What UI design trend do you hate the most?
I personally hate rounded corners and shadows added everywhere. Makes most things look crappy and smudged.
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I personally hate rounded corners and shadows added everywhere. Makes most things look crappy and smudged.
Saying “1 week ago” or “1 month ago” instead of just saying the date. Dude, I want to know if this happened in August or September.
The fact that venmo does this shit when I'm trying to see what date I paid for something is absolutely infuriating
Actually not seeing that issue in Venmo. Are you looking in your transaction list?
I think in the transactions list on mobile it shows date always, but I tend to look when I'm reviewing my transactions every week on my PC, and I couldn't find the transactions view there
Both are useful, but at different times to different users. It should be easy to toggle between relative and absolute expressions of time.
The first email was sent on 1/1 but I haven't heard any update in a month.
I think “15 hours ago” is fine. That one is quite precise. Showing date as “1 year ago” is not helpful. It could be anything between 2021-10-06 and 2022-10-05. It’s a huge span. In that time Ukraine got invaded and the Queen died.
FYI if you're using the standard lemmy UI, you can hover over (or long press on phone) the "15 hours ago" to get the precise timestamp.
I think the reverse of that is the exact perfect behaviour for a timestamp. Otherwise the timestamps are useless in a screenshot or any archive that can't display the hover text.
Tooltips don't help mobile users.
Why not? As I just said you can long press on phone to show the timestamp.
God I hate any attempt to make the computer personable. Like windows saying "Hi. We're setting some things up for you"
I’ve been ranting about this for years. Microsoft word used to be like would you like to save this document? OK or Cancel. And now it’s like Wanna save? Sure or nah
FOH with that Microsoft, you’re not my friend
Windows 12 will be like "want me to scribble these bits for you, bro? On God? Bet, cap"
Stop, Windows! We're not friends, you're not even an AI 🙃
It's just a trend though, maybe it will go back the other way...
If you group by time in Windows, it has "a long time ago"...
...in a galaxy far away...
Very annoying for screen shots. You'll see a tweeter post on reddit or here that says 1 week ago but of course it's a repost and was actually 2 years ago.
Google's chat programs (Hangouts and Texting) are the worst at this. Not only do they put fuzzy timestamps to messages (5 minutes ago, 1 hour ago) they group messages together. Bring back chat clients that had an exact time stamp on every message.
I'm thinking of Jira right now. October 1 rolls around and a comment from yesterday is suddenly "last month". Very often not helpful. I just want to see when it was made!
Massive whitespace. So many websites just feel like a PowerPoint presentation with their large-sized fonts and large amounts of space I have to scroll through.
Makes it very hard to find information sometimes.
And God help you of you ever try to browse the site using an older, low resolution monitor. It borders on being unusable.
I'll tell you why we've made it here. For as long as I've been a designer, the website has served as the face of companies and therefore subject to direct criticism from the higher ups. Too many times would my team create something wonderful that would meet all our needs and test well only to have the President chime in and say he wants ticker tape in the hero... for no particular reason. And also can we add this and add that and blah blah blah ok now it's a pile of garbage that's crammed full of stuff you don't need and is confusing to use. Skip ahead to today where graphic designers have taken over the world and made everyone forcefully subject to extreme minimalism. Who's laughing now!?! Maniacally laughs
"Since we have a Corporate Design, how about we make the change in Photoshop and print it out for you?"
Rather, it's probably more because of mobile first.
It can be so hard to identify where you need to click or what is viewable only. You have to study the whole page of which may, God help me, I have to scroll down.
And helps contribute to my wrist issues
Touch screens in cars.
When I'm driving I need a tactile immediate response that is easy to understand without looking at it.
Touch screens are for controls that change so you can take advantage of the dynamic nature of a screen for the static needs of a car and the immediate feedback you need, make them the worst possible solution.
Disappearing scroll bars.
Disappearing thin translucent scroll bars. It's so inconvenient.
Chill on mobile
Not chill on desktop
Disappearing anything. I suppose it is more of an app thing but greying out at least indicated there is an option available under some condition.
Disappearing or autohide? I like autohide scrollbars on desktop.
Disappearing top bars. Sure, limited screen real estate and all that, but I find it annoying that I have to scroll up a bit to reveal a button I need. Let’s say I want to copy the URL of a website, but I still want to keep on browsing. I need to scroll up a bit in order to reveal the ULR bar. Then I need to scroll back down again to continue where I left off. Usually thats “bit of scrolling” means I’m way off where I used to be.
In case you wanted to hear the “first world problem of the day”, you’re welcome.
More like a meta trend but the whole "let us redesign the look of everything for no reason every couple of years" thing gets old quickly.
As for actual trends, the one where they put all the options into one menu even though there is plenty of room to have individual buttons.
This is almost always because of some chump who wants to move up the corporate ladder and desperately needs something they can point at and say "Me, I did that." When it comes to applications, that's a lot harder to point at when what you did was fix some obscure bug that most people don't deal with.
No, this is middle management fuckwits who have nothing better to do angling for a way to get a better position.
The fact that this happens at Google just shows how they're no different than any other giant shitty corporation, because they've got idiots manning the controls who are more interested in moving up than doing a fucking good job.
Source: My sisters ex-husband who is a dipshit who works at Google and did exactly this while chasing a promotion.
When marking something to copy and paste. You start marking the text and drag to the right. If you drag too far to the right, your highlighting goes away and everything to the left of where you started becomes highlighted. Why would anybody ever want that behaviour? It is exactly the opposite of what you are trying to do.
Oh yeah. Or trying to highlight something including text further down, you want to scroll it a little bit and suddenly it accelerates and you highlighted the wohle page.
This is one of those things that came out of the gate sucking massively and nothing was ever done to improve it. We might be in our 60s some day still fumbling around trying to copy some text.
A variation of this that drives me nuts at work
Trying to highlight part of a url it decides nope you getvall or nothing.
I also hate this, but I wouldn't call that an UI trend. It's caused by the browser and it's rather a bad UX I think.
The browser implements the text selection behaviour, but how infuriating it is depends on how convoluted your page construction is.
On a simple page with no floats, overlaid elements, negative margins, absolute positioning, hidden stuff, and other css layout tomfoolery, it’s perfectly predictable. It’s only when designers do designer things does it start to break down.
A lot of these techniques aren't really used any more. We're old lol. Modern web design uses CSS grid, or at least Flexbox. I haven't seen a float or absolute positioning in years.
I know, but those techniques are more likely to cause selection weirdness than flexbox/etc, which is why I mention them specifically.
Yeah, I just feel like most of the people are comment little bit different kind of things then OP intended to ask for.
Gonna trim my litany of complaints about modern trends down to my top 4 gripes:
Bonus: Any time an email, website, or other online source has "click here" for a link. It's 2023. People know what a link is and what to do with it. All that "click here" says is you don't know what you're doing as a designer/publisher.
Yes, I deplore this. I don't see ads so I assume it's due to conform to mobile UIs that have a more vertical aspect rations like 9x16 so the designers don't have to bother actually designing their website. Fucking Wikipedia did this some time ago. Lemmy does it. I sit here on my desktop using 50% of the screen because web UX designers can't be arsed.
Oh, yeah. I forgot about half-assed mobile support being one of the reasons for that. I do responsive design all day in my job, and it's really not hard. At all. So yeah, like you said, the UX designers just can't be arsed to do it.
If you view those sites without adblock you'll probably find it's filled with ads DailyMail I'm looking at you.
Present wisdom is to design something that would work well on mobile first so single column and then make it work on larger screens the easiest way being to keep everything the same except for replacing ☰ with the actual nav menu at a certain width and setting a max width that keeps it looking like stretched out crap.
The 'darkly-compact' theme here does widen the page for me
The designers on my project actually designed such a non-telling unprofessional-tone "oops" error page.
Colleague implemented it like that, but on review we agreed it's just bad, and suggested/implemented an actually useful, professional error page.
It baffles me how people can implement actively useless stuff like that. And it even showed up in my team. I was somewhat surprised. I'm glad I'm Lead, and have direct communication with the customer. Two ways to prevent and improve things like that. At least in my projects.
You're a good team lead, then. A lazier person would have just shipped the unhelpful error and called it a day.
Do not underestimate the stupidity and/or computer illiteracy of some people.
I second this. There are lots of elements on a website that seem redundant or self explanatory today now that we've had 30 years of websites. But you simply can't assume this because everyone has a different amount of website navigation experience. Older people need everything to be labeled clearly and plainly and younger people are more familiar with app environments and might be inclined to look in unusual places for what they need. God forbid you take away the "home" link in the navigation "because everyone knows the logo links to the homepage anyway". No they do not. One of the best books on the subject is "Don't make me think" by Steve Krug and they have loads of excellent examples of why you can't just assume things like this.
Reddit is absolutely the worst for excessive padding. Here's your padded search page, let's open your thread in it with a padded modal! It's no wonder they can't load more than three nested comments before running out of horizontal space.
They're always like "Hi I'm a real person who will actually be able to address your query!"
... but then you ask them and it's always some uni student from bombay who's best attempt at helping you is to read the webpage you're looking at and then say... "Sure, if you can call 1800-whatever we will be able to assist you with that!"
Icons without labels.
Just add a small label underneath. It's not hard. It makes your app way more usable. Please...
I'm looking square the fuck at Windows 11 removing "Cut" "Copy" "Paste" and replacing them with fucking infuriatingly not obvious icons in the menu instead.
Do not fuck with me like this, Microsoft. Please.
I finally thought I had it down and then I forgot where to go to rename a file, just couldn't find the stupid icon at first
F2
First mistake was using Windows 11
Thankfully, this was someone else's PC...
Ima springboard right off your's:
Inventive app names.
It's not uncreative to call your app "Image Resizer;" it's descriptive. If I'm not using the app every day and it has a creative name, I'm going to forget what it's called. And because I'm installing and trying new apps all the time, if it isn't a descriptive name, I'm guaranteed to forget it. It's going to get lost in a sea of other apps, and I'm sure to never find it.
I've developed habits to work around Inventive Names, but... just call it what it is, or some variation. "Resizeratus Rex," or something.
Agreed, but if everyone named things merely descriptively.... we'd end up with like 200 apps named "Image Resizer."
So it's a bit of a conundrum, because descriptive names are clearly far superior, but if everyone used only descriptive names, most apps would be very similarly named, and then you'd have to filter based on author/developer.
And frankly a lot of us aren't clever enough to make up a name that is both descriptive and memorable like "Resizeratus Rex" lol.
You make a good point. I'm not very creative, so I just take whatever project I'm most copying and make a spin off of that. TBF, sometimes the association to what it does is nebulous, but I try.
You created Resizeratus Rex, so you are more creative than you give yourself credit for
Thanks. I've only got a couple of those in me, though, and now I've wasted one on someone else's project.
Internationalization. Don’t have to get icons translated (most of the time), and they always take the same amount of space.
You need a label for them anyway for people who use screen readers. And depending on how the label is implemented, tools can sometimes translate the labels like how they can translate the rest of the site
Alt and title attributes for screen readers don’t require space. Actual labels require space that might vary greatly depending on the language.
Home | Products | About | Privacy
Takes less screen space than e.g.
Startseite | Produkte | Über uns | Datenschutz
It is still doable, of course. It is just another thing one must account for. Languages that read from right to left or top to bottom are especially hard to implement in a satisfying manner, if you’re not used to it. With icons one can somewhat circumvent the issue.
To expand on this, a suite of icons that are visually hard to tell apart.
I have all Google apps I need to use in one folder and they're essentially identical and difficult to tell apart even with labels turned on.
This is less a design choice and more the reality of package-based architecture, but - menus that I have to wait before interacting.
I spent most of my life being able to enter clicks and hotkeys as fast as I want, because they would queue up and the app would resolve them in order. Now I can’t type too fast after pressing the Windows Start button, because the start menu needs time to load before it can handle KEYPRESSES. Tapping Windows key followed by “Discord” will search for “iscord” or something if I type full speed.
It feels like every modern app is optimized for a slow person browsing one-handed on a phone.
They assume all windows users only have one hand free at all times
Thin scrollbars. Why do I have to aim for a tiny area to click on a scroll bar? Other UI elements aren't that narrow.
This enrages me.
I can't remember the last time I had to click on a scrollbar.
Sometimes scroll wheels break and you don't have money for a new mouse.
Fast scrolling when pageup/pagedown is not available or not enough
Long press the middle mouse button and use the drag scroller.
This is bad UX:
When pageup/down is not available you usually don't have a mouse either. Think of a laptop with a minimalist keyboard or a phone.
I rarely do, but they are very handy for quickly scanning a long document (drag the scroll bar until I see a header, stop, read the header, and keep going).
I use the middle mouse button scroll for that.
The removal of borders on buttons. I don't know how many times I've been using a piece of software and haven't realized for a long while that some icon is actually a clickable thing and not just some UI decoration or something.
The removal of text in favor of icons. I hate having to memorize what all your icons mean in your app. Please just make text unless it's something insanely obvious. It's even worse when they neglect to put tool tips to tell you what the icon is supposed to mean
Dark UI patterns being socially acceptable. If someone advocated for or implemented a greyscale cancel button next to a vibrant and bold accept button then they should be tarred, feathered and disowned by their family.
Or the newsletter options that are straight up rude...
SIGN ME UP!!!
.
.
.
no thanks I hate saving money, and myself, and I kick puppies.
Just write some fake address like [email protected], works 99% of the time
Sure... but also - fuck whoever wrote that. (And if you're going to use a fake address please use @example.com)
That does sound bad, but a grocery store's wifi? Why would one be using that?
Because if you're like me, I can use my phone in a nuclear fallout shelter or at Point Nemo in the Pacific and still have 2 bars of 5G, but the moment I step into the Home Depot or Kroger by my house, my phone barely manages a single bar of non-data service. If I need to make a call or look something up in the store, I have to use the in-store Wi-Fi.
Ah. Makes sense. I've only ever experienced that in one store, but I get it now.
@xmunk @Sprite If your design rules emphasize contrast, it would be poorer design to highlight both buttons and it's not in the colour palette to have a 'mild' highlighting like Windows used to have (I think some KDE desktop themes do this too) that suggests which button is the accept button, but doesn't give the other ones zero highlighting.
Just check with your target areas jurisdiction first. At least in Germany your suggestion is considered illegal practice (I‘m unsure regarding the rest of the EU). Here, two uniform yes and no buttons are required to make an informed decision, according to courts (no suggestive design and no inconvenient hiding of the decline button are allowed). The reasoning is that if a user just clicks the highlighted button by muscle memory or convenience this cannot be considered valid consent.
God, I hope we can find a proper and widespread browser based solution to consent management soon.
how come? for me, it makes things clearer. I know the big shiny button is accept, grey one is decline. that way I don't have to read to accept or decline
I agree with you largely. It isn't always a dark pattern. It is a dark pattern if it's used shadily or maliciously, for example to trick you into downloading adware in an installer. It's not a dark pattern, but rather good UX design if it's used in a context to indicate a likely default choice, for instance:
We've detected your system is set to Dutch. Is Dutch your preferred language?
[No, let me change] [Looks good]
Maybe someone else has other examples of good uses. It's not appropriate everywhere.
This is what I meant by them being socially acceptable - dark UI patterns are now sometimes viewed as a norm. Make your cancel button a bold red and accept a bold green if you'd like to clearly differentiate with colors... but those grey buttons are specifically designed to be boring and less noticeable.
Grey cancel buttons didn't exist before material design and its push to have a "right" user flow.
Emphasised "continue" or "default" buttons have been around for a long time. In a software installer, nonstandard options are often less emphasised than the standard ones. For instance when choosing an installation location it makes sense for the default option, which is fine for most users, to be emphasized. If the continue and change location buttons were equally prominent the user might believe that a choice must be made here or that you are expected to choose a location. The experience of installing is more streamlined, less confusing for the less technically proficient, and requires less cognitive load when emphasis is used well.
As I said in an earlier comment, something being a dark pattern is entirely a matter of context. If used to encourage the user to shell out for gems in a mobile game, it's a dark pattern. If used to make user experience better, it's just good UX.
The key on what you're talking about is how we define emphasis - traditional button emphasis might involve underlines or bold font... but, I'd argue that's quite a bit different than de-emphasizing things - purposefully making a button less visible is only something to pursue when that choice is dangerous or requires careful consideration (and we frequently do that with speed bumps like confirm() prompts on actions that delete data).
I disagree that this is only occasionally a dark ui pattern since it is purposefully leveraging our perception to make some choices harder to see and, if you have a choice to put in front of a user, make the options obvious and clear. I also strongly dislike this particular pattern because it is used so frequently to abuse our psychology and I don't like to see it normalized.
At the core there is a difference between trying to make one option more visible and trying to hide another one.
The left side gutter that, I fear, is a trend still in it's infancy.
Dear Microsoft: I'm never going to launch apps from within teams or outlook. Why they fuck would I, that's what your terrible OS is for. Stop it.
Don't forget Microsoft's whole "we're gonna pretend like we're integrating everything just so you can never find anything"... I work from home half the week but don't want to receive phone calls after-hours (because of course we had to fucking get rid of real phones and change to Teams). Oh they claim there's lots of scheduling options, but when you dig into it you find out you can't actually schedule anything in Teams, you have to go into Outlook. I'm on Linux, Outlook isn't an option even if I wanted to touch that steaming pile. So I go to the web version of Outlook only to find that no, despite their assurances, you cannot actually schedule your office hours to send phone calls straight to voicemail. That feature might come "soon" but considering half the time our staff launches Teams they get a blank page on private chats and have to keep restarting until they show up, I have a serious lack of faith that Microsoft could code up something useful for office hours.
tl;dr: Using "integration" as a buzzword to put options in unrelated and unused products, only to discover those features don't even work.
Adding to that: building apps in electron that completely don't behave like you'd desktop apps expect to. Starting with sluggishness/high resource usage (Teams does little more than ICQ did back then, but needs more RAM than my entire PC had and it's still taking a second to think for each tab/chat change), but also just weird behavior of back buttons, that send you back to some seemingly arbitrary point within the app, but not back.
On the desktop, a lot of programs have been removing and hiding capabilities to look more like tablets and phones. This sucks, as I'm using a desktop which has the room to show all the fiddly bits.
The trend to make an ad link suddenly appear right where and when the user is likely to press.
The advertisers are likely not measuring the right metrics so they may not even notice. Sketchy things like this would increase their clickthrough rate, but lots of those users would drop off at the start of the funnel and not progress past the landing page. Many advertisers don't properly measure funnel metrics end-to-end - how many people click the ad, then how many of those people view an item, then how many of those add the item to their cart, then how many of those get to the checkout, then how many of those actually buy the item. Users drop off at each point in the funnel and it's important to know where to measure how effective your ad is.
They actually care quite a lot. Google ranks you down if this occurs frequently through a metric called Cumulative Layout Shift. You can also be put into confirm click status if you do this egregiously, which basically means you have to click "yes" after clicking an ad before you go to the actual page. It has a huge negative effect on revenue.
And shucks, looks like the little x moved right when tried to click it to dismiss the ad and now you're on a shady website.
Does non-pausable videos count? I can’t understand why apps like instagram, which exists to show pictures and videos, has the worst picture and video handling of all time. Can only magnify pictures by pinching and it only works while you’re still touching the screen. Can’t pause or restart a video. Want to show someone a video? You have to scroll to another post and then back to the video so it starts again.
I like the idea of instagram but the actual reality of it is utter, utter dogshit
Yea I don't get it either. Also no volume control ?
Like, fuck you
I love it. That means I will hate Instagram more and use it less. Please, no quality of life improvements to that app.
get your fix of dopamine
Websites that do not let me copy/paste my password in from my password manager, and break the auto-fill functionality.
Additionally, the ones that make you change the password every sixty days because they don't let me copy and paste the newly generated one in... It just feels like they're begging me to try to use an insecure one.
Anything overlaid on top of content, especially those chatbot bubbles.
Also, "No, thanks"/"Remind me later" options on popups where they should be "Fuck off and don't show this ever again".
Those carousels on Netflix/Prime TV apps displaying the trailer if you stay 1sc on an item. So annoying, forced to keep moving back and forth to watch the movie image
Fromt the top of my head:
all kinds of pop-ups wanting to guide me through their software/website latest features, giving me pro-tips or recommendations I didn't ask for
notifications about shit I didn't subscribe to
a virtual assistant icon in the corner showing a message that it wants to help me or talk to me
autoplaying videos (bonus points if it's a video unrelated to the article)
cookies pop-ups
It's like the old saying (which made more sense back in the CRT days):
If I wanted your website to make noise, I'd lick my finger and drag it across the screen!
Yeah, my favorite is when a site tries to shame my adblock usage by telling me it can't play an unrelated and unsolicited video
Autoplay videos are a scourge on humanity.
For cookies popups, look at the browser extension I Still Don't Care About Cookies. It blocks all the cookies popups and works very well. The website can't track you because you didn't click consent. Just make sure to use the version with still in it's name, it's a community fork since the original was bought by Avast.
uBlock also has filters to block those notifications, along with blocking virtual assistant popups, notifications and other annoyances. You just need to enable them in the settings
TIL!
uBlock has filters to block notifications, also for virtual assistant popups, notifications and other annoyances. You just need to enable them in the settings.
That shit where something on the page loads a few seconds later than everything else and shifts whatever I’m trying to click on down
“Mobile first” wich results in overly large buttons and font sizes and empty space on desktop.
Ultra slim scrollbars that auto-hide on a traditional monitor with a mouse or trackball input device.
Layout shifts. You know the ones where you go to click a button and an ad appears at thst exact moment, so now you have to close that garbage, and try again.
On mobile: multiple top and bottom tool/nav bars that automatically show/hide themselves when you scroll. They’re invariably more irritating than if they were just pinned at the top of the page (or perhaps viewport, but ideally page - I can scroll to the top of I want it back)
On desktop: animations tied to scrolling.
Anywhere: any kind of popup, modal, etc that I didn’t click on something to get. Please fuck alllllllll the way off.
Hello and welcome to our scroll wheel powered video presentation.
Continuous scroll websites. I want a sidebar or a menu that lets me jump to the exact information I'm looking for, I don't want to scroll through your entire life story to find the hardware specs.
Dynamically expanding UI widgets that push other content down. Used by Google search for suggestions which always leads to misclick links. Portainer and cloudflare dashboard also does this.
Minimizing to tray by default when you hit the x button.
Especially when there is no way to change the behavior.
When I can't middle mouse it right click to open a button in a new tab. It makes it harder to get back to the exact same spot, loaded how it was, to repeat the same task for the next button.
When you have a web page with only an input box. You can't do anything else on that page except input into the box and yet the cursor isn't automatically placed in the box! You have to put it there first.
YES, this drives me nuts. It's not like it's hard to put
autofocus="autofocus"into yourinputelement.FYI, Lemmy apparently drops any text that looks like an html tag, even in an inline code block. grrr...
This is mostly a thing on touch interfaces. When the UI designers think 100% of the screen needs to do something when touched. Like if an app pops out a form for you to fill out, don't let your palm touch the margins because there's a good chance it will close the form and delete everything you put in it. It's ironic that this is mostly a thing on the platforms where it's the biggest mistake. But it's horrible on PC too. I'm not sure what the proper way to refocus is but my habit has always been to click on whitespace because it's such an easier and therefore faster target than a taskbar. Too bad there are twisted shadow realms where our concept of whitespace doesn't exist.
For similar reasons I can't stand those "in-app" browsers either. God forbid you need to reference something in the app while using the in-app browser. Whatever page you were on, whatever you entered, it's gone with no warning. I avoid these whenever possible but I swear that despite all in-app browsers being "powered by chrome," the option to open the actual page in the actual browser is obfuscated in a different way every time. I barely use any apps anymore and it's still never where I expect to find it.
Also in the same genre of frustration, the way Android (idk if iOS is like this too) automatically clears out RAM is really inconvenient sometimes. I have a special emotion that only activates when I go back to an app from another and it reloads, losing everything.
Crap like this makes using a mobile interface feel like handling a live bomb sometimes. We use the term volatile to describe either memory that dissapears when power is lost, or software that's prone to crashing. But software also has a varying risk of your shit suddenly being lost without anything unintended occurring, and it just feels fragile. I don't know if we have any language right now to describe exactly what this aspect of software is like, but I love apps and programs where my work always feels safe.
Flat design. I don't know what a button is anymore. Often I randomly click through an UI to see if it's a clickable element or just a text box. Please give me back skeuomorphic design.
Not really a trend, but Material You and things that look similar. I don't want the background of my app to be a colour with the vibe of brown.
When Websites have a random part where scrolling down scrolls to the left.
A persistent bar at the top that takes up what feels like half the screen with 100% zoom on a standard 1080x1920 monitor.
Sidebars that can't be retracted, especially in desktop applications.
I love Material You! Why does everyone hate it? 😥
When every app looks the same, none of them look like anything any more. Plus it's just fugly with excessive whitespace, overly wide fonts and button sizes that seem to be optimized so my neighbor from across the street can easily understand the UI. It almost feels like UI parody to me.
Hot take: I miss apps looking the same. Consistency is good because it reduces cognitive load when switching between apps. No need to figure out how to navigate an app when it's using a standard UI toolkit for the system it's running on (or at least a popular one that other apps use).
Remember the Windows 95/98 days? You could set a system theme with custom colours, fonts, etc and it'd apply consistently across all apps. The majority of apps used the standard system UI components.
I don't like every app being a special snowflake that doesn't follow the platform's UI design standards. Don't even get me started on Electron apps where every app is custom-rendered...
I really intensely dislike the thing I think is Material You. It changed a bunch of OS colors on my phone to be kind of baby puke green because my background was an autumn photo of the park. Gross. Hate it. Can't really disable it.
I'm sure you can. At least on Samsung, I can change it pretty easily.
I did some searching and the only thing I found was an app that overrides it. I'm on a OnePlus 7
Why are you making me do math?
Why can't you just say you're on an 8?
Infinite scrolling. Sometimes I want things to end. It's fine if I have to click "more" but I want to know when I've reached the "end".
Also many apps/sites forget where I am it I leave, so if I leave and then go back I'm in the middle of a mess.
(I'm fine for it to be an option, I personally don't like it but I don't care if folks who like it keep it.)
Is it just me who likes rounded corners?
the overall ambiguity across all UI is what annoys me, tho maybe I'm too oldschool.
what I mean, around 15-20 years ago, the UI elements had defining qualities. borders were 3D as well as buttons. they stood up from the surface, had some 3d effect to make you instinctily feel that you can push that block. and this was consistent; things you could click on were 3d. you knew you can click on a list header, it looked like a button.
scrollable content always had a scrollbar. now it appears if you bring your cursor to the place where it should be, but you don't really know for sure is it scrollable or not.
links were blue, with the pointing finger cursor.
and things like these. Granted, oldschool UI is considered ugly nowadays, but it was functional. you opened a native app for your system, even if you never used it before, the UI gave you clues on at least how to navigate or operate the given software. it was familiar on all systems.
I don't feel there is a unified UX guide for today's computers. at a point, everyone went with their own interpretation of "modern" and "clean", caused (previously) vital UI qualities disappear. everything became "flat".
which, on its own isn't bad, of course.
White space.
So many UIs in my education programs and my work as a teacher just fucking love to leave huge piles of unused space and hide the options I am looking for in a drop down menu off a drop down menu.
Use the space. Give me buttons. Take options out of menus in menus in some absurd, backwards attempt at achieving "minimalism", because you don't understand what the word means, and make a UI that minimizes the time between when I load the thing, and when I get to what I am here for.
On touch centric UIs, it makes me absolutely insane when people have a button or something I might want to tap below a thing that has to be loaded and can be variable size, so I go for the button that does what I want and between my decision to touch it and my finger moving, the thing loads and I tap it instead.
Fuckin stop it. Make the thing that loads a static size or put the button above it. If your buttons jump all over the page after you initially display them, I hate you.
Designing everything for mobile first and de-prioritizing desktop. I'm on a desktop/laptop 90% of the day and it's infuriating to interact with a mobile looking interface on a desktop browser. That and a lot of platforms limit features you can access on desktop so you're forced to use their mobile app.
This. I don't need anything fancy, just copy the same functionality as in mobile. Even the same layout is ok, with a bit horizontal stretch.
Single page websites with only a few marketing blurbs, stock photos/meaningless graphics elements.
I want to know actual details about your product or service, so naturally I explore the menu... and every link takes me right back to anchors on the single page with its useless blurbs. Aaaaagh!
Limiting horizontal element width. If I wanted to read at 600px wide, I'd make my fucking browser 700px or so wide.
Ok, so mobile "needs" it? Not my fucking problem.
Compare the legacy Wikipedia design with the new one. Limiting the line width makes it so much easier to read, cause you don't loose your place as often when you jump to the next line. This is especially infuriating to me, cause some languages still use the old design. I always loathe using German Wikipedia cause of this.
I agree that it can be bad when lines are excessively short, or when designers make no adjustments for desktop browsers.
It is hard to read text with very long lines. Have you tried it? You need multiple text columns if you want to use more horizontal space (newspapers and large books have been doing this for centuries for this reason).
Creating columns was quite tricky before the widespread browser support for the relevant css. There was at least a decade with widescreen monitors but without proper (and responsive) column support in browsers.
That being said: Pages that are newer than let’s say 2020 don’t have this excuse.
Do websites display more than text?
Do some sites contain really wide text that may need to be viewed on one line, like code?
Of course I've tried it. I've been on the internet longer than that design choice.
When my browser window is in an inconvenient shape or location, do you know what I do? I resize and move my browser window just like any other window.
There was a time in the past when some web designers would move your window to the middle of the page. That location makes it easy to read content. Does that mean users want the designers making that choice for them? No. And webpages don't do that anymore.
Edit: just look at this disaster https://imgur.com/BfUcEVV 976 pixel margin in the left and the image is left aligned inside a centered 975 pixel div even though it is 2048 pixels wide and has plenty of space to be center aligned.
Newspapers have text in short columns as well, it’s just way easier to read than text that covers the entire width of a huge page.
Lot of new apps, like for example Windows' Phone Connection, have a minimum width instead. With unhideable columns. Often chat programs that does this. Also annoying. And weird that they build apps to look like mobile first designs, but then refuse to be useful on PCs when I scale the window to a vertical rectangle.
Fucking this.
My company does a SaaS SPA and it's hard coded to 800px for the main content panel, not for mobile purposes which has a different layout.
I have a 49" ultrawide, I guess I'll go fuck myself.
I hate how a lot of settings pages have stopped adding save/apply buttons, especially when they don't provide any indication that your changes are being saved after each modification. Like do I just close this window? What if I want to cancel the changes?
Also more sites seem to be adding these reactive-only search bars that dynamically fetch results as you type. Looks cool I suppose, but it's a huge pain in the ass when I want to add a search shortcut in Firefox and can't because they don't actually have a search URL.
Hiding scrollbars
Overlines instead of underlines. I'm looking at you Hulu Roku client!!
Not just Roku, also Hulu elsewhere. Actually I think that's the only place I see it.
Elements being so big they take up most of the screen. It makes shopping much more difficult, because you have to scroll to see more and then forget what you just saw a moment ago.
Also lazy loading. Scroll and scroll and scroll, have to stop to do something else, come back and the page has reloaded and you have to start all over.
Anything too small to reasonably tap without missing and hitting whatever is in the background.
Things that move for no reason. I.e. icon motion on the iPhone relative to the background when you move the phone. Pointless.
Ads on Windows.
Letting Sterling Archer design themes.
Me: All of the window frames in GNOME are black!
GNOME: Oh, are they? Or are active window frames black, and inactive window frames slightly darker black?
I know that you can change it by digging into some arcane CSS file. I've done it four or five times, since they keep changing the schema.
Bonus peeve, one that's too old to be a trend: Programs stealing window focus. I couldn't begin to count the number of times I've missed some dialog box, chose the wrong option, or generally messed up something which popped up and stole focus while I was typing something else.
Only NeXTSTEP ever got this right among desktop operating systems, by having the a "no window focus" state. You could start a program from the dock, and Workspace would lose window focus. If you waited, the new program would pop to the front with window focus. If you didn't want to wait, you could focus some other window, and it would stay focused! The new program would open all of its windows and dialog boxes in the background, waiting until you turned your attention to it.
It was glorious.
Icon on solid background.
Want to click on icon.
Start to move mouse toward icon.
Get almost all of the way there, and a square lights up around icon.
Something changed. It knows what element I want to interact with.
Click.
Nothing happens because I'm not actually pointing at the icon yet.
There are people in this world who need to be physically removed from what they're doing and pushed down into a chair, and have their job re-explained to them from scratch in a hushed, angry tone by someone looming over them with that "this is seriously your last chance before your life permanently worsens" look in their eyes. Whoever came up with that is one of them.
Sites that push clickable buttons down whilst they're loading, causing you to misclick.
Android:
Linux:
Every website needing Javascript to load stuff. Not needed, and with HTML and CSS you can do so much!
Mostly on phones: On/Off settings that have vague names and no description at all. I don't know what is Multi Layered Scrolling is and I'm not going to research it. It stays off until it is explained right where the setting is.
Websites and apps: I HATE a confirmation menu that has a "OK" and "Cancel" type buttons where the one they want you to click is bigger, more emphasized, better colored and attractive than the other. This is common when you want to quit a game - the "Actually no I want to keep playing" button is usually highlighted and bigger while the quit button is ugly, in red, in the corner.
Mobile first
modern layouts with tons of wasted whitespace and lowercase buttons that have no obvious widget borders.
I don't care if it looks cluttered- I'd rather have one page that I have to stare at for a second and then learn it than 5 pages that I have to scroll through every time.
Apps that aren't native
White background & gray text.
When did we shift away from black text?
There's less contrast with gray, and on a lot of displays it's more difficult to read, and more straining on the eyes.
Why does my PC need a flat UI? Gimme back my drop shadows.
I actually think the root problem here is the minimalist design ideas. The problem is minimalism isn't some design handed down by God or something, and it works horribly when what you're trying to interact with ... is basically a Swiss Army Knife x 2 trillion. I find minimalism nice for a vase, or a single purpose tool or device. But for computers it either makes them ever harder to actually use (now we've got docks we have to carry around with our laptops so we can plug in a USB device or flash drive or monitor vs just having the ports on the laptop because... well having a bag of wires, dongles, and a dock is so minimalist right?), or basically hides / removes functions.
Remember all the things you could do in Windows 98 that you can't do in Win10? Like one control panel to go to. You could set window, menu etc fonts and colors. etc. I mean simple UI things - no, we've been slowly trying to go back to a very limited OS interface.
Granted, I don't use Windows for most stuff anymore, so it doesn't bother me as much, but some of this stuff just follows you. Gnome does this crap so I can't use that anymore and have to look for forks from the programs that have a usable UI.
Signing in without a password. It makes it so much more annoying to sign in while using a password manager.
It's not noticed much, but information architecture based on business definitions instead of user needs.
You can plug in pretty much anything into that sentence. Business bullshit defines almost everything, because people getting paid to evangelize business bullshit are in charge of everything.
Place I work Is doing an overhall on our app ui right now. They gave us a beta build to play eith as we use the damn thing as well as supported it.
It was shit square buttons down the left side and nothing else which would have been fine if the plan wasn't make it preview to our customers.
They pulled the preview when we pointed out all the day to day stuff was all behind 1 button meaning out of the whole screen about 90x90 pixels was actually usefull.
The number of times we point out holes in the design is scary and always has the same conversation pattern
Can't do x because of y
Y wasn't given to us as a requirement
Who did you ask what the requirements were
........
It requires a strong, consistent hand on the rudder to keep that ship straight.
Menuless website. I don't want to scroll till i find the specific information i'm looking for
These websites that are just endlessly piled tiles look so dumb on desktop. And they're huuuge! How many MB of JavaScript do they need to cram into them where simple HTML and CSS would be perfectly fine and faster.
Confirmation button on the left, gray confirmation buttons, green cancel buttons (when the action you are performing is against the website, like subscription cancelation) or red cancel and gray confirmation.
Or hiding CTAs (like adding something to cart) under a hypertext rather than a button.
Different behavior for the same looking content (sometimes it redirects, sometimes it opens a new tab, sometimes it opens a modal).
Resetting forms on error - why the fuck do it need to fill it again?
I don't like animations, smooth transitions, smooth scrolling, rounded boxes and needless notification on the corner (unless it's a chatting app).
There can be inner shadows/colour gradients. It depends.
I liked how clean was Windows 9x design. Embossed buttons, same font family for design everywhere.. Pop-ups didn't have to 'fade in', just instantly appeared on the screen instead.
I hate rounded corners especially on phone screens. Rectangles for the win!
Thankfully this aesthetic has died off in most places, but the 5 year old head unit in my car has weird 3D icons of all the menu items complete with drop shadows, skewed perspective as if they're floating in space, and reflections. The background is some weird Tron shit and all the text looks like it's supposed to be some medical tech company from 2010
A floating window for things that should clearly have a tab-like look, like windows 11's start menu - why in the world does it float like a window?? Why is it not connected to the taskbar like in every other desktop? Or firefox's new tabs design.
Not using labels for radio buttons and checkboxes, is it really that hard? That's what it is for, if there's a corresponding text it should be used at a label for a given element, that way I can select it by clicking that text not a tiny square/circle
Also ignoring keyboard navigation, sometimes it's easier to just use tab key to move between fields, but nooo, the order is ducked up
Minimalist logos. I love minimalistic design, but I hate how absolutely BORING logos are becoming. Looking at you, Firefox...
A very small selection of Pastel colors instead of a color wheel. Give me my goddamn dark blue back Android!
Tip boxes that block the thing I'm trying to view
Text searches (e.g. page search in browsers) that do return results, but they don't show up anywhere on the screen or aren't highlighted.
flat design but specifically rounded everything. I'm not watching a video on a round player where part of what I'm watching is cut off. I even switched to the SE because the round screen with a notch in it on my iphone XR drove me crazy.
Aside from the standard dark patterns and extraneous, feature-forcing bloat, I really dislike that flat-design trend. Not just does it look kinda bad, but everything is so physically bloated to try to separate it from everything else that you get notably less usable screen space resulting in annoyingly little information density.
I have the opposite tendencies. I much prefer flat UI over the tacky bezeled borders or bubble/graphics/garbage of Old™.
I agree. And those 3D icons that were popular once were the height of the garbage trend. Flat and minimalistic looks so much better.
What irks me is when an app or website has a UI design made of simple geometric elements like a 1980s Macintosh ... but with the responsiveness of an overloaded Windows 98 machine.
So that's why everything is enormous now!
Modern web design uses a LOT of padding and I hate it. I'm a developer and usually ask the designers if it's okay to remove some of the padding.
And this might not qualify as a 'UI trend', but I'd like to personally wish a pox on whoever decided complex, multistep and ambiguous captcha puzzles were a good idea.
God those irritate me. Like ffs haven't you figured out I'm human yet?! %$#*
I don't like the overuse and misuse of Material UI – the paper-looking thing with raised textures and shadows. It takes a bit of work to make it look good, and many sites just drop in a CSS file and call it a day.
I'm very confused by the seemingly sudden rise of everyone recommending Material UI and apps being re-released with Material UI and it being used as the advertising point. I'm sure they can make cool stuff with it, but from my experience it all tends to look very unpolished and not so easy to read due to lack of distinction between areas.
Material UI is one of the more disappointing UI releases ever.
When you're browsing a website and the text and buttons are so large you can see them from the neighbors house.
I use a bigger screen and higher resolution to fit more, not fit the same...
UI elements that expand and cover up other UI elements when you mouse over them.
"Flat" color schemes where you can't even tell where one UI element ends and the other begins.
Insisting on using custom widgets (buttons, etc.) instead of the system-provided ones. It doesn't matter which platform you're on, I guarantee the system-provided widgets are better at being widgets.
White on white or black on black. Contrast is good, people. Use it.
I loved Chrome when it was all angular and tabs took up a tiny fraction of the top of the window. Now, everything has to be rounded. Everything. What the fuck is wrong with corners?
Flat and square everything is boring
Mobile-oriented UI on everything that makes it shitty to use on a real computer
I really don't care about boring as long as it is obvious. Agree on your second point.
Borderless windows. I don't know how many times I've clicked the window behind the one I'm using because I can't see where one window ends and the other begins.
Menus or results that live update or shift such that as you are clicking on a thing, it swaps for something else, which is what you actually end up clicking.
Not necessarily UI but the overuse of javascript on most websites. It makes browsing the web on low power and old devices a nightmare.
Microsoft's login page. Where you input your password, the when it asks for 2 factor, it resets itself.
Information hiding. Blender is near unusable unless you have a guide open of every key combination. Some combinations are just extremely well hidden but more often than not they literally don't even exist in drop down or right click menus. What makes things even worse is that guides just uncritically tell you to press key combinations without explaining what each button actually does, so while you do learn how to use the program you don't gain an understanding of what you're even doing in the first place, so when they update and change all the UI elements around you're left completely in the dark and have to relearn everything from the ground up.
As someone whose eye sight is shit, websites with grey text on an off-white page piss me right off.
I resent that UI designers are fucking around with trivial, and often annoying, shit when picklists still don't work properly. If it's, say, a list of countries and I hit U to find United Kingdom, the visible part of the picklist will be populated with Ts with the first U right at the bottom of it. How is is possible that this has not been resolved in what, three decades of picklists being used?
I also hate those scroll wheels for entering numbers with no option just to type the damn number. Sure, give us options. Don't make the easiest option impossible.
So much software that you just want to force the designer to actually use, as revenge.
Whatever happened after the frutiger aero days. Everything after that era of design is just a shitty solid color with maybe a gradient color if the design team is feeling particularly zesty. Back then, UI's were designed to be cozy and comfortable. Now it's just stiff and professional.
Huge pictures in front of an article - even when it's barely related
No contrast. Everything is in shades of gray. They're obsessed with the modern look even if it hurts visibility and usability. If you're old or have a shitty screen you're SOOL. Windows, I'm looking at you. They even removed the color customization so you either use the hideous high contrast mode or you're fucked.
Minimalism. I myself preferred the futuristic style of frutiger aero or sceumorfism (sorry for bad peeling I have dyslexia)
The generic and uninspired look of flat design
Every Gnome trend on the Desktop. Perfect for tablets, but it doesnt make sense?
In Gnome's defense, they also make it really easy to replace or customize the vast majority of things to an almost surprising degree and while their extension SDK is a bit weird with some choices, it's also fairly friendly to anyone with some JS experience.
I used to not be a fan either, but 44 and 45 have felt pretty good to use with minimal changes. Some of the more recent design guidelines they've refined have made a huge difference. I use Dash to Dock, but that's the only real UX change I use nowadays.
I still dislike the macOS-like launcher menu for apps. But I also don't care for an application menu or windows 7-style menu so I live with it.
Hmm, disagree here. How to replace the icons, the fonts, the buttons in the header, the positioning of the buttons?
In GNOME thats CSD (client side decoration) and either baked into the apps, or I guess nonexistant. On KDE its SSD and customizable, although mostly broken or worse than breeze.
Gnome Tweaks, dconf UI or cli, or extensions can adjust all of those things, CSD included. I wish it was more baked into the settings, fwiw. One of the first things I do is move the CSD buttons to the macOS location.
I definitely agree the baked-in CSD is annoying at times, but now that Wayland has matured a lot and most apps have adjusted to baked-in CSD along with adding Wayland support, it's pretty rare to run into problems.
Also... if you've only tried gnome recently on Ubuntu, def recommend trying it on debian or another distro that doesn't drastically change everything about it.
(And of course, all that said, desktop choice is wonderful and no one has to settle for anything, big or small 🙂)
I tried it on Fedora do vanilla too.
I dont know. I have lots of Gnome/Gnome circle/GTK apps I really like
But the desktop? Not yet convinced
Stock gnome feels a bit slow to me, but I love using it with custom keybinds for launching applications. Making good use of workspaces and multiple monitors makes it even better.
I cannot stand Gnome. I would genuinely prefer to use Bash-only than try to deal with Gnome.
I use the Cinnamon desktop, and Gnome apps and applets occasionally leak into Cinnamon "intact." They're easy to spot; the app opens as a large and mostly featureless blank window where all of the controls are crammed up into the top bar. open is all the way to the left, save is all the way to the right. Open and Save are spelled out as words, New and Save As are icons. Most everything else is in a hamburger menu, which usually isn't much because Gnome eschews menus, settings, configurations, options, or additional functionality. The app does the very middle of the road most normal use case for the task it's designed for and that is ABSOLUTELY it.
I'm also not on board with the whole rounded corners and bulbous look to everything. Reminds me of that line from The Simpsons: "Okay class, take out your safety pencils and a circle of paper."
I cannot stand bash haha. Its interface is so sad and without any colors. Its nice for TTYs and all, but fish is better for UX.
Funny how things like nala dont even work in a TTY as they use too fancy features.
Is it actually good for tablets now?
I remember having a good time with windows 8 on a tablet, that is, as long as all of my needs were fulfilled by metro apps. GNOME, one the other hand, I found to be less usable than even Win10 with display scaling.
Probably controversial, but as a full-stack dev that is front-end leaning, I hate everything to do with "material". Be it MUI or Angular Material or otherwise, I hate it all and advocate heavily at any gig to stray away from it whenever possible.
I don't like the Apple-like transparency and long transitions on everything. I like some, snappy transitions, but otherwise it just seems unstable, like it might vanish at any moment. A thing about material design is that it actually feels material, solid.
Material You/automatic color themes. I have a huge collection of wallpapers I've built up over the years and now I can only use a select few unless I want the entire phone os to be themed in ugly pastel colors like light brown or yellow or puke green. I literally just want an alternative option to pick my own color scheme or at this point I'd even be happy with the standard blue accent for everything instead of basing the entire os theme on random colors from my wallpaper. I also hate the rounded corners though! Especially the way phone displays are all rounded off and it just absolutely wrecks the resolution of everything. Having a camera sensor in the middle of the screen is kinda annoying too
while I personally quite like material you, I do think it would be neat to be able to create your own palette independent of wallpaper
because yeah, some wallpapers make the background of stuff shit green and eyewateringly vibrant orange for accents
I love the actual UI design with material you compared to the old material and holo design stuff but it's just that automatic coloring that drives me crazy. And to make it worse, I can pick a custom accent color on my phone but it really only changes the quick settings buttons and then everything else is auto themed based on the wallpaper lol it drives me crazy
Skeuomorphic design stinks. It showed up beginning with QuickTime 4 on the Macintosh, with curvy rounded buttons as if it was some kind of midrange stereo equipment. Soon there were serious apps with goddamn late 1970s wood paneling. And buttons with little glowy imitation LEDs under them instead of an obvious selected/unselected display.
Expose the app's controls in a way that fits neatly into the surrounding interface and is easily learnable by the typical user. Don't pretend that it's thirty to fifty years ago and you're building a piece of luxury hardware. You're not. It's a program on a modern computer system, and it can bloody well act like it.
I had to look up skeumorphic.
And the 50 shades of grey colour palette that makes every element look identical - Can I click this? Let's find out!
Spoilers in the titles, descriptions, and thumbnails of TV series. Looking at you, Plex.
Non minimalist designs
The equipment wheel on games. Metal gear solid did it best
The fricking hamburger menu on desktop applications. I don't care if there's an option to use it or even if it's the default option as long as there's a way to get a traditional menu bar. But when it's the only option the designers can fuck right off. Monopoly and privacy aside, I'll never use Chrome just because I have to use a stupid hamburger menu.
I completely understand why it's used on mobile devices, and thus I get why it's used for non-mobile devices. People who are used to it from mobile want it on the desktop. Or maybe your vertical screen space is limited and it lets you get back a line of space for other stuff. But it's really just poorly re-creating the menu bar while requiring (at least) an additional click. When there's no good reason for it, it just sucks. Give me an option to use it or not!
I hate whenever they randomly decided to flip the alphabetical column sort arrow from pointing down to up. Makes no sense to me, isn't the concept of an arrow supposed to represent 'hey, you start at this point and proceed in this direction'?
But no no, some nitwit decided to make the arrow just point to the beginning of the alphabet instead.
I'm someone who doesn't consent to data collection when it comes to choices given by GDPR - if I visit a new website and I get the popup that says how they value my privacy, I'm always going to customize the settings and have everything disabled.
However, as of "recently" a lot of websites have added a "legitimate interest" button which as far as I understand is a loophole, and unlike the other advertising options, they're not checked off by default which is annoying.
I want "realistic" UI, like macOS 10, not the flat sh*t we see nowadays.
Websites are not sliding puzzle games. Stop randomly floating bits over text. It sucks on mobile too.
I mostly use MacOS, my biggest gripe is how they are gradually making the whole thing look like your iPhone. I found it impossible to justify. It's basically dumbing down the UI.
Light gray on slightly darker gray for anything, especially scrollbars.
Rounded corners when it could fill my entire monitor and now leave white pixels in the corners
Websites that make you scroll down the main page.
Not being able to remove features and apps. Andriod and Windows are both doing it
Client-side decorations make every application look, work and feel different. It puts an inappropriate amount of control in the hands of app developers with questionable aesthetic and UX sensibilities, all to save like 5% vertical space and look fresh and modern in screenshots.
material you
White-on-black/black-on-white
The monitor is able to display millions of colours including hundreds of shades of grey.
Yet we still go with either vanta-black-text-on-pure-white-background or pure-white-text-on-vanta-black-background. That shit's TERRIBLE on your eyes, for fuck's sake. Bonus points if you're one of those ultra-turbo-power-masochists that uses their computer with all the lights out and nothing but the glow of the monitor lighting up the room. Do you WANT to be blind before you turn forty?
The lower-contrast a theme is, the better. Solarized or death.
I also highkey miss the age of transparencies and animations and skeuomorphic 3D-prerendered icons on everything. The modern trend of symbolic icons and mostly-flat UI elements lacks prettiness. There was never a moment when computer UIs looked better than early aughts MacOSX. Fight me.
Gnome CSD. Other desktops/software use GTK too, you know?
An old trend... but back in the days, "web 2.0" became the new hot topic and the hot design trend for web 2.0 was glossy, reflective buttons.
I remember making shiny buttons in GIMP for my personal web projects, thinking they looked so cool.
That didn't age well...
LEMMY one : response to your comment without the context or the thread. OK, it's more UX than UI
When I get several comments on my post, I would like to click to the oldest and see the thread back, not doing it one by one.
Monochrome/grayscale/otherwise extremely desaturated icons. Just... why? They're so much harder to parse and remember.
Not necessarily UI but I hate having a weird display ratio and having media playback have giant black bars on either side, some movies are better than others but y'know.
Also I hate the simplication of colors and angles and general creativity in the UX design.
Those new key bindings and editor thing in github. I wish I could opt out and just get static pages.
I don't think this is a big trend in real life but at several jobs I've had to go off on a spiel about how hover isn't a great interaction. Doesn't work on mobile. Easy to create mouse tunnels. People might not think to hover over random things on the page.
Most of site-of-the-days on awwwards.com
I understand skeuomorphism isn't really a big thing anymore, but I wish it were easier to find it as an option. I know it's the opposite of what you asked so I suppose UI flattening is what I hate
All of them. Every idea any web designer has had since 2000 has been a bad one. Content on the internet is exclusively worse since Facebook was released. Redesigns let management get convenient quarterly objectives and we spend way too much time redesigning when we could be getting features. It's all absurd.
material you
Action buttons all over the page
Status updates that resize the rest of the page
Date fields that require the calender picker
Date fields that can't be client side formatted
It's funny to me, whenever this kind of threads pop up, there's people arguing against and for the exact same things with upvotes for both. It's like aesthetics are a personal and subjective opinion, or something.
Windows 11. All of it
very skeuomorphic icons
Whatever BS Google is doing to their apps and webpages at the moment. I swear, they are constantly changing and degrading their UIs. Pretty annoying to see the app has a new and more garbage UI then it had yesterday or the last time I opened the app.
Vector art. Fuck them.
Good thing it’s no longer 2005 then