Stop Sending Your Web Designer an AI Website Brief
How to annoy your designer before the project even starts? Send them a 27-page AI-generated website brief.
I'm only half joking. This has become incredibly common. Ask any designer and they'll recognise the document: beautifully formatted, meticulously structured, covering everything from target audience and sitemap to UX principles, SEO, accessibility, visual direction and functionality.
"The website should provide a seamless and intuitive user experience."
"The visual direction should feel modern, professional and engaging."
"The site should be fully responsive across desktop, tablet and mobile."
Twenty-seven pages later, I still don't know why you're rebuilding the website.
I get it. AI makes it easy to turn a few thoughts into a "comprehensive professional website brief", so why wouldn't you? The problem is that AI is very good at making a brief longer without making it more useful. And a generic brief has a cost: the designer ends up solving a generic problem, and you end up with a website that could belong to any company in your industry.
A useful brief doesn't need to give us all the answers. It needs to help us find the right questions.
That's why we don't ask our clients for website briefs at all. We run a discovery session instead. One conversation gives me more than a 20-page document, because I can ask the next question. Then challenge the answer. And sometimes realise that what we're discussing has very little to do with the website.
Not every website problem is a website problem. A client comes to us asking for a new site, and once we start talking it becomes clear they can't explain who they're for, what makes them different or what the central message should be. Then we go back to brand strategy before anyone mentions a sitemap. I don't expect a client to diagnose what they need before they come to us. Part of discovery is working out where we're actually starting from.
When the brand is already strong, whether built internally or by another agency, I'm not going to drag anyone through an exercise they don't need. The questions simply change:
What role does the website play in the business, and why?
Who will use it, and what are they coming there to do?
What information needs to be found quickly? What actions matter most?
What happens before and after someone visits?
What does the internal team need to manage, connect or automate?
What isn't working in the current website?
What does the business need the new one to do that the old one can't?
Now we're talking about the website. After that, it's our job to recommend the solution: structure, hierarchy, user journeys, functionality, CMS, integrations, the whole experience across the site. I've built hundreds of websites. I know the drill. I don't need a client or AI to prescribe all of that before we've spoken. I need enough real information to understand the problem. Then we work out the best solution.
So how does AI can help with website brief?
I use AI myself. I understand why clients use it. And I don't think we're going back to a world where everyone sits in front of a blank Word document trying to remember what belongs in a website brief. Nor should we.
AI is brilliant at helping you prepare. The trick is to use it on your information, rather than asking it to invent the information for you.
Give it your messy notes, transcripts from internal conversations, customer feedback, every complaint about the current website. Ask it to organise all of that, find repetition and contradictions. Ask it to separate brand questions from website questions and flag anything that sounds generic or unsupported. And, please, ask it to shorten the document. That's an excellent use of AI.
What I would avoid is asking AI: "Write me a comprehensive website brief for a premium [insert industry] company." Because it will. It will give you target audiences, UX recommendations, suggested functionality, a sitemap, visual direction, CTAs, SEO considerations and probably a paragraph about responsive design. It may all be perfectly sensible.
But sensible isn't the same as specific. So here's what to send instead. Your messy notes. The three things that annoy you most about the current site. One sentence on why now.
That's the brief. We'll take it from there.
