What are the modern design trends you hate most?
Original question text by @[email protected]
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.
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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.
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?
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.
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.
The option is called "relative date" (as opposed to absolute date). On macos you can switch it off:
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.
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.
At least they usually show the real datetime on hover
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
and
Isn't this triggable in most OSs? Unless we are talking about mobile, which I lean towards disappearing because of screen sizes.
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.
A pair of buttons forcing you to choose Yes or Maybe later. The word is NO, assholes!
I want to find the marketing genius who started that shit and ask them, "do you want me to whomp you over the head with a rusty manure shovel? Yes or Maybe later?"
it's pushed by CEO that don't see a no as a no. Be it with customers or with people at the bar
Even yes or no infuriated me to start with... The words I would choose are "never ever"
It only accomplishes making me feel better, but it's a side benefit I get from using the uBlock Origin extension's "zapper mode" function: getting to one-click nuke these things and move on with my life like a normal person.
Highly recommend the When Phones were Fun series.
Fun videos; thanks for sharing
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
Everything is a fucking service! NO, I don't want to spend 2.99 every month on a app that reminds me to take a pill.
Even hardware products that basically are scrap metal if you don't pay a monthly fee.
Oh I HATE that. It's outrageous
My alarm app would like me to pay 9€/y and it's discount...ridiculous
on the hardware products, I enjoy finding the early examples of them (where the manufacture stopped supporting) as project boxes.
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.
As an engineer, Home Assistant (purely local smart home hub) is fucking awesome and only gets better.
Smart is fine if and only if:
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.
Millennial gray interior design. Gray "wood pattern" laminate floor, white cabinets, black appliances. Just no color. It's so depressing. For only $1600/no you can live in a 3rd story gray pod that's still 45 minutes from where you work.
I actually love that because you can add your own color with paint, throw rugs, furniture, etc. It allows you to start from a blank canvas.
For contrast, my parents' house has one bathroom with a mustard yellow toilet and yellow-and-white floor tile, and another bathroom with an avocado green toilet and matching shower enclosure. These were put in by the previous owner and date back to the '70s. They're in perfectly good shape, so my folks don't want to replace them, but it does force them to decorate those rooms with complementing colors, and they will never not look dated.
Ew, stop! That's my actual life right meow.
Reject society, live in a bus painted however you want >:3
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
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.
Give me back my God damn full keyboard and headphone jack. (Phones)
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...
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(TM) 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.
If I ever meet the asshole that invented the mouse-off function for webpages so that when you go to close a tab, a pop-up jumps up so that the website owner can scream, "wait, no, please subscribe, give us your email, send us money, something holy fucking shit, dear god ah!" at you I swear I will break their fucking fingers and punch them in the dick.
"Have you tried our new layout?"
"Did you know you now can...?"
"We've hidden this from you, but don't worry! Click here to see them"
"News: We're launching a new product!"
"Looking for X? It is now here!"
"We upgraded you to the new view. Revert to the old view?"
"Enable integration with (our other product) for an enhanced experience"
"You may not have permission to view what used to be on this page"
"Take a tour"
"How are you liking the new settings screen?"
"You will be automatically moved to the new X, no need to do anything"
I guess I’m too thick to see the complaint here.
It's too chatty.
This is basically every Discord label or button text ever.
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.
Houses are usually white to reflect heat and because white doesn't burn out.
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.
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.
I mean, compared to gold bars I guess. (Guess who's painting their house)
Yeah, paint is pretty damn expensive. Especially outdoor house paint that is neither a pain in the ass to apply nor will flake off in 3 years
Red and green go well together. Perhaps a natural foresty color.
Yeah, like a Christmas house. Sounds very tasteful.
Red and green house with golden roof. So artsy and kitsch <3
Touch controls everywhere, I've got an induction cook top which is all touch, (temperature is a bar you can drag) guess what happens when you've got some spillage while cooking. Yeah, if you are lucky nothing happens, but I had it several times shutting itself down, or adjusting the temperature, which is fucking stupid and dangerous. You want to get rid of the water with a towel? Something will trigger. Really great.
Letting the computer decide what is best for you. There was/is this feature?! in windows 10, or 11 where it sets the color of your font on the desktop based on your wallpaper, and I did not find a way to change it. So what happens when you've got a wallpaper that is bright on top and darker on the bottom, like maybe a landscape image? Guess you are just not reading any of the text on the top half...
The installed appification of everything riddled with trackers when a web browser + site will do. Dead simple minimalistic UI that a toddler can figure out how to use. Every product is designed to account for the lowest common denominators of human intelligence which encourages 'cant, wont, dont know how' brain rot instead of making the tech illiterate feel pressured to actually apply themselves to learn. Now we have entire generations of idiots who feel entitled to the pleasant convince of advanced technology but unwilling to understand whats actually going on under the hood or accept responsibility to learn how to use it properly/ethically.
A society built entirely on dead simple convinence and instant gratification is one that fosters the destruction of individual critical thinking skills and mental robustness to troubleshoot/adapt when encountering a problem.
So many people are proud of it, thats the worst part for me. Legitately bragging about making it through life with the bare minimum of braincell rubbing. As if just being an unthinking half-sentient ape with a learned helplessness complex is an ideal state of being worthy of pride.
You hit it spot on. That lazy attitude pisses me off so much I will hardly help people with tech anymore. I know like maybe 1 person who actually has the want to learn, the rest are so lazy they wont even get off the couch to watch a DVD they already own so they stream it with ads instead. Infuriating. And the people using gibbity are 10000 times worse. Idiots. I think those of us who want to learn and enjoy it are going to be gone in 10 years. Replaced by total corpo idiocy.
Blue LEDs are eye piercing, especially when they are always on and you are trying to sleep in the same room.
Sad Shuji Nakamura noises
I mean, sure, they're overused now, but that's because they were such a breakthrough that the dude got a well-deserved Nobel prize for finally figuring out how to invent them. Think about it: it's not just blue that they made possible, it's the whole spectrum and white, too. If it weren't for blue LEDs, we'd still be stuck using CFLs.
See also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AF8d72mA41M
I understand that they were a huge achievement, that is not in question, their overuse was.
What's the point of smartphone colors that will get completely covered by the phone case? And don't tell me phone cases are not necessary, I've accidentally dropped my phone enough times!
(I'm on my 4th smartphone in about 12 years, and I've never scratched or cracked a screen)
my phone case is transparent
It shifts your thinking from whether or not to get the phone, to which color of the phone to get.
On the occasion that I have the option to pick a cool color, I will pick a cool color over a boring one.
Material design. Everything must be so flat that you cannot see if it’s a button or just something highlighted.
Exactly, I can't believe we are still in this since years, can't wait for the next trend hoping it won't get worse..
Electron apps. Write native apps. I don’t need a simple todo app using 300MB of RAM.
If only you could write cross-platform native apps otherwise.
Many tool sets let you do just that. Qt works fine.
The problem is that when we rely on capitalist companies to produce the software we rely on, they will reduce cost as much as possible. This leads to them not wanting to pay for separate teams to develop native desktop applications on Windows, macOS or Linux.
While I hate Electron apps as well, they are how Linux became much more able to run these proprietary apps society depends on. We know the capitalist companies wound’t invest in native Linux software, as the user base is too small.
Agreed. This is why I still subscribe to the Asahi Linux Patreon, even though two of their best people are gone. I don't even run Linux as my primary OS. I run it on mini PCs for server stuff, but I own Apple Silicon hardware and I want the option to go Linux if I feel the need.
Imagine Electron for your whole OS (I realize why this is a silly statement, please don't correct me).
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.
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?
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?
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.
UI components that do things when you click on them but don't appear until you hover the mouse over them. I'm mostly talking about stuff like little edit buttons with pencil icons or close/cancel buttons with little X's. I want to select an item from a list or change tabs in my browser, but when I click, I find I am actually now editing the name of the thing or closing/muting a tab because a button that wasn't there before has suddenly appeared beneath my click action. But it also applies to vanishing scrollbars others have complained about.
On that point, I want bigger scrollbars, not smaller ones. Browsers especially could benefit from the kind of minimap I get in a code editor.
Dialogues that don't require clicking OK to apply my selection. What if I change my mind or click the wrong thing?
Here's a past annoyance: help text for BIOS settings that was like
Tronic memory catalyst conversion ratio: Sets the ratio of tronic memory catalyst conversion.
O RLY? 🤔
All BIOS help text is like that. Why do they even bother?
I feel like they've gotten better over time. And some settings you're really only supposed to be changing if you know what you're doing.
Every new building looks the same. Fast food restaurants are indistinguishable except for the sign out front. All apartment buildings are identical. Office buildings are built to house cubicle farms. Nothing new is interesting or unique, because it’s not profitable to stand out; it’s all optimized for speed and cost. Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V everywhere.
Same with cars. They're all the same ugly-ass hideous blobs that hardly resemble cars anymore, and all of them are the same tiny grays, whites, blacks, and maybe red if you're lucky. Gone are the days of colourful cars that actually had style.
I miss brightly coloured cars. A friend has an old, bright yellow car that probably won't last for much longer, and they are sad that newer cars are much duller.
Convergent evolution through CAFE laws and UAW protectionist lobbying.
Yes! And from the perspective of somebody who managed buildings: Any residential structure built in the last 10 years is subject to horrendous levels of breakdown and failure, due entirely to substandard materials and overall build quality.
Building sprinkler systems springing leaks behind major walled areas. AC systems failing to the point of needing seals and recharge in 3 years. Alarm systems in perpetual state of ground-fault due to improperly installed wiring or water leaking where it shouldn't be. Water-hammer effect everywhere. Plumbing joints springing leaks left, right and center as a result. Doors falling off, every single knob in a 120-suite structure needing replacement after 3 years.
Its utterly disgraceful.
Those front loading washers everyone seems to adore almost universally require the installation of water hammer arrestors or it's bye bye pipes.
This response reminds me of this article (which I found absolutely hilarious on first read): https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-44/the-intellectual-situation/why-is-everything-so-ugly/
Fast food restaurants looking generic is on purpose.
There's value in owning a property. That value is a lot lower if it's something like McDonald's kid-theme restaurant, or the classic Pizza Hut building.
If you got a generic modern building, it can be used for anything and sold with ease.
I didn't say "It's not a bad decision because there's a reason".
I shared that because I found it interesting myself and thought that others might too.
I recognize this point every time I drive by one of the old, now-closed Sherri's restaurants.
I have been a software tester for a long time and I really fuckin hate these JS frameworks that try to reinvent the wheel but worse.
Like why is a fucking table now a bunch of divs? Why is a drop down (select) list a bunch of divs? With disappearing html blocks when you close the list?
HTML worked fine, why are we reinventing basic HTML but worse?
I feel like I was there at the genesis of this one. Originally, people used tables for layout because there was nothing else. Dreamweaver and similar wysiwyg editors that code-o-phobes used those days produced table hellish markup that looked reasonable to people on screens with fixed resolutions, but was absolutely abysmal as far as legibility and maintenance.
Then, over time, people righteously hated that and called it an anti-pattern. The original people that wanted semantic layouts and championed CSS in the early days had nuance, but the kiddos learning from them did not. So they thought it was "tables bad!" and they rushed off to please their senior devs by putting tabular data into complicated bullshit elements that were already semantically correct as tables.
I recently installed NoScript, and it's truly eye-opening the number of pages that "require" JS just to show me a page that has literally no reason to require JS. It's abysmal.
Long-time NoScript user. I only allow scripts to run that actually need to run, and some I forever-block everywhere just on principle (looking at you Google). Except for sites like banking, if a site won't run without garbage javascript it's quite easy to just go elsewhere where the signal-to-noise ratio is smarter.
Oh yeah. I generally don't touch it if a site is generally okay without it. I've just come across lots of sites that will only display an error message unless I allow JS.
Tables and select boxes have been standard for ages across all browsers what are you on about.
Why does every apartment I ever live in now never have laundry in unit, and requires you use a mobile app w/ an account to pay to do laundry. Why do I need to load a digital wallet that requires I pay a fee if I only want to add just the amount for one load? It's absurd. Let me put quarters in.
starting to run into this in some hotels too. fucking stupid.
Sounds like an easier job for the landlord/owner, not having to manage coins and exchange.
Sure, but it makes it impossible for anyone that doesn't have a smartphone with Bluetooth to use them, and makes me have another account I don't want, among other issues. If the apartment's WiFi has issues, the machines lose connection and you can't use them, It's a vastly worse experience then using quarters or even just a card reader.
Wouldn't be surprised if the landlord/owner gets a percentage, as well.
Of course the landlord gets a percentage. They are essentially leasing the space to the company that manages the laundry equipment.
Your counciousness hates it, and your unconsciousness loves it
Infinite scroll
Enshitification of search results when shopping
Planned obsolescence
The removal of bezels on phones, the camera cutouts sometimes have issues and its all together worse, just for a technically larger screen, and Apps, so many apps are just packaged web browsers, but with more access to private information and such.
I don’t understand why they need the have the lenses in a bump. Just make the phone a bit thicker with a bigger battery
Yes this is so dumb. Razor thin phone with massive camera bumps. Who is asking for this?
Especially when the first thing you do is get a case to protect the cameras and make the phone sit level on a table
I think that's kind of the thing. They can't physically make the camera any smaller, but they assume you're going to make the phone thicker with a case. So it's a compromise based on customer preference.
Well ideally they would just make the phone more durable without a case, and the full thickness of the camera filled with battery, headphone jack, etc.
Seriously so much smartphone design is based on initial appeal, not actual usability.
For me, the issue isn't just about durability, it's also about how a cheap clear TPU case is way grippier than the metal or glass of the phone itself.
The thinner the phone, the less room for the battery. Is that really such a good idea?
I love my Xperia, still has bezels and it makes the phone easier to hold imo
I hate Google's material design with a passion. Everything looks exactly the same, and many buttons and other touch elements are indistinguishable from highlights and general design elements.
When someone puts a house up for sale and all the photos of the house are photoshopped in some way, with fake added furnishings in every room. I'd so much rather see an empty room than that fake shit. Or hell, even if it's not empty, show me the current owner's shit, I don't care.
I'm currently sitting in a modern car dealership and ever single chair SUCKS. Modern chairs are hard, low backed, have funky angles, and if they are high backed, it's to give this half assed sense of privacy that just isn't there.
Man old chairs are so much better. You just sunk and could almost take a nap.
Maybe that's intentional to keep you from wanting to stay there a long time and negotiate.
Which especially sucks if you're just there for servicing and have to wait for a couple hours
lack of user control in devices and software generally
I wish I could tell my dishwasher what sequence and length of rinse, wash, and dry cycles to do and how long to do each but instead i gotta pick between "heavy, regular, light, eco" and just fucking guess which is best for my needs. if I'm lucky the manual will have sequence descriptions
As other mentioned, lack of physical buttons.
Minimalistic interfaces in software:
Apps and websites copying the designs/colour scheme of popular ones. How many Slack looking websites are too much?
Copying IKEA furniture design, I don’t like most of IKEA designs and the sensation of making your personal space identical to thousands of other people personal spaces. I don’t have an issue with IKEA itself, my issue is that you try to find alternatives looking elsewhere and is the same thing, sometimes inspired, sometimes a clear copy, and most of the time even worse quality.
I’ve been looking for a wall shelf for almost a year and it seemed that every company, every store had the same ugly designs varying a little and with different prices. I’ve just bought one that it was the less ugly I could find, it was expensive and the materials quality is crap.
The "toggle switch". In the past we had these checkboxes. A black square. If it had a x or check mark in it, it meant this option was active, otherwise not.
Now we have these fancy toggle switches. If it's on the left side, is it on or off? What if it's blue, or grey?
Left is always off, right is on. Generally a toggle switch indicates an immediate change, whereas a checkbox can have a delayed effect. Colours are optional but generally a colour indicates the switch is turned on.
left is definetly not always off. i am curious what you mean by delayed effect that cannot also affect a checkbox. especially if some cookie settings now havetoggles with three options, each one in a different color, some just slide between the rightmosg and middle option etc.
no matter what you say, this is not intuitive, a checkbox is! if there are more than two options, choose another ui element. foem over function is way too common for (at least my) comfort nowadays
Left is always supposed to be off. If not, the UI/UZ designer who made the page messed up.
What I mean by immediate effect is that a switch is supposed to toggle something instantly. Checkboxes are more common in forms, where you expect to submit your choices later.
Switches with more than one option are generally bad, agreed with you there.
Apps/websites that log you out too frequently for no good reason
They all have 2 factor authentication too. Sometimes I just want to be in another room than my god damn phone.
I think USB finger scanners are quite cheap though
Sticky headers. Unbearably distracting.
Also, wasted space and a lack of information density.
Some take up 30% of the page... In plain 2025! Disgusting.
I've seen even worse! Sticky headers with sticky sidebars on both sides. Only about 10-15% of the viewport was left for content. And this is for documentation, so you can only read about 100-200 words at once.
Why even bother having a webpage at that point. Just make the whole thing a non-interactive .png file.
Scrollbars that are impossible.to use because they auto.minimize , and you have to get them just right to slide.
Dark pattern design obviously
Nothing is ever done, even when it evolves to a great functional state that everyone is familiar with, and it works perfectly well. No, we need to fiddle with it to "keep it fresh" which inevitably makes it worse in some way.
iOS Photos app is a textbook example of this
I bought a dryer and it has "AI Dry." Which I'm fairly sure is not. It's just the "sensor dry" feature that dryers have had for decades. Except I can't control the amount of heat (no "low heat" option) so it ends up being fairly useless. This is also the default option whenever the dryer turns on, so yay.
We recently bought a dryer and it's "eco mode" means we gotta run it two or three times before things are dry. How the eff is that eco at all???
Don't get me started on eco on the washer. Too late, it means there won't be enough water to COVER ALL THE CLOTHES.
Well that's just silly
AI dry. fuck off haha
Moved into a rental to find that all the kitchen appliances were "modern" - meaning zillions of touchy "buttons" for things maybe two people on the planet would ever actually use, all burying finding the things normal people would actually use.
I still have to figure out how to run the dishwasher. Spouse thought they had it figured out, only to have it run for 10 minutes and stop for no discernible reason. Apparently they set it to "option 20" by accident and that meant "just run a rinse". You have to set it to "option 52" to actually wash the dishes. Ah! I see.
I'm a big fan of option 53 myself.
"Squircles", Just make shit square you fuckers I hate you
Theres somthing off about th econflicting uniformity of a grid of squircles.
Putting a bunch of unskippable bullshit in front of a game I'm doing to play.
I don't need to know how much you all jerk yourself off to your own studio's logo.. I just wanna play. Can you get that shit out of my face please or let me courtesy-skip it after 1 second?
Cameras and microphones in "smart" TVs. There's a reason why when the current TV I use as a monitor dies that I'd be more than willing to take it to a repair shop than replace it.
Also, on the subject of that TV, I'd be lucky to find a modern model that's even half of double the size of my current one. It feels impossible to find anything anywhere near 1080x1920 resolution. Maybe I'm bad at finding them, but you know, finding anything like that from known, reputable companies today. Hell, I even looked at a few Japanese brands from their Japanese websites and all the models were looking like American super sized models.
Removing or replacing decades old proven and studied ui elements because fuck you user.
BLUE LEDs!! Because you don't need your eyesight anyway, might as well completely blind you, right?
Oh, let's make it even better. BLUE DISPLAYS!! Because now you fucking really can't read it! Ha-HA!
High wasted jeans, they make your legs look too long and your butt to be infinitely high, I still love you though.
Going to present an alternative take.
Deciding that your waist is at your belly button just feels like an anatomical miscalculation to me.
Getting cutesy with the OK button label
Got it, Take me there, Understood
Agreed, but if it said "Make it so" I'd totally be on board.
I would like to change the radio station in a school zone and not run over a bunch of kids because I had to take my eyes off the road. Touchscreens are more distracting to use than my phone, which I don't like to use while driving because it is distracting enough.
Touchscreens absolutely do not belong in cars and I hope my car with buttons doesn't fucking die before the trend dies.
I agree. My car a Mercedes A200d from 2020 is a bit of a hybrid, it has a touch screen but also button controls to change things, but even those are a bit fiddly.
I love that it had a voice control feature that actually works so no I just press a button on the steering wheel and say “play classic fm” and it changes. Good for using navigation too as the less time you are using the screen the better.
So many things. Most things seem designed against humans instead of for them. Most are designed to supposedly look pretty, when I'm someone looking for content and information. Those are often hidden. Add to that malpractice, misleading, and lying.
Big garages on the front of houses, with front door hidden. Hate Hate Hate the garage houses with my whole soul.
They're called "snout houses," because the garage makes them look like they have a big, ugly pig snout.
must look ultra sexy for car brained people
are the garages at least used for hobbies?
Dunno. Maybe, because sometimes I see the cars are parked outside, but often people just drive into the garage and close it, enter through some door inside it.
I really can't overstate my disdain for this design.
Light themes as default. I don't want to be maced with photons. Dark themes always please.
Counter offer: dark themes as default for professional software.
I don't write software in a dimly light geek cave, I do it in a well lit office. And I can't tell that dark red string from the background.
I need to add another one. All modern anime, to me, seems look the same. Like a lot the same. Homogenous. And unfortunately just not at all visually interesting. It’s preventing me from even attempting to get into anything new, because I honestly can’t visually tell the differences anymore. What happened to the artistry? For instance:
Boring flat dark design interfaces.
I miss the CDE colour scheme. The BeOS funky 3D icons. Buttons that look like buttons. Tabs that look like tabs. Now everything is just flat, bland and monochromatic. It's sad.
What the hell is it with the Sterling Archer window borders? Y'know, where the active window is black, and the inactive windows are slightly darker black?
You can choose any colour, as long as it's black.
That appley design. Mouse, keyboard, bubbley UI it all just disgusts me and I hate that it affects Windows 11
Long winding UI Dialouge trees that you can get "stuck" in! If my settings are invalid, let me out of of the menu with as little consiquences and sacrifices as you can manage. I may need to back out to go grab data or change a setting on a page you decided to make before (hell even after) the one that wont let me continue and/or go back.
Windows's "wizard" style dialouges just suck!
All the app icons looking the same. Most prominent example are all the Google apps, but it doesn't end there.
Rounded corners everywhere
IMO that actually looks nice most of the time.
Rounded screen corners.
San-serif fonts across everything.
Farmhouse modern
Also anything that looks like it comes from Kirkland's, because there's a good bit of overlap:
I hate single page apps that force you to click on a post to see comments, and don't let you open them in a new tab.
It's very hard to find unique colors these days. Everything is becoming color graded for digital. That means everything starts looking the same because screen displays are limited, especially in the web.
Is that because Color != Material? That computer colors is an oversumplification of physical material surfaces? Is it the fact that colors are rounded to the nearest integer (commonly) within a 0-255 range for R,G and B? Or both?
You have Panteone for house paint and design , ACES for movies and ICC for your digital cameras - that's what I know. Color values are so normalized to see something that's unique you need to use optical camera instead of digital or make your own dye.
I wouldn't expect it to be the rounding; either it's a material thing or they're talking about colors that can't be represented inside the RGB color space.
I think it's that everyone picks the same six colours
Apartment complex websites that photoshop (outright lie) about what the apartment is like and you're not allowed to see the actual place before renting (current tenant is still there, or the manager/owner just doesn't want you to see even if it's empty). And - there's so much competition for apartments in the area you either sign the lease sight-unseen or you live in your car.
I've done OK in some of these. None were what the website pics and descriptions offered, but they were still OK. Some others, though, turned out to be absolute broken down dumps. And every single one of these places have great online reviews. Imagine that.
time to get a cheap toy drone and start taking the pictures yourself
Pants and suits coming in slim fit. Went to Macy's, they had like 5-6 of the maybe 8 clothing things with only slim fit. Mf this is fucking McDs loving USA. Ain't nobody got time for that slim fit nonsense. Why do people not realize that shit also makes the rise some uncomfortable? At that point you just hate have testicles to the point that you may as well admit you're into a fetish.
I'm a skinny American, and it's very difficult to find clothes that fit me right---always has been.
Tried on a pair of slim cut jeans the other day in a box store, and the thigh fit like a pair of pantaloons. This is partly due to the trend toward baggier fits (kill me), and even one of my go-to brands sits a little more loosely than I'd like, at the moment.
On one hand, I can still walk into the store I shopped at in high school, pick up my size and cut of pant, and walk out without trying them on, knowing that they will work. On the other hand, I'd like to walk into a store for adults and be able to find my size in a cut that fits.
I knew two years ago when I saw that rich white lady wearing what looked like Jncos for rich white ladies that I was about to get fucked by the resurgence of late 90s fashion styles. Baggy doesn't look good on someone who looks like they were built out of toothpicks.
All this to say: chin up! Your time is coming!
Light colored text on a light colored background, in the thinnest font possible. It's like, let's make wrenches out of rope because that would look cool.
The trend to more complicated but cheaper instead of doing it right. Result is news about security incidents every single day.
Probably preaching to the choir but: Corporate Memphis
touch screens aren't a design trend. they're a way to save cost.
I haven't seen it much in the last year or so, but Corporate Memphis art style in any and all tech was causing so much rage inside of me. I'm so relieved it's not so much a thing anymore, but for a few years it was everywhere.
Camera bumps on phones
That's not a design decision per se, but a physical limitation of camera lenses and light.
The thickness* of the device could be considered a design decision.
websites that scroll wrong, and then they stop dead on some animation. Automatic nope on the product.
Beige.
White.
Intentional mishyphebation, it came in like 2 years ago and is driving me insane. I mean the kind where they want to use same amount of letters in 3-4 rows, but intentionally make it so it doesn't follow the proper hyphenation.
Sorry about the example, this was the first thing to pop up in my head that has enough letters:
KARD
ASHI
ANS!
Focusing on frontend more than on backend
Splash loading pages, huge fonts
Everybody everywhere in the whole wide world is wearing blundstone boots!
I don't understand what was wrong with the original post.
Dark themed apps and websites. Vertical video. Blurry photos and videos when it's done for "artistic reasons".
Heatpumps in front of houses.