The Problem with Webflow’s AI

My in my opinion, one of the last great innovations that Web Flow had was it was a point around this time last year where they released um page uh page builder page builder or um where you were able to define a bunch of components and then marketers can then add them all in and you know move them around and stuff like that. And and I thought I I me personally and this is this is free advice for web flow. Take this advice. Why you didn't take why you didn't add to this momentum with AI? I don't know why um why you couldn't give a marketer the ability to spin up a page with AI but using components that web the designer has already done. Like that's where I feel like AI could really add a lot of value and a clear kind of definition to it by allowing designers to still work with web flow and use web flow for what it's for because now it's not you know the the appg gen doesn't really compete or sorry it puts on a level playing field with everything else you know it's not really adding to these these tools and I fully agree they could um introduce so many of these things to marketers and then we would know like okay they're trying to sell this to marketers. So as a designer I as a designer I felt like I'm um being I felt offended by the designs that they showed the AI created and they called it good. That that felt bad that that didn't I was like that is that is the opposite of good. That is a wireframe that is sloppy. Not even a clean wireframe. It was a sloppy wireframe with some a little bit of style to it. It was just had a few purple colors. That was it. Don't call that nice. But what you said that that web flow should pay you for it. They should they should create a video. Hey, we use AI to you know the designer can create the designs and the variations manually handcrafted beautiful it has soul and now a soulless marketer I'm sorry for uh soulless marketer comes in and says I want a landing page using these systems with this copy and the AI takes the copy expands on it based on the context of the website and uses these compon components that the designer created with love and create a page based on it. It totally makes sense. It goes it goes back to what I was saying when it comes to clearly understanding and clearly defining who this tool is for and what they trying to achieve. So they can still announce the same sort of things I in some ways I guess but like they need to understand that web flow users the people who use that design. Think of the three um uh what do you call them build mode design mode or whatever people who work in the design mode categorically do not like AI. So focusing on a focusing on all that time building a platform or a system that helps them do something they don't want help with or not just that they don't want to help with. Again, it comes down to the framing of it. Have it kickstart your design. Don't have it do your design because that's no that's what you want to do. you want to do that like yeah I'm a fan of basically building me a simple six column grid system just to get me going and then then I can add all of my on top of it right what I'm saying is feels like they're lost in who who they need to identify their different users and what those users want AI to do for them they've taken that they just assume that all designers want to not design or or all web flow users users want to not use web flow. They just want AI just to do everything. Yeah. Every company is assuming that which is wrong. Yeah. Yeah. Um so yeah like if they if I think their their AI ambitions should have been focused on their their marketing targets or their marketing audience because they have a strong marketing marketers audience as you know with analyze and Seth Goden being there and stuff like that there there is a that's a they have a very clear audience of marketers that's one of their biggest selling points I think 5050 to designers is like designers who want to build websites without writing code and marketers who want to work on websites that have been defined for them and they can easily just craft designers are the next generation of the developers. I believe this is uh where you know companies decide uh what tool to go with because web flow does not have the respect of developers like true hard you know code yeah it slow it slows us down if anything really does webflow should be fine with that they should try to get people who are you know junior developers who are trying to become developers but they just get stuck at CSS and uh a bit of JavaScript. they can't completely get these people in and forget about like the hard you know like the the crazy uh developers like ninja developers and designers should be the heart the heart of the product because they are the decision makers any regardless a marketer is is useless without a designer anyway yeah it's an interesting point like as a developer I will use web flow as a developer er, but not for me. I will use what I when I interview a client, I'm talking to a client, I'm looking I'm listening for them wanting to do things themselves once it's been developed or or created or whatever want to. And sometimes people don't want that. You know, sometimes people literally just they want to build a product and then want to they want to work on it for for a year and several years and constantly. That sounds like the where a developer would fit in. But if they just want to build something that they can just create pages from and add content, it's like cool, web flow is your thing. I'm going to I'm going to dislike using it, but it just doesn't need a developer's continual um you know involvement. So yeah, I don't know. It's they need to be clear about who their target market is. And I think you've identified it. There's two major two major. The designer and it's the marketer. Really? Is it? Do you think there's many more? This is part of a larger conversation on my show, Command AI, which we stream live every single week. We discuss the news and all things related to AI in the world of design and web. Catch us next week and join in the banter.