Ask Lemmy

1. 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.
2. Disappearing scroll bars

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.

Items are no longer made to last past their warranty.

They are made to last past the time you’re allowed to leave a review.

Nothing is fun anymore. Seriously. Modern designers do not design fun things anymore. No matter what it is, cell phones, cars, dining chairs, there is nothing fun. Nothing invites interaction. Nothing invites relationship building.

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I saw this thing the other day. The "Jack in a Box" Television by Timo Salli for the short-lived studio SNOWCRASH. Made in 1997. Where the fuck is this energy nowadays?? Everything looks either angry or bored with us now; antagonistic with no justification. Zero whimsy, zero intrigue. Why does this walmart toaster look like it wants to fight me? Designers' personalities are erased with nothing to show for it but row after row of the same matte white or piano black plastic SHIT (30% OFF!)

Every appliance, monitor, speaker, clock, really anything that plugs in has to have a blue LED.

Got a modem from the cable company installed in my bedroom, the indicator lights were bright enough to read by.

1.) Everything is a "smart" device. Household appliances, as a general rule, should not be connectable to the internet or require an app.

Cheaper components, poor build quality, and lack of user serviceable parts are the primary reasons your washer and dryer last 10 years compared to your parents Maytag set that was still ticking away after 30. Cheap, unnecessary electronics, which don't have as long a lifespan as mechanical timers and switches, only exacerbate this problem.

2.) Cordless tools as a means of vendor locking customers.

LED indicator lights on things that have nothing to indicate. Does an electric fan need an indicator? Will you be confused about whether it's operating or not if it doesn't have one? Oh, it's in swivel mode! Good thing it told me that, or I might have thought it was swiveling for other reasons.

Millennial gray interior design. Gray "wood pattern" laminate floor, white cabinets, black appliances. Just no color. It's so depressing. For only $1600/no you can live in a 3rd story gray pod that's still 45 minutes from where you work.

Minimalism.

It's everywhere from company logos, to fast food interior design, and now the vexillology community swears by minimalist flag designs.

• When interface shifts around due to information update (e.g new bluetooth devices found).
• When primary content in a website is hidden behind hover effects.
• Expensive animations, blur and gradients with no functionality.
• When an app treats me like a baby and asks me 20 questions one at a time instead of giving me a menu of options.
• Excesive round corners
• Excesive padding on apps.

I just really hate when webpages take 10 seconds to load a cluttered mess of an interface with no sense of direction

Give me back my God damn full keyboard and headphone jack. (Phones)

Colors. Society has been getting more monochrome for years. And now black and white houses are all over.

If I ever meet the asshole that invented the mouse-off function for webpages so that when you go to close a tab, a pop-up jumps up so that the website owner can scream, "wait, no, please subscribe, give us your email, send us money, something holy fucking shit, dear god ah!" at you I swear I will break their fucking fingers and punch them in the dick.

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?"

Sort of meta, but: Alienation.

Buildings plopped down in a rectangle with a standard layout—boxy building with door facing parking lot—with no ornamentation, no contextual clues about what's inside, and worst, no consideration or design dialogue whatsoever with the surroundings. It's like a city as Lego set, each building on its own bar plate, and they can be shuffled around in any order. Designers talk about design language, and this style says, "fuck you."

Food that just shows up at your door after ordering from an app, made by a "ghost kitchen." Possibly located in one of those boxes-with-a-parking-lot. No connection to other humans. (Or is that a tire distributor's headquarters? No way to tell.)

Company web sites with no information about who runs the company, or where it is, or much about its connection to the community. The product is probably made on spec by an anonymous Chinese factory, so even if you can talk to somebody, they're either in a contract call center serving hundreds of companies, or somebody not paid enough to care.

Speaking of low-paid lackeys, the fast food-ification of the landscape. They're getting rid of dining rooms, so your only human interaction is briefly through a window. If you're lucky. They're working on getting rid of that, too. Then, you're sealed behind a windshield, in cars that get more fortress-like every year, never seeing another human face.

A lot of people say that they're introverts and hate people and like it this way, but we also have a pandemic of loneliness and poor mental health , so...

"Have you tried our new layout?"
"Did you know you now can...?"
"We've hidden this from you, but don't worry! Click here to see them"
"News: We're launching a new product!"
"Looking for X? It is now here!"
"We upgraded you to the new view. Revert to the old view?"
"Enable integration with (our other product) for an enhanced experience"
"You may not have permission to view what used to be on this page"
"Take a tour"
"How are you liking the new settings screen?"
"You will be automatically moved to the new X, no need to do anything"

Every electronic item whether it be a hot water kettle, air conditioner or an UPS backup in my camper, even my electric toothbrush has to make a noise, a bing or beep when either the things starts, changes phase or finishes.

This button “style.” WTF even is this? It’s objectively and functionally terrible.

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Also McDonald’s brutalism. But then, I’m happy not to eat there.

1. Blue LEDs are BORING! You have the entire specturm of colors, stop using only blue!
2. Touch buttons are terrible, and should be illegal in cars.
3. Flat UI design is boring and lazy, give me the UI design from the Ubuntu Humanity theme in Ubuntu 9.04, that shit was great!
4. SUVs all look the same, they are boring and too big, hot hatchbacks are great!
5. Smartphone design has stagnated, you used to be able to get some cool colors, but that has mostly gone away, folding phones are an interesting development though...
6. Stop building boring grey buildings that looks like boxes, get some jugend or cool brickwork buildings (do NOT paint the brick building!)
7. Stop tracking everything we do, I just read about how Meta is using a new secret tracking technique that enable tracking ocer VPNs and other services, soon we will all need a sound isolated anechoic chamber with an airlock that you only enter through a double faraday cage with a full body hazmat suit to access a dedicated burner device to access a specific service, I don't want that, enough is enough.

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.

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...

Electron apps. Write native apps. I don’t need a simple todo app using 300MB of RAM.

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? 🤔

The removal of bezels on phones, the camera cutouts sometimes have issues and its all together worse, just for a technically larger screen, and Apps, so many apps are just packaged web browsers, but with more access to private information and such.

Infinite scroll

Enshitification of search results when shopping

Planned obsolescence

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.

"Squircles", Just make shit square you fuckers I hate you

High wasted jeans, they make your legs look too long and your butt to be infinitely high, I still love you though.

Scrollbars that are impossible.to use because they auto.minimize , and you have to get them just right to slide.

Apps/websites that log you out too frequently for no good reason

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

So many things. Most things seem designed against humans instead of for them. Most are designed to supposedly look pretty, when I'm someone looking for content and information. Those are often hidden. Add to that malpractice, misleading, and lying.