Do Websites Need Pages?

Until now, they'e been the most efficient way we've had to communicate information. But what actually are they? 

They are a vestige of the past. Prior to websites, we had books. At the dawn of digital, we needed familiar metaphors to ease the transition. Books had pages, so we converted them into the digital domain. 

Over the last two decades, we’ve made them more sophisticated. We now have entire systems of templates and flows and componentry. But the fundamental architecture of what a website is very clear.

But here's the question underneath: do people need pages, or do they simply need intuitive ways of finding and exploring information?

If the answer is the latter, then the website is just one possible delivery mechanism. And maybe not the best one anymore.

Let’s think about something analogous. We’ve all seen Nano Banana producing “slides” But, what is a slide? If an AI image model can produce an image that looks like a slide… but it wasn’t created in Keynote or Powerpoint… is it a slide?

The same question applies to websites. 

If it looks like a website, and you can interact with it like a website, does it have to be composed of  HTML and CSS and JavaScript? Components and pages? Or simply look and respond like that?

And then the bigger question: Would it even need to look like a website as we know it at all?

We've come from a world where we’ve developed singular interfaces to try and serve every user. We're now in a world of generative digital products: where Artificial Intelligence can now render bespoke interfaces and function on the fly to serve every user individually.

But here is what's interesting…

As we conceive of and develop these new experiences, we can find ourselves reaching for old metaphors. We understand the concept of AI orchestrating an interface, so immediately jump to that orchestration being of the substrate we're used to: engineered components, modules, functional blocks and pages. The same designed and coded building blocks, now just atomized and assembled in real time.

But if the pixels on the screen look like a webpage, act like a webpage and respond like a webpage, does that page need to be made using engineered components at all?

Picture something very different.

A canvas - a visual surface - rendering pixels. That canvas might look like a website: responding when you scroll, tap and type… 

But then as the user interacts, those same pixels might morph into a map to meet that user’s need... then into a “video” to unpack a concept… then what looks and responds like a 3D world… then back to (what looks to be) a webpage again. 

The right pixels, displayed in the right way at the right time. 

This is the new paradigm coming. 

Conscious Interfaces are agentic experiences that have self-awareness. Pixel-streamed canvases in continual motion, responding to interaction, generating what's needed in the moment.

This might be a conceptual reach for some. Especially for those that are still trying to wrap their minds around AI being able to compose anything at all. 

But I believe this world is coming and is almost here.

Here’s a demo where, if you squint, you can see where we’re headed. We’re in the pixelstreaming’s “dial-up” era. The same as Midjourney’s “seven fingered hands” era.

But if you project forward, you’ll quickly grasp where this is going.

Websites are designed as “pages”, because we humans came from a world made of them in paper form. Vestiges of the past often follow us into the new. For good reason. Making new experiences intuitive for new users often means relying on familiar patterns. 

There will always be a need to bridge from old worlds to new: primarily to help those bridging them with us. Netflix didn't win by jumping straight into streaming, but by first offering the mail order equivalent of a world consumers already knew.

We’re at the same stage with Generative Interfaces. We may need to rely on old paradigms for a moment as we bridge from one world to the next. But the new world is coming faster than we think.

My encouragement to us as Experience, Product, and Engineering leaders, though, is this:

Where the software of the last two decades has taught us to think inside highly engineered boxes, this new era will allow us to break out of them.

Here are the three questions for digital product leaders entering this new world.

1. If intelligence can render pixels, do those pixels need to be based on pre-engineered components?

2. What new types of experiences can we deliver when pixels can morph to what’s needed on the fly?

3. In a world of incredible, new possibility, how can going back to first principles allow us to conceive of what's next?