Show HN: DesignArena – crowdsourced benchmark for AI-generated UI/UX
18 comments
·July 12, 2025coryvirok
This is really good! It would be really cool to somehow get human designs in the mix to see how the models compare. I bet there are curated design datasets with descriptions that you could pass to each of the models and then run voting as a "bonus" question (comparing the human and AI generated versions) after the normal genAI voting round.
grace77
wow this is a super interesting idea, and the team loves it — we'll fast follow-through and follow-up here when we add it, thanks for the suggestion!
debesyla
This would be extra interesting for unique designs - something more experimental, new. As as for now even when you ask AI to break all rules it still outputs standard BS.
butz
What is this new trend of building websites without scrollbars? Was this website also made by GenAI?
grace77
I wish—just added them back
muskmusk
This is a surprisingly good idea. The model vs model is fun, but not really that useful.
But this could be a legitimate way to design apps in general if you could tell the models what you liked and didn't like.
grace77
yes! that is the hope — /play is our first attempt at building out utility, would love your feedback and will ship hard to make it happen!
a2128
I tried the vote and both results always suck, there's no option to say neither are winners. Also it seems from the network tab you're sending 4 (or 5?) requests but only displaying the first two that respond, which biases it to the small models that respond more quickly which usually results in showing two bad results
grace77
Yes — great point. We originally waited for all model responses and randomized the vote order, but that made it a very bad user experience -- some models, especially open-source ones, took over 4 minutes to respond, leading to a high voter drop-off rate.
To preserve the voter experience without introducing bias, our current approach waits for the slowest model within each binary comparison — so even if one model is faster, we don’t display until both are ready. You're right that this does introduce some bias for the two smallest models, and we'd love to hear suggestions for how to make this better!
As for the 5th request: we actually kick off one reserve model alongside the four randomly selected for the tournament. This backup isn’t shown unless one of the four fails — it’s not the fastest or lowest-latency model, just a randomly selected fallback to keep the system robust without skewing results.
ethan_smith
Adding a "neither is good" option would improve data quality by preventing forced choices between two poor designs.
grxxxce
this is a great note — will be sure to add!
justusm
nice! Training models using reward signals for code correctness is obviously very common; I'm very curious to see how good things can get using a reward signal obtained from visual feedback
grace77
As are we, seems like the natural next step
adi_hn07
Awesome web app !! This is loads of fun and gives an idea about which models are best for which type of UI design.
Do launch on https://www.superlaun.ch for more traffic and exposure for your web app.
I’ve been using AI to generate some repetitive frontend (guilty), and while most outputs felt vibe-coded, some results were surprisingly good. So I cleaned it up and made a ranking game out of it with friends, and you can check it out here: https://www.designarena.ai/vote
/vote: Your prompt will be answered by four random, anonymous models. You pick the one you prefer and crown the winner, tournament-style.
/leaderboard: See the current winning models, as dictated by voter preferences.
/play: Iterate quickly by seeing four models respond to the same input and pressing space to regenerate the results you don’t lock-in.
We were especially impressed with the quality of DeepSeek and Grok, and variance between categories (To judge by the results so far, OpenAI is very good for game dev, but seems to suck everywhere else).
We’ve learned a lot, and are curious to hear your comments and questions. Excited to make this better!