designed component from an UI framework, while completely skipping all of its subtle accessibility features.

Claude website once had a main navigation menu (the dropdown popup kind) that was impossible to access. Openrouter used to have a 1px wide range sliders that were impossible to use, nor were did they look like actual range sliders -- to a point that I thought they were simple sliders, because they lacked any of the common visual cues like handles.

Good UX has always been invisible, but rendering something accessible on the web requires significant amount of work with seemingly no benefits. You don't appreciate the value of accessibility in UX until the day you need it, much like how you only start caring about ramps when you're wheelchair bound.

I'm afraid that much like with slop art, where the modern eraser artist wouldn't even notice a silly 5 finger mistake. These new vibecode designers aren't that different.

There reason why I'm calling it a soulless design is because people who worked on UI frameworks have had plenty of experience of handling such cases. The AI might not do well yet but I'm sure eventually it's all going to be covered.

"If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck then it must be a duck"

In the end, if what the AI made looks like a duck, you have to be sure that it also quacks like a duck and floats like a duck cause otherwise you might have a duck-shaped rock in your hands.

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