Making AI Website Building More Intuitive
Simplifying the journey from choosing a starting point to creating a website through clearer decisions, contextual guidance, and more transparent AI interactions.
Independent design assignment, not shipped professional work. Actual anonymized design screens are shown; identifying assets and account details have been withheld. Final content requires sharing-rights review.
Reducing uncertainty in an AI-powered creation journey
The assignment focused on evaluating an AI-powered website builder, from the initial selection experience through brand customization, site generation, and the resulting dashboard. The challenge was to make the experience easier to understand and navigate, especially for users unfamiliar with building websites. The redesign explored how clearer starting choices, optional brand inputs, meaningful AI guidance, and transparent progress feedback could help users move through the experience with greater confidence.
Unclear starting decisions
Uncertainty around brand inputs
Limited visibility into AI- generated outcomes
Making complex interactions feel simple
The design approach combined evidence from the supplied assignment brief, user feedback, and existing journey analysis to identify areas where clearer interactions and content could reduce uncertainty.
Simplify decisions
Clarify expectations
Help users understand their available starting points without overwhelming them with choices.
Explain which inputs are optional, how they influence the generated experience, and what happens next.
Make AI transparent
Use contextual AI guidance and meaningful progress messages to explain what the system is doing.
Keep users in control
Make editing, reviewing, and recovering from interruptions easier throughout the journey.
From complex choices to guided creation
The proposed experience focused on improving clarity across key moments of website creation while respecting the existing flow and implementation constraints.
Making the first decision easier
Existing visual options were difficult to compare. The proposed experience makes the first choice explicit: start with a template or use existing brand assets.
Making inputs easier to understand
Existing assets, visual inspiration, and written descriptions are grouped by purpose. Optional inputs are identified and their contribution explained; recommended assets are not required.
Making AI progress more meaningful
Contextual status messages explain the stages while information is processed. This sequence shows three successive states of brand-board preparation, not additional onboarding steps.
Brand-board preparation · The status changes as assets, colors, and typography are brought together. No completion time is promised.
Giving users confidence before moving forward
The brand board introduces a review moment before proceeding: discoverable editing controls and a preview help connect the chosen visual direction to the site that follows.
Designing what the AI says, not just what it shows
An important part of the work involved designing the instructions behind dynamically generated AI assistant messages. Rather than treating the assistant’s responses as static interface copy, I explored how prompt instructions could shape helpful, contextual guidance across different stages of website creation.
Selected proposed instructions and corresponding assistant messages from the assignment. These are design explorations, not a production-tested deployment.
Starting point guidance
Explain template versus existing identity, so the first decision has a clear purpose.
Brand input guidance
Explain what each input contributes and give users permission to skip.
Generation guidance
Explain the current brand-board preparation and the review that comes next.
Designing for when things don’t go as planned
A reliable AI-powered experience needs to help users recover from interruptions without losing their progress or confidence. The assignment included proposed interactions and content for situations such as failed uploads, unavailable reference links, missing brand assets, and interrupted site generation.
Making AI experiences clearer and more controllable
The assignment resulted in a proposed redesign of the website creation journey, supported by UX analysis, interface designs, AI prompt instructions, and recovery-state explorations. The work reinforced the importance of balancing AI automation with clear communication, visible progress, and user control.
Clarity matters at every decision point.
AI-generated experiences need transparent guidance and understandable feedback.
Recovery experiences deserve as much attention as the happy path.
This was a design assignment. The proposed improvements were not validated as shipped product outcomes. Potential validation could include task completion, progression through the builder, interaction with editing controls, and feedback on generation transparency.