The Most-Seen UI on the Internet? Redesigning Turnstile and Challenge Pages

Hacker News · Feb 27, 2026 · Collected from RSS

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2026-02-2715 min readYou've seen it. Maybe you didn't register it consciously, but you've seen it. That little widget asking you to verify you're human. That full-page security check before accessing a website. If you've spent any time on the Internet, you've encountered Cloudflare's Turnstile widget or Challenge Pages — likely more times than you can count. The Turnstile widget – a familiar sight across millions of websitesWhen we say that a large portion of the Internet sits behind Cloudflare, we mean it. Our Turnstile widget and Challenge Pages are served 7.67 billion times every single day. That's not a typo. Billions. This might just be the most-seen user interface on the Internet.And that comes with enormous responsibility.Designing a product with billions of eyeballs on it isn't just challenging — it requires a fundamentally different approach. Every pixel, every word, every interaction has to work for someone's grandmother in rural Japan, a teenager in São Paulo, a visually impaired developer in Berlin, and a busy executive in Lagos. All at the same time. In moments of frustration.Today we’re sharing the story of how we redesigned Turnstile and Challenge Pages. It's a story told in three parts, by three of us: the design process and research that shaped our decisions (Leo), the engineering challenge of deploying changes at unprecedented scale (Ana), and the measurable impact on billions of users (Marina).Let's start with how we approached the problem from a design perspective. Part 1: The design process The problem Let's be honest: nobody likes being asked to prove they're human. You know you're human. I know I'm human. The only one who doesn't seem convinced is that little widget standing between you and the website you're trying to access. At best, it's a minor inconvenience. At worst? You've probably wanted to throw your computer out the window in a fit of rage. We've all been there. And no one would blame you. Turnstile integrated into a login flowAs the world warms up to what appears to be an inevitable AI revolution, the need for security verification is only increasing. At Cloudflare, we've seen a significant rise in bot attacks — and in response, organizations are investing more heavily in security measures. That means more challenges being issued to more end users, more often.The numbers tell the story:2023: 2.14B daily2024: 3B daily2025: 5.35B dailyThat's a 58.1% average increase in security checks, year over year. More security checks mean more opportunities for end user frustration. The more companies integrate these verification systems to protect themselves and their customers, the higher the chance that someone, somewhere, is going to have a bad experience.We knew it was time to take a hard look at our flagship products and ask ourselves: Are we doing right by the billions of people who encounter these experiences? Are we fulfilling our mission to build a better Internet — not just a more secure one, but a more human one?The answer, we discovered, was: we could do better. The design audit Before redesigning anything, we needed to understand what we were working with. We started by conducting a comprehensive audit of every state, every error message, and every interaction across both Turnstile and Challenge Pages.What we found wasn't the best. The state of inconsistency in the Turnstile widget. Multiple states with no unified approachThe inconsistencies were glaring. We had no unified approach across the multitude of different error scenarios. Some messages were overly verbose and technical ("Your device clock is set to a wrong time or this challenge page was accidentally cached by an intermediary and is no longer available"). Others were too vague to be helpful ("Timed out"). The visual language varied wildly — different layouts, different hierarchies, different tones of voice.We also examined the feedback we'd received online. Social media, support tickets, community forums — we read it all. The frustration was palpable, and much of it was avoidable.Take our feedback mechanism, for example. We offered users feedback options like "The widget sometimes fails" versus "The widget fails all the time." But what's the difference, really? And how were they supposed to know how often it failed? We were asking users to interpret ambiguous options during their most frustrated moments. The more we left open to interpretation, the less useful the feedback became — and the more frustration we saw across social channels. The previous feedback screen: "The widget sometimes fails" vs "The widget fails all the time" — what's the difference?Our Challenge Pages — the full-page security blocks that appear when we detect suspicious activity or when site owners have heightened security settings — had similar issues. Some states were confusing. Others used too much technical jargon. Many failed to provide actionable guidance when users needed it most. The state of inconsistency on the Challenge pages. Multiple states with no unified approachThe audit was humbling. But it gave us a clear picture of where we needed to focus. Mapping the user journey To design better experiences, we first needed to understand every possible path a user could take. What was the happy path? Was there even one? And what were the unhappy paths that led to escalating frustration? Mapping the complete user journey — from initial encounter through error scenarios, with sentiment trackingThis was a true cross-functional effort. We worked closely with engineers like Ana who knew the technical ins and outs of every edge case, and with Marina on the product side who understood not just how the product worked, but how users felt about it — the love and the hate we'd see online.We have some of the smartest people working on bot protection at Cloudflare. But intelligence and clarity aren't the same thing. There's a delicate balance between technical complexity and user simplicity. Only when these two dance together successfully can we communicate information in a way that actually makes sense to people.And here's the thing: the messaging has to work for everyone. A person of any age. Any mental or physical capability. Any cultural background. Any level of technical sophistication. That's what designing at scale really means — you can’t ignore edge cases, since, at such scale, they are no longer edge cases. Establishing a unified information architecture One of the most influential books in UX design is Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think. The core principle is simple: every moment a user spends trying to interpret, understand, or decode your interface is a moment of friction. And friction, especially in moments of frustration, leads to abandonment.Our audit revealed that we were asking users to think far too much. Different pieces of information occupied the same space in the UI across different states. There was no consistent visual hierarchy. Users encountering an error state in Turnstile would find information in a completely different place than they would on a Challenge Page.We made a fundamental decision: one information architecture to rule them all. Visual diagram displaying a unified information architecture with a consistent structure across Turnstile widget and Challenge pagesBoth Turnstile and Challenge Pages would now follow the same structural pattern. The same visual hierarchy. The same placement for actions, for explanatory text, for links to documentation.Did this constrain our design options? Absolutely. We had to say no to a lot of creative ideas that didn't fit the framework. But constraints aren't the enemy of good design — they're often its best friend. By limiting our options, we could go deeper on the details that actually mattered.For users, the benefit is profound: they don't need to re-learn what each piece of the UI means. Error states look consistent. Help links are always in the same place. Once you understand one state, you understand them all. That's cognitive load reduced to a minimum — exactly where it should be during a security verification. What user research taught us How do you keep yourself accountable when redesigning something that billions of people see? You test. A lot.We recruited 8 participants across 8 different countries, deliberately seeking diversity in age, digital savviness, and cultural background. We weren't looking for tech-savvy early adopters — we wanted to understand how the redesign would work for everyone.Our approach was rigorous: participants saw both the current experience and proposed changes, without knowing which was "old" or "new." We counterbalanced positioning to eliminate bias. And we did not just test our new ideas, but also challenged our assumptions about what needed changing in the first place. Two different versions of a Turnstile being tested in an A/B test Some things didn’t need fixing One hypothesis: should we align with competitors? Most CAPTCHA providers show "I am human" across all states. We use distinct content — "Verify you are human," then "Verifying...," then "Success!"Were we overcomplicating things? We tested it head-to-head.Our approach won decisively. For the interactivity state, "Verify you are human" scored 5 out of 8 points versus just 3 for "I am human." For the verifying state, it was even more dramatic — 7.5 versus 0.5. Users wanted to know what was happening, not just be told what they were. User testing results: users strongly favored our approach over the competitor-style designThis experiment didn't ship as a feature, but it was invaluable. It gave us confidence we weren't just being different for the sake of it. Some things were already right. But these needed to change The research surfaced four areas where we were failing users:Help, not bureaucracy. When users encountered errors, we offered "Send Feedback." In testing, they were baffled. "Who am I sending this to? The website? Cloudflare? My ISP?" More importantly, we discovered something fun