So every year, I write a post about the WebAIM Million Report, which tests the top one million homepages for accessibility. The results are always the same - somewhere around 96% of websites fail. I normally focus everything on that.

As sad as it is to consider only 4% of websites are actually accessible to seniors and people with disabilities, what hit me this year is the complexity count. The average homepage now has 1,437 elements. Up 22.5% from last year and nearly doubling since 2019. Wow. Not only does that kind of complexity affect accessibility, I have to wonder if it's contributing to the cognitive overload I keep reading about, and which I myself feel more than ever lately.

I think we've hit what I'm going to coin Peak Complexity. You heard it here first, folks.

Of course the cognitive overload so many people are experiencing right now has more to do with the insanity of the world, the constant bombardment of messaging, and 24/7 fear-based media. Adding AI to the mix just takes everything to yet another level. It's too much.

Time to get simple.

Peak Fold

I've been building websites for 29 years. I can't tell you how many times clients have asked us to cram more "above the fold." My typical wise-ass response: what fold are you talking about? Web pages don't have folds. And people figured out how to scroll in 1997.

But the fear behind it was always real. If someone doesn't see everything immediately, they'll leave. That thinking has driven homepage bloat for two decades. Every meeting where someone says "what about" adds another widget, another section fighting for placement.

People scroll. That was settled 20 years ago. Attention drops as they go, sure. But that doesn’t mean the don’t skim as they scroll. And a page with clear hierarchy, breathing room, and fewer elements competing for attention lets each message be heard.

Feeling Stressed?

What we're missing in most conversations about designing for the user is the mental state of the visitor. We talk about intent. We talk about conversion mindset. We talk about personas and journeys. But if a significant proportion of visitors are experiencing cognitive overload, we should be talking about how to reduce that load.

The American Psychological Association's 2025 Stress in America survey found 62% of adults are stressed about societal division. 75% are more stressed about the country's future than they used to be. The economy feels permanently unstable. The news cycle is 24/7 fear-based media and there is no escaping it - it's on every screen, embedded in every feed. No escape.

And now after living through a two-year pandemic lockdown, we have Artificial Intelligence. Terminator battle scenes aside, this is a one-two punch. For many, AI will kill their jobs. For others it opens new opportunities. Either way, it's relentless and exhausting. Every single day there's a new model that throws out the last plabook. I'll be damned if we don't look back in a decade and realize a lot of us developed something we'll end up calling AI Syndrome or AI Psychosis. Mental fog. Difficulty focusing. Slower decisions. One participant nailed it: "It was like I had a dozen browser tabs open in my head, all fighting for attention.”

So is feeding that poor user a homepage with its 1,437 elements and auto-playing hero carousel. How's that going to go?

Noise vs. Information

Cognitive load research makes a useful distinction between visual complexity and informational complexity. Google's homepage is visually simple and informationally enormous. A logo, a search box, two buttons. All the depth is there. The page just doesn't force you to process it at once.

Most corporate homepages are the opposite. A cookie consent for which you don’t even know what the heck you're consenting to. A nav with 47 links. A hero video that you can’t ignore, that’s fighting a sticky header that’s fighting a notification bar that’s fighting an AI chatbot. The user is exhausted before even moving off the homepage..

Jakob Nielsen has been making this argument for 25 years. Every additional element on screen competes with the relevant one. The math hasn't changed. But the people on the other side of that screen have less capacity to deal with it than at any point we've been able to measure.

Not Empty. Clear.

I want to be careful here. The argument is not "strip everything out."

Oversimplified interfaces frustrate people. I remember one agency a few years back that had a homepage that was all black with just four arrows. Only the forward arrow worked. Sure, interesting concept. But the visitor had no direction. No sense of place. And more times than not, probably assumed the site was broken and jetted.

Remove too many contextual cues and users can't figure out where they are or what to do next. Minimalism that sacrifices clarity isn't calm. It's confusing. And confusion creates its own anxiety.

The test for every element is simple. Does this help the person who just arrived, already tired, figure out if they're in the right place and what to do next? If it doesn't, it's junk.

The 75-Year-Old Test

Here's the test that every designer needs to always be measuring against. Can a 75-year-old with low vision use this site successfully?

That's not a compliance question. It's a UX question. If the answer is yes, you've built something with clear hierarchy, readable text, sufficient contrast, logical navigation, and an interface that doesn't require perfect eyesight or a full tank of cognitive energy. You've built something that actually works.

For the person with AI brain fry, your calm page is a relief. The mobile user in direct sunlight? Your contrast and tap targets work. The procurement officer who needs to understand what you do in 30 seconds? Your clear message lands. Google's search engine crawlers and AI agents? Your semantic HTML is exactly what they need to parse your content accurately.

71 million Boomers hold $548 billion in discretionary spending. They're disproportionately affected by every factor in this article. Low contrast, tiny targets, interfaces that weren't built for them. And they're the fastest-growing segment of internet users. Designing for their reality isn't charity. It's good business.

Vibe Coding Is Compounding the Problem

WebAIM's own conclusion names it. The spike in complexity likely reflects "automated or AI-assisted coding practices" - what we now call vibe coding. More and more websites and digital experiences are benign designed by AI.

The deeper issue is that these models are trained on existing design patterns. The patterns that got us to 1,437 elements and 56 errors per page. AI generating layouts from those patterns compounds the problem with a tool that has zero sense of the user's emotional state and no ability to feel the difference between calming and triggering… aka SLOP.

This shows that human designers are  irreplaceable. Not as pixel pushers, but as people who are able to FEEL what a design conveys. Designers who get that humans aren’t there just to consume words and data. They also need to feel the feels, and AI just can’t do that.

Calm is the New UX Gold Standard

When every competitor has a bloated homepage with a hero video, three carousels, and a chatbot popup, the brand that presents one clear message with one clear path forward feels like walking into a quiet room after a loud party.

Design for the 75-year-old with low vision. The drained knowledge worker. The AI agent parsing your page. They all need the same thing. Clarity. Structure. Calm. That's the gold standard.

Less is more