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.
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 “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.
- 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.
touch screens aren’t a design trend. they’re a way to save cost.
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
Farmhouse modern
Also anything that looks like it comes from Kirkland’s, because there’s a good bit of overlap:
Material design. Everything must be so flat that you cannot see if it’s a button or just something highlighted.
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.
Nothing is ever done, even when it evolves to a great functional state that everyone is familiar with, and it works perfectly well. No, we need to fiddle with it to “keep it fresh” which inevitably makes it worse in some way.
iOS Photos app is a textbook example of this
I hate single page apps that force you to click on a post to see comments, and don’t let you open them in a new tab.
websites that scroll wrong, and then they stop dead on some animation. Automatic nope on the product.
Removing or replacing decades old proven and studied ui elements because fuck you user.
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.
Cameras and microphones in “smart” TVs. There’s a reason why when the current TV I use as a monitor dies that I’d be more than willing to take it to a repair shop than replace it.
Also, on the subject of that TV, I’d be lucky to find a modern model that’s even half of double the size of my current one. It feels impossible to find anything anywhere near 1080x1920 resolution. Maybe I’m bad at finding them, but you know, finding anything like that from known, reputable companies today. Hell, I even looked at a few Japanese brands from their Japanese websites and all the models were looking like American super sized models.
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.
