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 bought a dryer and it has “AI Dry.” Which I’m fairly sure is not. It’s just the “sensor dry” feature that dryers have had for decades. Except I can’t control the amount of heat (no “low heat” option) so it ends up being fairly useless. This is also the default option whenever the dryer turns on, so yay.
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.
Sticky headers. Unbearably distracting.
Also, wasted space and a lack of information density.
Big garages on the front of houses, with front door hidden. Hate Hate Hate the garage houses with my whole soul.
I need to add another one. All modern anime, to me, seems look the same. Like a lot the same. Homogenous. And unfortunately just not at all visually interesting. It’s preventing me from even attempting to get into anything new, because I honestly can’t visually tell the differences anymore. What happened to the artistry? For instance:
I’m currently sitting in a modern car dealership and ever single chair SUCKS. Modern chairs are hard, low backed, have funky angles, and if they are high backed, it’s to give this half assed sense of privacy that just isn’t there.
Man old chairs are so much better. You just sunk and could almost take a nap.
Endless scrolling over pagination
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?”
Light colored text on a light colored background, in the thinnest font possible. It’s like, let’s make wrenches out of rope because that would look cool.
Every new building looks the same. Fast food restaurants are indistinguishable except for the sign out front. All apartment buildings are identical. Office buildings are built to house cubicle farms. Nothing new is interesting or unique, because it’s not profitable to stand out; it’s all optimized for speed and cost. Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V everywhere.
Same with cars. They’re all the same ugly-ass hideous blobs that hardly resemble cars anymore, and all of them are the same tiny grays, whites, blacks, and maybe red if you’re lucky. Gone are the days of colourful cars that actually had style.
I miss brightly coloured cars. A friend has an old, bright yellow car that probably won’t last for much longer, and they are sad that newer cars are much duller.
Convergent evolution through CAFE laws and UAW protectionist lobbying.
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.
Oh I HATE that. It’s outrageous
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.
Touch controls everywhere, I’ve got an induction cook top which is all touch, (temperature is a bar you can drag) guess what happens when you’ve got some spillage while cooking. Yeah, if you are lucky nothing happens, but I had it several times shutting itself down, or adjusting the temperature, which is fucking stupid and dangerous. You want to get rid of the water with a towel? Something will trigger. Really great.
Letting the computer decide what is best for you. There was/is this feature?! in windows 10, or 11 where it sets the color of your font on the desktop based on your wallpaper, and I did not find a way to change it. So what happens when you’ve got a wallpaper that is bright on top and darker on the bottom, like maybe a landscape image? Guess you are just not reading any of the text on the top half…
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?
lack of user control in devices and software generally
I wish I could tell my dishwasher what sequence and length of rinse, wash, and dry cycles to do and how long to do each but instead i gotta pick between “heavy, regular, light, eco” and just fucking guess which is best for my needs. if I’m lucky the manual will have sequence descriptions