Original question text by @phantomwise@lemmy.ml
What are the modern design trends you hate most? Feel free to rant! Mine are:
- Physical buttons are out of fashion, now EVERYTHING must have a touch screen instead! Especially if it makes the appliance more inconvenient to use. Like having to press a flimsy touch screen ten times to scroll through a washing machine’s programs instead of just turning a physical knob and pressing a physical start button.
- Every website looks like it’s made for a phone and was vomited by the same app in slightly different flavors of vomit.
- Actually EVERYTHING looks like it’s made for a phone… Like what’s the deal with all those hamburger menus on DESKTOP apps? Please just put a regular menu and same me some pointless clicking, it’s not like you’re lacking screen space. I especially hate that those menus can’t be opened from the keyboard like regular menus.
I fucking hate the waste of space on websites. I also hate topbars that follow me as I scroll down.
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.
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…
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 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.
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.
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
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
* 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.
Even worse: “last week/month/year” lumps everything together when you start the next week/month/year
The option is called “relative date” (as opposed to absolute date). On macos you can switch it off:
- open Finder, go to list view
- select very first item in hierarchy
- click on the little triangle next to the (folder-)icon to expand but press the option key wihle doing so
- hit “cmd” + “J” - a settings panel will open
- there is a tick box that says “relative date” that needs to be disabled (unticked)
- if you want to apply this settings as the new default setting for all finder windows, press the “apply as standard”-button at the bottom. All dates will show now the actual date instead of “today”, “yesterday” and such.
Oh you sweet summer child, thinking that will apply to most websites.
Tthis setting is not intended to apply to websites. With this setting you can change whether the date is shown as absolute (dd.mm.yyyy) oder relative (today, yesterday,…) for your own files on your computer.
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
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
Oh I HATE that. It’s outrageous
on the hardware products, I enjoy finding the early examples of them (where the manufacture stopped supporting) as project boxes.
Removing or replacing decades old proven and studied ui elements because fuck you user.
- No error messages, ever. Because apparently users hate information with all their heart and are at risk of burning down cities if they ever find out what the fuck went wrong with an application.
- Disappearing scroll bars
Users have somehow been trained to ignore and dismiss error messages. Probably from getting too many ad pop-ups.
Users are lazy AF and hate to read. No matter how instructive the error message, some people would rather open a helpdesk ticket because “the computer isn’t working again”.
It says right there your USB drive is full and suggests deleting some files to free up space, Karen! 🤨
Users have always hated computers but they now must use them and treat them as appliances.
When my parents needed a new computer, I told them “no hp ever, and don’t buy an anti-virus, it’s built-in now.” They obviously knew better than me and asked the salesman instead. They bought a hp computer with a McAffee subscription…
Worse than useless error messages are useless error messages that try to be cute/funny.
Uh oh! We made an oopsie 👉👈 sowwy we wost your data
Two buttons on the bottom of the window:
- “It’s okay fam!”
and
- “I’m a grumpy meanie who doesnt understand things happen!”
Disappearing scroll bars
Isn’t this triggable in most OSs? Unless we are talking about mobile, which I lean towards disappearing because of screen sizes.
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.
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.
