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. And then having the nerve to tell you to download the mobile app 😑
- Why does everything need to be an app by the way? Especially when the only advantage the app gives you over the website is that you’re not constantly spammed with messages telling you to use the app… Are you making your website shittier on purpose so I feel like I have to use the app?.. I don’t WANT your app, you can shove it where the sun doesn’t shine.
- Actually EVERYTHING looks like it’s made for a phone… Like what’s the deal with all those hamburger menus on DESKTOP software? 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. You know, “keyboards”? Those things that people on DESKTOPS use?
- All phones look the same. All laptops look the same. It’s boring as hell.
- Laptops must be as thin and flimsy as possible. Bonus points if you can’t even fit an ethernet port.
- I’m so sick of rounded corners everywhere… 😭
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- All new cars look the same and are way bigger than necessary
Everything you said.
Programs > apps (in the sense of the word)
Everything looks nearly identical online
Stupid delayed popups right where you’re about to click
Websites making ANY chime/beep/noise in an attempt to direct you to their garbage robot support
Robot support
No companies having phones anymore…zero accountability.
Everything being forced to some social media garbage to tell a company how their service/product is broken and you need help
Right the robot support… Especially when the only way to reach support on a website is to go through the annoying support chatbot first… and it’s designed intentionally this way to increase the chances of you just giving up 😡
Robot support
I had a good, brief conversation with one the other day. I told it I was going to their competitor because they didn’t have annoying chat pop-ups.
Stupid delayed popups right where you’re about to click
🤬
- Completely flat chiclet keyboards on laptops. It drives me absolutely insane because I can barely tell if my fingers are aligned with the keys. Thanks, Apple!
- Hidden controls on desktop software or desktop websites (ex: hidden exit, forward, and back controls on picture galleries)
- Hiding or collapsing scrollbars on desktop software
In general, it seems like there’s a major trend in design of form beating the heck out of function. It looks pretty! Who cares if you can actually use it or not?
I’d argue it’s less “It looks pretty” as “It looks modern™”…
You definitely have a good point!
I loath the modern obsession with minimalist, utilitarian design. Everything is just a white, black, or grey slab with no artistic thought put into its form. Buildings, homes, cars, clothes, electronic devices. It’s almost like a capitalist version of brutalism. Even the design of user interfaces is usually a pile of flat, washed out rectangles now. It’s like the soul has been sucked out of everything we make, reduced to it’s most basic form. It can feel anti-human at times. Like the world has collectively decided that beauty is a waste of time.
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.
Infinite scroll instead of pagination.
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Rounded corners. Everywhere. They lose so much space, especially on small screens, and everything feels crammed.
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No personalization anywhere. You used to be able to completely customize social media profiles, to the point of editing your page’s CSS directly.
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Modern OSes (except linux or BSD based ones which are not android) also have no color or personalization. You usually have the slabs of white on light mode, or the slabs of blak on dark mode, with only one color you can choose for some details.
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JavaScript animations on every. Single. Website. I have an old phone (because I don’t like modern stuff), and it struggles with almost every modern, animated site. Is it really necessary to add all that js and animations?
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No headphone jacks or expandable storage on modern phones. It probably costs cents to add those features. I know phones don’t usually have expandable storage because it makes you buy a new one once you fill all your storage, and I know they don’t have audio jacks because it makes you buy the company’s wireless headphones, but I need those features in my phone.
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Why does everything have to be a web app now? Have people forgotten about actual softwate, that you own, that doesn’t need internet to work, that uses almost no resources and is faster and has more features than a web app? We got everything backward. Sites that should be webs like reddit will ask you to download their apps, while microsoft will try to code Word in javascript and sell it to you as an “upgrade”.
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I hate subscriptions with passion, especially for software.
There’s so much javascript everywhere… A few years ago I used to be able to browse the internet with the NoScript extension, and it only required a few allows now and then. Now NOTHING works without javascript, and each website needs you to allow 20 others websites for it to work…
I’ve tried COSMIC DE Beta on Pop!_OS on an older laptop I have around, and the feature I’m looking forward to most, that I’ve seen and experienced from my mininal usage of it, is the ability to easily change colours from settings. Not just accent colours, but window colours, text colours, etc. From what I recall, I could, for instance, recreate Hot Dog Stand, the Windows 3.1 colour theme, right from the system settings app, no third party downloads
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Car centric cities by far. Bring back walkable neighborhoods and give me options to move around instead of only being able to be stuck inside a car
QR coding everything. It has it uses and is practical in certain use-cases, but don’t use it everywhere.
Maybe I’m paranoid but it also seems very insecure. I’ve been to some restaurants where they have the menu as a qr code and you even pay for your food from the website. What’s to stop a bad actor from creating a fake version of your website and stealing card data? They just need to create a qr sticker and put it on top of the one on the table.
That’s actually a huge problem and I don’t get why it is not talked about more. We all learn about validating links in emails and are very careful about clicking anything there. But QR codes we just scan and open without thinking.
saw a mall once that didn’t have its hours printed or posted anywhere and only had a printed-out QR code u had to scan if u wanted to check the hours. turned my ass right tf around and never came back.
Smart everything. I’m buying second hand TVs simply so they are not marketing to me as soon as I turn it on.
Terms of design I feel like since postmodern we have had a bastardisation of flat design which was really mostly suited to information design but it got shoved on everything hence the monochrome blandness. On the other side we got a bastardisation of arts and crafts maybe where people tried to digitally replicate traditional methods, we got hand lettering stamping etc. then they swished them together and true design got shoved out the window in favour of , how can we grab the users attention, to
how can we hold the viewer captive, to
How can we force the viewer to absorb, to The how can we annoy the viewer so much they will pay to just read/view in peace.I am not sure what this design movement will be called
- Light and dark modes with nothing in between. Platinum from MacOS and the default look from Windows 95 were crisp and bright without burning out your eyeballs.
- Wasted screen space. People laugh at Japanese websites for looking too busy, but I’d much rather deal with that than scroll for ages or look for links buried 3 levels deep in a hamburger menu.
- The idea that everything needs a backlit color LCD screen.
- Modern standby on laptops. Sure I could just hibernate it, but that’s very inelegant when S3 sleep was perfectly fine before.
- Glued-together electronics.
The ultra-dark dark modes really bug me, black with various shades of black or dark colors is almost impossible to see UI elements on easily.
Dark modes should be like in the 50% gray area, where it’s dim but things can still have good contrast.
Out of curiosity, what is the difference between older S3 sleep and modern sleep?
S3 sleep powers down all major components except for RAM. Modern sleep also keeps the CPU and network up, albeit in a low power state. It’s not always executed well, hence the reports of laptops cooking themselves in a bag or draining overnight despite being “in sleep mode”.
Ah, that’s exactly what mine does sometimes.
Also doesn’t hibernate write your RAM contents to your disk? That sounds like a great way to leak your passwords and encryption keys in plaintext. Also you need to always reserve the same amount of space on disk as your RAM and can’t use that space for anything else on the off chance you might want to hibernate.
At least for windows the hibernation file is stored as a file on the C: drive, so will be encrypted by bitlocker along with your other data.
Wouldn’t that also mean that when the file gets overwritten, i.e the next time the system hibernates, you can potentially run a data recovery program on the C filesystem to leak its previous contents since modern filesystems don’t necessarily immediately overwrite the underlying data anymore, but usually just change the regions on the drive the file points to? So you could have ghost memory dumps hiding out in your free space just waiting for malware to access. You can definitely recover data from the free space of a Bitlocker volume because the encryption is transparent to the filesystem.
This is also why I don’t like swap files and always disable them (or use an OS like Fedora that doesn’t have them by default), because it kind of defeats the point of only storing some data in RAM for security.
I could just be ignorant of how memory files in storage are managed though.
Indeed. I have everything encrypted, but it’s still a waste of P/E cycles, especially when combining large quantities of RAM with QLC flash SSDs.
Modern sleep keeps a network connection active so it can still check your email or whatever stupid reason they came up with.
Colors. House color options are stupid as shit. Especially if you’re selling. Car color options. Why is everything so boring? Where’s the teal and hot pink, and yellow with red stripes, amd rainbow, and glittery purple, and burnt orange and…
All houses are mostly beige-y white, or soft dark colors or something boring. All cars are black, white, or boring shades of blue, maybe red. No interesting shades. And then the inside of the car is like beige.
Meanwhile electronics, especially computer parts have too many fucking lights that are distracting as shit.
FUCKING MATERIAL DESIGN AND ALL IT’S RELATIVES!
FUCK YOU, WHOEVER DESIGNED THIS SHIT.
I don’t mind that someone designed it, but the people who decided that it would the new standard and the ONLY standard design should be shot. In the legs. And left to bleed out on a raft above a shark tank.
Thank you! this mental image was like cold balm on my soul.
I shall cherish it. :)
Why so much purple? Always. This shit is so tired.
Interrupted garden paths. Like stepping stones in lawn. Just put a continual path. Stepping stones are terrible for access and maintenance. Just grass or just paving would be preferable.
The home, back, and switch app buttons on Android being replaced with that bar like on the iPhone.
I especially miss the back button, swiping from the edge of the screen is nowhere near as ergonomic. It also replaced the ability to reveal the side panel by swiping from the left edge, so now you have to tap the hamburger menu way up at the top left corner of the screen for it, which requires either your other hand or you have to shimmy the phone down your hand until you can reach it.
Also, when you have a full screen video playing, you have to swipe up once to reveal the bar, and then again to actually close out of the app. That made sense with buttons but why the hell is it still the case with the bar?
Double tapping the switch app button to switch between the two most recent apps was also more convenient than swiping up to reveal the app manager and dragging the window to the right, and when you want to go to the previous app, whether it’s on the right or left side of the current one seems to depend on how long you’ve been on the app for, which means you can never build up muscle memory since it changes all the time.
Another case of Google trying to imitate Apple’s UX but seemingly not actually doing any of the usability testing and polishing that Apple does, and generally making it both worse than Apple’s implementation and worse than what was there before.
You can bring back the old control scheme! You can even flip it which my gf uses cause it’s easier for her to reach.
Touch screens on fitness watches is the dumbest shit. I straight up can’t use it while jogging and sweating. I just need a couple real buttons, but good luck finding that.
