Asklemmy

Limiting horizontal element width. If I wanted to read at 600px wide, I'd make my fucking browser 700px or so wide.

Ok, so mobile "needs" it? Not my fucking problem.

I hate how a lot of settings pages have stopped adding save/apply buttons, especially when they don't provide any indication that your changes are being saved after each modification. Like do I just close this window? What if I want to cancel the changes?

Also more sites seem to be adding these reactive-only search bars that dynamically fetch results as you type. Looks cool I suppose, but it's a huge pain in the ass when I want to add a search shortcut in Firefox and can't because they don't actually have a search URL.

Elements being so big they take up most of the screen. It makes shopping much more difficult, because you have to scroll to see more and then forget what you just saw a moment ago.

Also lazy loading. Scroll and scroll and scroll, have to stop to do something else, come back and the page has reloaded and you have to start all over.

1. Hiding scrollbars

2. Overlines instead of underlines. I'm looking at you Hulu Roku client!!

Anything too small to reasonably tap without missing and hitting whatever is in the background.

Things that move for no reason. I.e. icon motion on the iPhone relative to the background when you move the phone. Pointless.

Ads on Windows.

Letting Sterling Archer design themes.

Me: All of the window frames in GNOME are black!

GNOME: Oh, are they? Or are active window frames black, and inactive window frames slightly darker black?

I know that you can change it by digging into some arcane CSS file. I've done it four or five times, since they keep changing the schema.

Bonus peeve, one that's too old to be a trend: Programs stealing window focus. I couldn't begin to count the number of times I've missed some dialog box, chose the wrong option, or generally messed up something which popped up and stole focus while I was typing something else.

Only NeXTSTEP ever got this right among desktop operating systems, by having the a "no window focus" state. You could start a program from the dock, and Workspace would lose window focus. If you waited, the new program would pop to the front with window focus. If you didn't want to wait, you could focus some other window, and it would stay focused! The new program would open all of its windows and dialog boxes in the background, waiting until you turned your attention to it.

It was glorious.

Flashbang white, looks so sterile and unappealing

Wasted space, fucking everywhere now

And thanks to smartphones, everything gotta have the same shitty uniform design

Sites that push clickable buttons down whilst they're loading, causing you to misclick.

Icon on solid background.

Want to click on icon.

Start to move mouse toward icon.

Get almost all of the way there, and a square lights up around icon.

Something changed. It knows what element I want to interact with.

Click.

Nothing happens because I'm not actually pointing at the icon yet.

There are people in this world who need to be physically removed from what they're doing and pushed down into a chair, and have their job re-explained to them from scratch in a hushed, angry tone by someone looming over them with that "this is seriously your last chance before your life permanently worsens" look in their eyes. Whoever came up with that is one of them.

Mobile first

Mostly on phones: On/Off settings that have vague names and no description at all. I don't know what is Multi Layered Scrolling is and I'm not going to research it. It stays off until it is explained right where the setting is.

Websites and apps: I HATE a confirmation menu that has a "OK" and "Cancel" type buttons where the one they want you to click is bigger, more emphasized, better colored and attractive than the other. This is common when you want to quit a game - the "Actually no I want to keep playing" button is usually highlighted and bigger while the quit button is ugly, in red, in the corner.

Android:

• those damn huge quicksettings buttons
• the combined internet toggle
• animations being literally required for a stable UI
• showing all media playback on lockscreen for everyone picking up my phone

Linux:

• Gnome with their tablet-like UI on laptops, close-button not in the very edge of the corner etc.
• KDEs sharp ugly icons. The style before, in the Windows7 era, was crazy and maybe not really modern. But the small breeze icons look too sharp and kinda weird. I like the rest of the icons though

Every website needing Javascript to load stuff. Not needed, and with HTML and CSS you can do so much!

modern layouts with tons of wasted whitespace and lowercase buttons that have no obvious widget borders.

I don't care if it looks cluttered- I'd rather have one page that I have to stare at for a second and then learn it than 5 pages that I have to scroll through every time.

Why does my PC need a flat UI? Gimme back my drop shadows.

• Personally I hate the everything is flat with no borders. Like - what was wrong with buttons looking like buttons (3D and an animation WHEN YOU CLICKED THEM)? Now it's like - what's the button?
• The "hamburger menu" - why can't we have the traditional set of menus across the top? No, now it's an extra click for no reason.
• Why do we keep adding clicks to get to stuff? Why is right click -> more -> open in file manager -> rightclick -> properties so I can figure out where a shortcut GOES in Win10?
• Hiding scroll bars, and not having the little buttons on the sides. Now I can't easily click on down or up to slightly scroll when I need to look for something, no on very log docs I'm just wildly swooping around.
• Ever more clicks to do anything.

I actually think the root problem here is the minimalist design ideas. The problem is minimalism isn't some design handed down by God or something, and it works horribly when what you're trying to interact with ... is basically a Swiss Army Knife x 2 trillion. I find minimalism nice for a vase, or a single purpose tool or device. But for computers it either makes them ever harder to actually use (now we've got docks we have to carry around with our laptops so we can plug in a USB device or flash drive or monitor vs just having the ports on the laptop because... well having a bag of wires, dongles, and a dock is so minimalist right?), or basically hides / removes functions.

Remember all the things you could do in Windows 98 that you can't do in Win10? Like one control panel to go to. You could set window, menu etc fonts and colors. etc. I mean simple UI things - no, we've been slowly trying to go back to a very limited OS interface.

Granted, I don't use Windows for most stuff anymore, so it doesn't bother me as much, but some of this stuff just follows you. Gnome does this crap so I can't use that anymore and have to look for forks from the programs that have a usable UI.

White background & gray text.

When did we shift away from black text?

There's less contrast with gray, and on a lot of displays it's more difficult to read, and more straining on the eyes.

Apps that aren't native

I don't like animations, smooth transitions, smooth scrolling, rounded boxes and needless notification on the corner (unless it's a chatting app).

There can be inner shadows/colour gradients. It depends.

I liked how clean was Windows 9x design. Embossed buttons, same font family for design everywhere.. Pop-ups didn't have to 'fade in', just instantly appeared on the screen instead.

Confirmation button on the left, gray confirmation buttons, green cancel buttons (when the action you are performing is against the website, like subscription cancelation) or red cancel and gray confirmation.

Or hiding CTAs (like adding something to cart) under a hypertext rather than a button.

Different behavior for the same looking content (sometimes it redirects, sometimes it opens a new tab, sometimes it opens a modal).

Resetting forms on error - why the fuck do it need to fill it again?

Signing in without a password. It makes it so much more annoying to sign in while using a password manager.

I hate rounded corners especially on phone screens. Rectangles for the win!

Menuless website. I don't want to scroll till i find the specific information i'm looking for

It's not noticed much, but information architecture based on business definitions instead of user needs.

A floating window for things that should clearly have a tab-like look, like windows 11's start menu - why in the world does it float like a window?? Why is it not connected to the taskbar like in every other desktop? Or firefox's new tabs design.

Thankfully this aesthetic has died off in most places, but the 5 year old head unit in my car has weird 3D icons of all the menu items complete with drop shadows, skewed perspective as if they're floating in space, and reflections. The background is some weird Tron shit and all the text looks like it's supposed to be some medical tech company from 2010

A very small selection of Pastel colors instead of a color wheel. Give me my goddamn dark blue back Android!

Not using labels for radio buttons and checkboxes, is it really that hard? That's what it is for, if there's a corresponding text it should be used at a label for a given element, that way I can select it by clicking that text not a tiny square/circle

Also ignoring keyboard navigation, sometimes it's easier to just use tab key to move between fields, but nooo, the order is ducked up

Minimalist logos. I love minimalistic design, but I hate how absolutely BORING logos are becoming. Looking at you, Firefox...

Text searches (e.g. page search in browsers) that do return results, but they don't show up anywhere on the screen or aren't highlighted.

I find it really annoying when browsers waste vertical space, especially with most laptops being 16:9 which is stupid.

flat design but specifically rounded everything. I'm not watching a video on a round player where part of what I'm watching is cut off. I even switched to the SE because the round screen with a notch in it on my iphone XR drove me crazy.

Tip boxes that block the thing I'm trying to view

And this might not qualify as a 'UI trend', but I'd like to personally wish a pox on whoever decided complex, multistep and ambiguous captcha puzzles were a good idea.

God those irritate me. Like ffs haven't you figured out I'm human yet?! %$#*