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.
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
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…
- 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.
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 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.
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?”
Removing or replacing decades old proven and studied ui elements because fuck you user.
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.
* Sort by date *
* Sorts date alphabetically *
Looking at you Altium Designer
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.
The main post is asking about general design patterns, and many others have commented about relative dates in gitlab and many other online sources.
It is precisely my point to say that the settings cited here are local only.
Endless scrolling over pagination
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?
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.
Oh yeah. I generally don’t touch it if a site is generally okay without it. I’ve just come across lots of sites that will only display an error message unless I allow JS.
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.
I’m talking about pre-HTML5. Back when a lot of non-web devs hated JacaScript. Back when people liked ActiveX. Back when CSS wasn’t universally supported. If you’re too young to remember those days, count yourself lucky.
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.
Dialogues that don’t require clicking OK to apply my selection. What if I change my mind or click the wrong thing?
Here’s a past annoyance: help text for BIOS settings that was like
Tronic memory catalyst conversion ratio: Sets the ratio of tronic memory catalyst conversion.
O RLY? 🤔
Removed by mod
- 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
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!”
