From Navigation to Intention: Reframing the Web Experience through Goal-Driven Interfaces

The dominant paradigm for interacting with the Web has long relied on menu-driven navigation and complex graphical structures that can impose a high cognitive load on users. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) enable flexible NL understanding, yet purely conversational systems lack the stability and visual affordances required for complex tasks. This paper introduces Mirage, a framework that bridges these paradigms by making graphical user interface (GUI) components interpretable and orchestrable by LLMs, enabling on-the-fly construction of simplified UIs tailored to user requests. Developers declare application functions as reusable components with semantic descriptions and typed schemas; Mirage maps user goals, expressed in natural language, to the most relevant components and renders them as interactive interfaces. We implemented Mirage as a Next.js framework and validated it in a user study comparing the new paradigm to the navigation of a traditional website. Results show that Mirage significantly reduces task completion time, lowers cognitive workload, and achieves higher usability without compromising accuracy. Our approach also highlights new design directions toward supporting on-the-fly building of goal-driven interfaces.