Smashing Magazine has published The Death of the Button: Why the Best Interface Is No Interface. It is a good piece about a real shift, and if you work anywhere near design you should read it.
The argument: we are moving from point-and-click interfaces to intent. You state a goal, the software performs the ten steps in the background, and the interface recedes. Booking a flight stops being a ten-click ordeal and becomes one sentence.
That shift is real. But the article asks the designer’s question — how should we design when the interface dissolves? — and never asks the question that matters more to everyone who is not building an AI product.
If the assistant is doing the choosing, how does it choose?
What happens to the businesses inside the answer?
The article’s own example gives the game away. A user asks Perplexity to compare the top three budget laptops for a computer science student. Perplexity reads dozens of articles, weighs specifications, cross-references reviews, and returns a clean comparison table in about two seconds.
Three laptops made it into that table. Many more did not.
For Perplexity, that is a UX achievement — thirty clicks collapsed into one. For the manufacturer that did not make the table, it is a distribution event. And no amount of redesigning their own website would have changed it, because the customer never went there.
This is the part that should concern Caribbean business owners. The article frames the disappearing interface as liberation. For a hotel in Tobago or a firm in Port of Spain, the interface is not disappearing. It is relocating to a building they cannot edit.
What do the assistants actually have to work with?
Rather than theorise about it, we checked.
On 11 September 2026 we ran four queries a real customer might plausibly ask, and looked not at the answers but at the sources behind them — specifically, how many were the business’s own website, and how many belonged to somebody else.
| Query | Sources | Business’s own site | Third-party |
|---|---|---|---|
| Best boutique hotel in Tobago | 7 | 0 | 7 |
| Best restaurants in Port of Spain | 7 | 0 | 7 |
| Best accountant in Port of Spain | 9 | 1 | 8 |
| Best web design agency in Trinidad & Tobago | 8 | 5 | 3 |
Across the three ordinary consumer categories: 23 sources, exactly one of which was a business’s own website.
That one was Aegis Outsourcing & Advisory Services, a Port of Spain accounting firm. Everything else came from Tripadvisor, OpenTable, Expedia, Booking.com, Trip.com, Oyster, a couple of local directories, a freelance marketplace, a salary-data site, and a travel vlogger’s blog post from 2023.
The detail we keep returning to: BDO — a global network firm with an office on Frederick Street — was represented in that source set by its Facebook page, not its website.
Does that mean those businesses are invisible to AI?
No. And this is where most commentary on this topic goes wrong.
Bacolet Beach Club, The Villas at Stonehaven, Blue Haven, Blue Waters Inn and Native Abode were all named. So were The Waterfront, Buzo Osteria Italiana, Samurai, TOWN, Lola’s Food Company and Donkee and Audie’s. These businesses are being recommended, by name, today.
They are simply not the ones supplying the words.
The risk here is not absence. The risk is loss of authorship. You can be recommended enthusiastically and still have no say in what is said about you — your prices, your current menu, your opening hours, whether you still offer the service being described, whether the photograph is from this decade. The answer gets assembled from whatever third parties happened to write down, and the customer never sees your version.
An assistant summarising you badly is a worse commercial problem than an assistant ignoring you, because it looks like an answer and nobody clicks through to check.
Why was the web design result different?
One query behaved unlike the others. For “best web design agency in Trinidad and Tobago,” five of eight sources were agencies’ own websites. The rest were Clutch, TechBehemoths and Sortlist.
Agencies being good at being found is not a shock — it is adjacent to what they sell. But the useful reading is not “agencies are special.” It is that first-party websites can hold their position in these answers when they have been built to. Nothing structural prevents a Tobago hotel from being its own best source. Most sectors here have simply never given a machine a reason to prefer their website over a directory entry.
For the avoidance of doubt: we ran our own category too, and UX Caribbean does not appear in it. We are early in our own programme, and it would be dishonest to report this finding while quietly leaving ourselves out of it.
How solid is this, really?
Modest, and we would rather say so than dress it up.
- These are web search results, not a transcript of any single assistant’s answer. Assistants ground their responses in retrievable web sources, so this shows the pool they draw from — it is a reasonable proxy, not a recording.
- One run, one date, four queries. Directional, not definitive.
- The search was US-geolocated. The same questions asked from a Trinidad connection may return a different mix.
What this is not is a claim that any named business is performing badly. Several are visibly doing well. The finding is narrower: it is about where the source material lives. On that question the pattern was consistent enough to be worth reporting, and anyone can repeat it in ten minutes.
The footnote that matters more than the argument
While checking the article’s citations we found something more useful than our own data.
Webster cites Jakob Nielsen’s AI: First New UI Paradigm in 60 Years in support of the shift, and that citation is fair as far as it goes. Nielsen does describe the move from command-based interaction to what he calls “intent-based outcome specification,” and he writes that it “completely reverses the locus of control.”
But Nielsen does not predict the death of the button. He predicts its survival:
“Thus, the second UI paradigm will survive, albeit in a less dominant role. Future AI systems will likely have a hybrid user interface that combines elements of both intent-based and command-based interfaces while still retaining many GUI elements.”
He describes himself as “an enthusiastic fan of graphical user interfaces,” argues that clicking things on a screen is “an intuitive and essential aspect of user interaction that should not be overlooked,” and doubts that current chat interfaces are what we will be using in a few years. His article is also dated 18 June 2023 — three years old, not a bulletin from the frontier.
None of this makes the Smashing piece wrong; its central observation stands. But an article about a future in which machines summarise sources on our behalf is itself leaning on a summary that points somewhere slightly different from the source.
That is the entire problem in miniature. An AI summary of a source is not the source. Opening the primary document took four minutes. It is the cheapest professional habit available in this field, and we have published our own mistakes from skipping it.
What should a Caribbean business do about this?
Four things, roughly in this order.
- Measure before you change anything. Find out what the assistants currently say about you, and write it down with the date on it. Without a baseline you cannot tell improvement from noise, and you will be at the mercy of whoever tells you a good story afterwards.
- Fix the corroboration, not just the website. Google Business Profile, directory entries, listings, reviews, and the same business name, address and phone number everywhere. This is unglamorous and it is the largest single lever.
- Make your own site answer questions in plain language. Prices, service definitions, coverage areas, exceptions — written out where a machine can read them, not locked in a PDF or a carousel.
- Keep the facts current in the places actually being read. If Tripadvisor is narrating your restaurant, the accuracy of Tripadvisor is a commercial concern, not a vanity one.
Note the order, because it is the opposite of what most people expect. The majority of that work is not on your website. The button moved; the work moved with it.
Frequently asked questions
Does this mean my website no longer matters?
No, but what it is for has changed. Fewer customers will browse it and more machines will read it. It is now less of a shopfront and more of a reference document — the authoritative place a machine checks your facts. A site that states prices, services, locations and exceptions in plain, structured language does more commercial work than a beautiful one that hides them in images and carousels.
Is this just SEO with a new name?
There is overlap, but the goal is different. SEO competes for a position in a list of links that a person then chooses from. This competes to be included in a single synthesised answer where there is no list and usually no click. Traditional SEO wins attention; this wins inclusion. The tactics shift too, with far more weight on off-site corroboration and consistent, machine-readable facts.
Where should a Caribbean business start?
Start by measuring what assistants currently say about you, and date it. Then claim and complete your Google Business Profile, make sure your business name, address and phone number are identical everywhere they appear, and write plain answers to the ten questions customers ask you most. That sequence costs very little and addresses the largest gap first, which for most Caribbean businesses is off-site corroboration rather than website design.
Can you guarantee that AI will recommend my business?
No, and you should be wary of anyone who does. AI assistants are not a ranking system anyone controls, and their outputs shift. What can be promised is the method and the proof: measure your baseline, do the work, measure again, and show you what changed. Anyone offering a guaranteed position is describing something they cannot see inside.
I run a small business with no marketing budget. Is this hopeless?
No. Most of the highest-value work here is free and takes attention rather than money: a complete and accurate Google Business Profile, consistent business details across every listing, current opening hours, and honest written answers to common questions. Small businesses often move faster on this than large ones, because there is no committee between noticing the problem and fixing it.
Sources
- Carrie Webster, The Death of the Button: Why the Best Interface Is No Interface — Smashing Magazine, 9 September 2026.
- Jakob Nielsen, AI: First New UI Paradigm in 60 Years — Nielsen Norman Group, 18 June 2023.
- Golden Krishna, The Best Interface Is No Interface — New Riders, 2015.
- Source counts recorded by UX Caribbean on 11 September 2026 from US-geolocated web search results for the four queries listed above. Method and limitations are stated in full in the section above.