The shift
to growth
Scroll down
The people closest to your website often have the least control over it.
Your website is one of the only places you have full control over your first impression. The teams building it know as much, and it’s why they care about the copy, structure, interaction, and flow.
What holds them back isn’t a lack of ideas or skill. It’s layers of approval. Fragmented ownership, tool limitations, and unclear roles and responsibilities. There is no immediate fix for structural problems. But AI is a bigger opportunity to eliminate repetitive work than most teams realize.
AI won’t amend your approval chain or org chart. It won’t replace your designers, marketers, or developers. Used creatively, it can give them room to focus less on the routine and more on the work that requires human judgment: what you hired them for
Put more trust in your website team, then get out of their way.
Key takeaways
1
How you operate your website is how you compete.
Companies that treat the website as a strategic product ship faster, experiment more, and capture more pipeline from the same traffic.
2
Stick to the status quo, growth stalls.
When most of the work is edits and approvals, ambitious improvements never ship and teams stay stuck maintaining instead of improving.
3
Make adjustments now, it compounds.
Reducing bottlenecks, empowering website teams, and using AI to remove routine work creates speed that compounds over time.
Scroll-driven animations
More than a quarter of answers referenced some form of animation, whether it was parallax effects or GSAP-powered transitions. Roughly 8% specifically called out 3D: Three.js environments, interactive product views, immersive scenes.
"Animations that move around the background of the page - i.e., butterfly flying across the screen, paper crumbling out of a notebook."
"A crazy website with wild scrolling transitions/animations and effects, but in a non-overwhelming and not too crowded way."
"When the user scrolls, the website doesn't go down but rather takes you on a journey through a path."
AI-powered experiences
They want AI to do all the things without it announcing itself.
"Animations that move around the background of the page - i.e., butterfly flying across the screen, paper crumbling out of a notebook."
"A crazy website with wild scrolling transitions/animations and effects, but in a non-overwhelming and not too crowded way."
"When the user scrolls, the website doesn't go down but rather takes you on a journey through a path."
Radical simplicity
Designers, marketers, and devs want clarity and restraint.
"The coolest websites are the simplest ones. Intuitive and easy to use."
"Love ones that do the job with minimalism. How they make as few elements do all the work in the best possible way."
"90% negative space."
Interactive storytelling
Respondents were intrigued by designs that deliberately push back against the sleek look of today’s websites.
"The creativity of the Flash era, and I'm hopeful that there will be a departure from Material/DS-related design choices and a return to creative interactivity exploration."
"A site which looked like an old Windows interface, but each icon was a different portfolio piece. Very cool!"
"I saw a retro 90’s style website the other day, and that was neat. It was unapologetically ‘messy,’ and I enjoyed seeing that."
Interactive storytelling
People are drawn to websites that feel like they’re alive.
"Pages where scrolling subtly changes scenes-illustrations morph, text glides in like it’s part of a narrative, and data visualizations animate only when you reach them. It feels cinematic."
"I liked a UX/UI feature that turned off the lights for a light fixture store to show what the product looks like in the dark."
"Choose your own adventure framework. Unlocks ability to tailor the experience to different customer groups."
