Remember way back in the day in the history of website design, when websites had buttons that you had to click and it was totally up to the designer what they said and how easy they were to spot?! Crazy, right?
How on earth were they expected to know what we were looking for, when they didn’t even know who we were, or why we were on their website?
Fortunately, it’s 2025 and we’ve come a long way from those archaic practices. The Web has evolved into a global, intelligent network of resources – we simply ask it what we need and it delivers us personalised results, guaranteed to be useful. AI has transformed how we interact online – the traditional website experience is very much dead.
However… We didn’t arrive at this point by accident. Plenty of traditional techniques have contributed to the way in which the web has evolved over the last 25 years, from minor features to major considerations that have been used to enhance the way we experience content.
Let’s have a look back at some of those techniques that were used to make websites Self-Aware – often missed by legacy website designers, but always appreciated by website visitors. You’ll hopefully have seen some of these in the wild!
Dark Mode
We all know about Dark Mode, right? It’s that handy setting on our devices that stops you burning your eyes out when the outside world is… well, dark. Nowadays, with most of our web interactions being conversational, this goes unnoticed – but back in 2025 it was kind of a big deal.
You may remember a few websites having the ability to toggle between Light & Dark versions, but did you consider that they could do this automatically for you?
Most of the coding languages we used to create websites offered a way to get both the time of day, as well as the visitors’ device settings.
It would be fairly straightforward for developers to not only create a Dark Mode for their site, but to have it switch depending on these factors without having to press a toggle.
This way, the website would automatically adapt itself – no more blinding people browsing in the dark with a bright white website, or having to compromise on design trying to design something that would appeal to both modes.
Illuminating! (or not, as the case may be…)
Cookies
If you were visiting websites in 2025, you’ll know all about Cookies. Well – maybe not all about them, but at least that they existed – thanks to the never-ending slew of popups that you were presented with upon opening almost any site.
Alongside the sneaky things like data collection & tracking, developers could also use Cookies to improve your experience of their websites. A couple of ways they could have done this might have included:
Filter History
Let’s say you had a shop, or some other sort of archive on your site. A visitor might only be looking for a particular thing, so they use your filters to narrow down their search. They find what they’re looking for and plan to come back later to review it. Great!
But… they come back later, and have to filter all over again. They are sad! Developers could use Cookies here to prevent this frustration. We wouldn’t want to just preload their search for them, as they might not want that – but an option as simple as –
‘Use my previous search’
– would help them get instantly back to their results. They are happy!
Content Suggestions
This one worked particularly well on sites offering different types of end goal – ie. Services, Products or just Articles. Maybe visitors found a post through a Google search, and as the website manager you wanted them to continue to explore. How would you know what they were interested in?
You may have heard of tools such as Clarity, used for capturing data from users visiting a web page. Though you may not have considered that this could also be done in real-time! Here’s a potential example:
- You’re a pet store selling pets online. Your blog post covers the keeping of various kinds of pets, with paragraphs covering Small Mammals, Reptiles, Birds & Fish.
- You also sell Small Mammals, Reptiles, Birds & Fish through categorised sections of your site.
- Using IntersectionObserver technology, you could determine which sections of your post the visitor lingered on the longest – and tailor your suggested content accordingly. They skimmed the article but spent 10 minutes reading about fish? Show them more fish!
- This data could be stored in Cookies, so it would constantly be kept up to date with what the visitor was interested in, and the suggested content updated in real-time.
Localisation
Localisation was really important on traditional websites where the content needed to be unique to visitors in different locations. This would generally be for a couple of reasons:
- Language (they needed to be able to read the site!)
- Physical Addresses (they might want directions, or a branch of the company nearest to them)
Both of these could be automated to improve the UX of the website:
Language
To optimise websites for different languages, the content could be translated using either human translation (slow & expensive, but most accurate) or AI translation (quick & cheap, but sometimes made mistakes).
We could store these translations in the site, and use the visitor’s IP address to determine which country they were visiting from, and show the language that matched – while also providing a switch to allow them to change it if they wanted. Simple!
Physical Location
In addition to just your country, we could also perform more accurate Geolocation. If you ever approved the browser popup ‘This site wants to know your location’ – congratulations, you’ve been geolocated!
Sites featuring Google Maps to show a location, or with a range of branches around the country, could use this to personalise your experience.
Instead of a regular map, it could show directions from your actual address.
Branches could automatically be sorted by nearest to you, making finding the right one much more convenient.
Speed Optimisation
Preloading
You may, or may not have heard of DNS Prefetching / Preloading. This was a technique where we instructed the user’s browser to load resources from somewhere before the page actually needed them – things like font files and external CSS were often ‘prefetched’. Did you know, though, that we could also fetch entire pages?
Using intelligent javascript, we could detect when someone’s mouse lingered on a button on the page – and then immediately preload that page’s content – before they actually opened the link.
This would result in that page loading much faster in their browser when they did decide to click on it – saving loading times and the potential for a lost lead.
Performance Tests
Another way that our websites could think for themselves is by using performance tests to analyse the capabilities of the visitor’s device, before serving them material appropriate to their power. Not everyone in 2025 possessed the newest, fanciest, ultra-beefy phones or computers – plenty of people (most, actually) were still working with limited hardware. We had the technology to display incredible 3D scenes, but what would be the point if it crippled users’ devices?
Using relatively lightweight performance tests was a great way to determine whether their browser was up to the task – and if it wasn’t, web pages could be reduced to a version that still hit the mark visually, but was much less intensive to load. They could also determine other things such as media format support & support for modern CSS such as scroll behaviour, to load resources appropriately.
Physical Sensors
Did you know that many fingerprint sensors built into mobile phones in 2025 also doubled as heartbeat monitors?
I recently came across a calming/meditation app that used this feature to progressively enhance its UX – while going through the steps in the app, the user could measure their heartbeat and try to lower it through the calming sequences offered – and different sequences would be offered depending on your starting rate.
This is a great example of how physical attributes of a device could be used to improve the self-aware capabilities of a website or app.
In Summary…
Plenty of our standard practices used by our Web Intelligence in 2050 have roots in some of the features mentioned above, alongside other advanced techniques used by designers & developers to nail down the UX of their sites and make them as self-aware as possible, to tailor experiences to the users themselves.
Next time you’re building or commissioning something on the web, think about how it could be intelligently optimised in this way – your users will love you for it!