Pixels Never Dry: Our Greatest Power Is Now Our Greatest Responsibility

In a recent meeting with a trusted healthcare client, he used the phrase “pixels never dry.” In the moment, it came off as a throw-away line, aimed at providing a bit of levity and reassuring the combined client-and-agency team in the midst of a long and complex project. But I have to admit that it’s taken on a more outsized presence in my brain in the weeks since I first heard it, especially as we approach the 20th anniversary of World Usability Day on November 13.

It is not lost to me that our digital agency, Genuine, and WUD were both founded in 2005 with the same underlying belief in technology’s power to improve human experience. And for most of the past two decades, that power has been rooted in the opportunity to push boundaries, innovate and challenge the way things have always been done.

Building for “wow”

When I joined Genuine in 2008, we prioritised the ideal experience over the inclusive one. We built award-winning Flash sites and rich, video-heavy experiences with little thought for users with visual or hearing disabilities, let alone bandwidth or data usage constraints. Terms like 'graceful degradation' were just entering the lexicon, but, if we’re being honest, most of those ‘fallback’ experiences were far more degraded than graceful. We were designing and building for "wow," not necessarily for all. And throughout, trust was assumed; it wasn't a metric we were designing for.

But, about that same time we saw a confluence of things: wider adoption of Internet technologies, legal and regulatory pressures, and inclusion as more of a business driver. All these combined meant more companies looked beyond checklists and guidelines to think about situational context, have deeper empathy for users.

Fast forward to 2025 and we see that the digital landscape is no longer one of naïve optimism. Despite significant improvements to web accessibility, the landscape is defined by alarmingly low trust in media, institutions, and even the platforms themselves. AI-generated propaganda, deepfakes, and opaque data-harvesting models have made us all, understandably, sceptical. The very malleability of our medium has been weaponised.

Our Spiderman Moment

As Genuine and WUD enter our respective third decades, in an era of profound distrust at nearly every level, this malleability is no longer just a power. It is our single greatest responsibility. The commercial imperative (what we do at Genuine) and the human-centred mission (what WUD stands for) have forcefully converged. And this year’s WUD theme, "Emerging Technologies and Human Experience," perfectly captures this tension. Our industry, (not to mention our cultural, economic and political systems) is being challenged with how we can wield the power of these technologies without eroding the trust and privacy that human-centred design is built on. Our focus on privacy, trust, and ethics isn't just a nice-to-have, it's an emergency brake.

Our new brief: Designing for Trust

• The insight: The malleability of our digital medium can serve as the antidote to broken trust, if we wield it responsibly.  
• The challenge: Create experiences that engender trust by leaning into those attributes that make us uniquely human.  
• The KPIs: Our new measures of success become transparency and earned trust.

Mandatories:

• Remember that accessibility isn’t a barrier to creativity, it’s a boon. Design like it.
• Make work that works. Don’t forget what we’re doing. We’re crafting experiences so that people can use them.
• Bear in mind that trust is earned not claimed. Prioritise usability above all else by leading with empathy, compassion, and creativity.

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Our call to action

If pixels never dry, then there’s more work to be done. For 20 years, this notion has been our license to try new things and push the limits of the available technologies. For the next 20, it must be our pledge: to use our power not just to make experiences cooler, more cutting edge, or but to make them worthy of belief. The most "usable" experience we can build today is one the user can trust.