Original question text by @phantomwise@lemmy.ml
What are the modern design trends you hate most? Feel free to rant! Mine are:
- Physical buttons are out of fashion, now EVERYTHING must have a touch screen instead! Especially if it makes the appliance more inconvenient to use. Like having to press a flimsy touch screen ten times to scroll through a washing machine’s programs instead of just turning a physical knob and pressing a physical start button.
- Every website looks like it’s made for a phone and was vomited by the same app in slightly different flavors of vomit.
- Actually EVERYTHING looks like it’s made for a phone… Like what’s the deal with all those hamburger menus on DESKTOP apps? Please just put a regular menu and same me some pointless clicking, it’s not like you’re lacking screen space. I especially hate that those menus can’t be opened from the keyboard like regular menus.
I fucking hate the waste of space on websites. I also hate topbars that follow me as I scroll down.
- No error messages, ever. Because apparently users hate information with all their heart and are at risk of burning down cities if they ever find out what the fuck went wrong with an application.
- Disappearing scroll bars
Users have somehow been trained to ignore and dismiss error messages. Probably from getting too many ad pop-ups.
Users are lazy AF and hate to read. No matter how instructive the error message, some people would rather open a helpdesk ticket because “the computer isn’t working again”.
It says right there your USB drive is full and suggests deleting some files to free up space, Karen! 🤨
Users have always hated computers but they now must use them and treat them as appliances.
When my parents needed a new computer, I told them “no hp ever, and don’t buy an anti-virus, it’s built-in now.” They obviously knew better than me and asked the salesman instead. They bought a hp computer with a McAffee subscription…
Worse than useless error messages are useless error messages that try to be cute/funny.
Uh oh! We made an oopsie 👉👈 sowwy we wost your data
Two buttons on the bottom of the window:
- “It’s okay fam!”
and
- “I’m a grumpy meanie who doesnt understand things happen!”
Disappearing scroll bars
Isn’t this triggable in most OSs? Unless we are talking about mobile, which I lean towards disappearing because of screen sizes.
Showing ”2 weeks ago” or ”1 month ago” instead of the actual date. ”1 month ago” can be anything between 30 days and 60 days ago.
This makes my blood just boil. I can do math, you fuckers. I am aware of dates. I wanna know when this shit went online.
Even worse: “last week/month/year” lumps everything together when you start the next week/month/year
* Sort by date *
* Sorts date alphabetically *
Looking at you Altium Designer
If all dates are ISO-8601 what’s the problem?
Because they’re not. Altium has them as DD.MM.YYYY mm.hh.ss.
I don’t disagree, but generally these have a hover property that gives the date.
It’s annoying when going through a list of multiple ”1 month ago” entries. Maybe I’m looking for an entry at a certain date. Aim with mouse, wait one second, repeat.
What I could easily visually identify in less than 1 second can take more than 10 seconds to find.
It also greatly increases the cognitive load of using the program. If there are many entries to look for, then it’s going to be difficult to keep all actual dates in memory.
”Where was the 14 April entry? I need to check again. Ah there it is! Now I need to compare it against the 30 April entry. Where was it again? It was just in front of me…”
Then mouse hover doesn’t work on mobile.
The option is called “relative date” (as opposed to absolute date). On macos you can switch it off:
- open Finder, go to list view
- select very first item in hierarchy
- click on the little triangle next to the (folder-)icon to expand but press the option key wihle doing so
- hit “cmd” + “J” - a settings panel will open
- there is a tick box that says “relative date” that needs to be disabled (unticked)
- if you want to apply this settings as the new default setting for all finder windows, press the “apply as standard”-button at the bottom. All dates will show now the actual date instead of “today”, “yesterday” and such.
Oh you sweet summer child, thinking that will apply to most websites.
Tthis setting is not intended to apply to websites. With this setting you can change whether the date is shown as absolute (dd.mm.yyyy) oder relative (today, yesterday,…) for your own files on your computer.
We use gitlab and I knew my coworker commited something yesterday, I deployed a new version yesterday but I wasn’t sure if I deployed before or after his commit. Why do they just show yester instead of a normal timestamp. Do these developers think we can’t read?
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I honestly think a lot of it is that they have to keep twiddling with shit to have something to do.
These pieces of garbage have come across my desk as “requirements” too because they get copied and pasted from other “best of breed” apps from the web.
Most of the designers I’ve encountered in my day to day work love nothing better than to copy from other apps rather than actually think for fifteen seconds about how to design something.
Items are no longer made to last past their warranty.
They are made to last past the time you’re allowed to leave a review.
I’d like to leave a positive review of this comment, but the review period has expired.
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Highly recommend the When Phones were Fun series.
I’m an avid fan of Mr Fisher. Highly recommend his videos. and he looks like Riker, if anyone is reading this.
Every appliance, monitor, speaker, clock, really anything that plugs in has to have a blue LED.
Got a modem from the cable company installed in my bedroom, the indicator lights were bright enough to read by.
The problem I have isn’t so much that they’re blue, but that they’re bright. I have flashlights with modes dimmer than the average modern indicator LED.
Get some blue-tack and blind all those blinkers!
The lights have use, I cover them with black electrical tape to dim them sufficiently
LED indicator lights on things that have nothing to indicate. Does an electric fan need an indicator? Will you be confused about whether it’s operating or not if it doesn’t have one? Oh, it’s in swivel mode! Good thing it told me that, or I might have thought it was swiveling for other reasons.
These indicators help in troubleshooting. If the indicator says the device should be swiveling, but doesn’t swivel, you know it’s broken. If there’s no indicator, you might think you’re just too stupid to put it in swiveling mode.
Old-fashioned switches, of course, solved this problem without LEDs.
Minimalism.
It’s everywhere from company logos, to fast food interior design, and now the vexillology community swears by minimalist flag designs.
The open floor plan was the beginning of our demise.
Almighty Profit Motive™ forbid we proles find any semblance of joy in our lives and - gasp - interact with the physical world around us in any meaningful and engaged way!
No, we must be deprived of all dopamine outside of our designated corporate brainrot centers.
Colors. Society has been getting more monochrome for years. And now black and white houses are all over.
Oh man yeah, everything’s monochrome. Grey houses, grey fences, white cars, grey window frames, grey kitchens. Everything is so dull.
I am about to close on my first house and it has white aluminum siding. I want to replace the siding, but what color do I choose? Also the roof is red metal.
any color you want. Your local paint store can can mix any of tens of thousand different colors while you wait. Paint is cheap - spend the extra cost for their best paint and it is still cheap.
make sure you don’t move where a hoa puts limits on you - and tell your realtor not to waste your time on those places.
Paint is cheap
I mean, compared to gold bars I guess. (Guess who’s painting their house)
Red and green go well together. Perhaps a natural foresty color.
Yeah, like a Christmas house. Sounds very tasteful.
My house is a reddish brown with a green metal roof. My cars are black, red, and yellow, and I do everything I can to make sure that I am surrounded by at least some kind of light and color at all times.
If I was dating a girl and I found out that she was a sad beige mom, that would be the end of the relationship.
Give me back my God damn full keyboard and headphone jack. (Phones)
1.) Everything is a “smart” device. Household appliances, as a general rule, should not be connectable to the internet or require an app.
Cheaper components, poor build quality, and lack of user serviceable parts are the primary reasons your washer and dryer last 10 years compared to your parents Maytag set that was still ticking away after 30. Cheap, unnecessary electronics, which don’t have as long a lifespan as mechanical timers and switches, only exacerbate this problem.
2.) Cordless tools as a means of vendor locking customers.
I feel like I should bring back this timeless Tumblr post. I do not want internet on any of my appliances, and nobody should.
I’m way more inclined to connect my devices if I can actually control them and not just have random seemingly pointless data about me harvested. But mostly we just don’t get that choice.
Every electronic item whether it be a hot water kettle, air conditioner or an UPS backup in my camper, even my electric toothbrush has to make a noise, a bing or beep when either the things starts, changes phase or finishes.
Sort of meta, but: Alienation.
Buildings plopped down in a rectangle with a standard layout—boxy building with door facing parking lot—with no ornamentation, no contextual clues about what’s inside, and worst, no consideration or design dialogue whatsoever with the surroundings. It’s like a city as Lego set, each building on its own bar plate, and they can be shuffled around in any order. Designers talk about design language, and this style says, “fuck you.”
Food that just shows up at your door after ordering from an app, made by a “ghost kitchen.” Possibly located in one of those boxes-with-a-parking-lot. No connection to other humans. (Or is that a tire distributor’s headquarters? No way to tell.)
Company web sites with no information about who runs the company, or where it is, or much about its connection to the community. The product is probably made on spec by an anonymous Chinese factory, so even if you can talk to somebody, they’re either in a contract call center serving hundreds of companies, or somebody not paid enough to care.
Speaking of low-paid lackeys, the fast food-ification of the landscape. They’re getting rid of dining rooms, so your only human interaction is briefly through a window. If you’re lucky. They’re working on getting rid of that, too. Then, you’re sealed behind a windshield, in cars that get more fortress-like every year, never seeing another human face.
A lot of people say that they’re introverts and hate people and like it this way, but we also have a pandemic of loneliness and poor mental health , so…
- When interface shifts around due to information update (e.g new bluetooth devices found).
- When primary content in a website is hidden behind hover effects.
- Expensive animations, blur and gradients with no functionality.
- When an app treats me like a baby and asks me 20 questions one at a time instead of giving me a menu of options.
- Excesive round corners
- Excesive padding on apps.
I just really hate when webpages take 10 seconds to load a cluttered mess of an interface with no sense of direction
Hiding your UX behind a series of next buttons, asking for more, More, MORE PII
- Excesive round corners
- Excesive padding on apps.
Its so you dont cut yourself on sharp edges or hit your head on the UI elements. If not the literal function than certanly ment to envoke the feeling of crib padding.
Yeah, they look and feel more comfortable but sometimes the go overkill and just lose a lot of space for nothing.
Oh Man, the number of times I deleted something because of the notification on top that shift everything down… Drives me mad.
This button “style.” WTF even is this? It’s objectively and functionally terrible.
Also McDonald’s brutalism. But then, I’m happy not to eat there.
Someone on the design team heard that squircles are the latest shit and put zero thought into implementing them.
How was this person hired onto a design team?! You can’t even read the full button text because it’s cut off for no reason!!
Worse than the squircle button design?
- the height of the “Home” button isn’t even the same as the rest of the other buttons
- no spacing between the buttons
- the element surrounding those buttons don’t even contain buttons properly
- lack of proper spacing between the buttons and the containing element
I am not wanting vast swathes of white space between elements, but if you’re giving them background colors so that you indicate where the user can click (and thus interact with the button) at least have some decency to give them some breathing room. Sure, when hovering you can add an effect such that it either changes color, brightness, or gains a glowy border or what have you, but most of the time none of those elements are hovered! You’d be seeing them all crammed together like sardines in a tube!!
Oh, and I got so riled up that I didn’t even address that out of place “ExtraCare scan in store” element. Why is it even covering the “Discover” text? Was the foreground some interactive element that just popped up?
Sorry. The more I try to make sense of the UI, the more I think rounded/squircle buttons are the least of the problems there.
Your point are all 100% spot on. Also why would the “Scan in store” thing pop up when I’m in my bedroom?
Also why would the “Scan in store” thing pop up when I’m in my bedroom?
When I try using geolocation for my desktop or my phone connected to my home wifi, it is as if I were in the same building as my ISPs offices (or maybe servers?) I suppose it’s the same over there. Maybe there’s a CVS near (same building?) your ISPs offices.
