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.
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!
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.
I love my Xperia, still has bezels and it makes the phone easier to hold imo
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.
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.
Farmhouse modern
Also anything that looks like it comes from Kirkland’s, because there’s a good bit of overlap:
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.
The trend to more complicated but cheaper instead of doing it right. Result is news about security incidents every single day.
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.
- the lets put a lot of shit in the title bar of our app trend. Fuck off, I use that bar to pull the window around.
- The idea that I should adapt to the technology, and not the other way around. Don’t force changes on me, especially when they’re only implemented to be able to slap a new version number on the box.
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
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.
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.
Oh I HATE that. It’s outrageous
As other mentioned, lack of physical buttons.
Minimalistic interfaces in software:
- In websites they waste a lot of real estate on the monitor.
- They make harder to find things navigating menus and submenus that should have the settings you are looking for but they decided that it should be better to bury it somewhere else.
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.
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?
Because many of the frameworks, including Angular and React, were getting started while HTML and JS specs and the support of those specs were a giant hodgepodge MESS.
Why are so many things divs instead of standard components? Because for WAY too long, those components weren’t standard. Some browsers didn’t even fully support basic components or styling options that had been standard for years.
Why is everything a div? Because in many browsers, divs got the most feature support.
The frameworks seem nonsensical and dumb because they’re covering up a LOT of even worse things.
Not to say a ton of nasty things cannot remain, or new gross things crop up, but at least this one has a history that’s more interesting than, “they designed it poirly”. Nope, a lot of the problems have no design at all, or might’ve been worse with a more “standard” implementation!
Tables and select boxes have been standard for ages across all browsers what are you on about.
Like why is a fucking table now a bunch of divs?
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.
websites that scroll wrong, and then they stop dead on some animation. Automatic nope on the product.
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!
