Will Web Design Be Automated?
It’s 2020 in a couple of months!
Time flies, so does technology and innovation.
The automation of human labor has continued for quite some time but has been intensified in recent decades in massive proportions.
In fact, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, authors of the book inventing the future, predict that in the next twenty years, about 47 to 80 % of people’s regular jobs will be automated.
According to a study by Clutch, 46% of small businesses didn’t have a website in 2016, but this number dropped to 29% in just one year.
However, the simple and straightforward answer to “will web design be automated” question is:
No..
And here is why:
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Drag and drop website have been in existence for over 10 years now
Don’t get me wrong, websites like WIX and Weebly allow anyone to create their dream website without the need to have any prior experience or the need to hire a web developer.
The available templates, however, are just templates, meaning your website can look like many other websites on the web.
Drag and drop software was an attempt to tackle web design automation. We still have them today and we still have more and more web designers and web developers who are in demand to create custom designs that require custom coding.
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Custom themes, functionality, etc. will always require human input
What businesses don’t take into consideration is that available and easy to use templates are often not perfect for their company or the functions they want and can be slow to load.
The skill of an experienced web developer is in their ability to create something from scratch that meets the needs of your business and your brand – you simply can’t do that with drag and drop websites.
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Web design requires creativity
The last jobs to get automated are the ones that require creativity and original thought.
Web design and web development jobs are likely candidates to be one of the last jobs still kicking until the end of time – or at least close!
With that unique creativity, you can get every single web design detail in your mind put into a beautifully-designed and unique website.
And with creativity comes back-and-forth frequent communication.
Half of the job of a web designer or web developer is understanding client requirements and then putting all of these specific requirements into code.
Until a program can understand a human being’s needs better than another human being, automation of web development jobs will not happen.
Only if or when a program can communicate with a human being better than we can, will automated web design take over web developers’ jobs!
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A good website requires solving a problem not merely “producing code” by Artificial Intelligence
Computers and technology cannot observe a brick-and-motor’s workflow & business processes problems and that is truly where the real value of any web developer delivers over code.
We are just at the early phases of machine learning and we have a long way to go before we have “creative” computer algorithms that can do this with little to no human intervention.
At some point in the future, AI may be designing and building websites for us but looking at the market and the massive number of opportunities available for experienced and talented web developers, I don’t think any experienced & talented web developer has anything to worry about anytime soon.
Final thoughts
I don’t see anything on the horizon that would devastate the supply side of web development anytime soon.
We get requests for web design every week and we love delivering amazing web design.
Even if off-the-shelf solutions like WIX and Weebly increase in number, over time, novel uses for technology will continue to appear and the web is for now the singular platform that underpins it all for all businesses.
Contrary to what the media would have us believe, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) hype is still considered weak Artificial Intelligence and is largely based on technology developed decades ago. It has become more widely adopted due to cheaper and larger storage capabilities.
Web developers are paid by local and international businesses to give them an edge over competing templated sources of attention to their value proposition. That is a zero-sum game and is not going away anytime soon.
Nevertheless, the web itself might become obsolete, one day!
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