Compare the process by which an app or website design makes it out into the world to how a patch makes it into an open source project. Anyone can start programming, but to be accepted as a 'good' programmer you're inevitably vetted by other, better programmers. The ad-hoc peer-review of OSS actually works reasonably well. Most importantly: it can be very critical. Most designers I meet today have laughably thin skin.

Try comparing the most successful projects on GitHub to those on Dribble. Dribble makes my skin crawl.

Anyway, you're right. Most contemporary interaction design is absolutely awful. It's going to take time for the rules of the discipline to evolve. We'd probably see this improve a lot if the apps and sites we used weren't optimized for 'engagement'. They just look like slot machines designed by Portlandia characters.

The mechanism here is that whatever esthetic and psychological principles are in play, an interface must also present the needed info and functionality. Craigslist and HN do that in a more-or-less bullshit free way. UX designers can get caught up in other concerns.

In fact there is a systematic bias: since we know that users don't like too much information, UX pros will want to hide info and functionality. But since no one likes boring designs, they also want to add cooling-looking (i.e. distracting) stuff.

... which, after you learn how to use them, often work much faster than the alternatives.

There are anecdotes a-plenty here like our local (tiny) bank who held out replacing their terminal based with their Windows version because in tests the keyboard based, archaic, every-on-one-screen application was far more productive than the new one and this particular application is only to be used by seniors in this bank who, because of the size, are not replaced / added very often. The Windows version, although not even that well designed, has been created to be faster to learn for new employees and the screens have been designed to be aesthetically pleasing and therefor sparsely layed out over many more pages.

The old staff hates it, the new staff (not very many) is just used to this kind of easy to learn, nothing to master kind of thing.

They don't have to be exclusive though; what happened to the 'expert mode' in apps/applications? That button you ram if you are an expert and suddenly 100 screens are packed into one, keyboard navigation is switched on and I can do my work much faster than clicking HUGE easy to learn, text heavy buttons?

In a throw-away society, all this interaction design makes sense; no-one is at a job long enough to really get into software and you don't get through the trial period if you don't learn using it fast enough. In that regard you need big empty pages with videos explaining what everything does and a boned out interaction process that has been carefully thought out.

I think we need that if the budget is there, but I think we need the expert mode as well and that, as far as I have seen in my life time, (interaction) designers are not very good at packing dense nor is it needed; if you are an 'expert', you'll cope (or don't care in some cases) about the (interaction) design.

And frankly the mouse, and more recently touch screens, seems to have made interface designers ignore the value of haptic feedback.

If only there was room for a UX person as well. Let them do the 'Sprint 0' before someone even touches a computer.

This has been true in recent years with the trendy but awful design. It's not just the typography. The obsession with flat design and giving up all the distinctiveness and affordances of other styles might even be worse.

It's also been going on for a long time with assuming if Google says it in its guidelines for webmasters then it must be good, as opposed to being good for Google's search engine.

It's even going on with software, specifically the various libraries and tools these organisations produce. Some of those libraries and tools are competently executed, but few are as remarkable or transformative as the hero worship might suggest.

This culture of emulation naturally leads to the kind of bland, homogeneous, poorly conceived work that is all too prevalent in our industry today. How could it not?

Ironically, I was just reading another HN post about a jobs board for older geeks, and the related discussion about the endemic problem with ageism in our industry. What we are talking about in this discussion is literally what happens when you hire a bunch of very young, very inexperienced, very untrained people, given them very snazzy hardware for their very good eyesight and their very dexterous hands to work with, give them effectively unlimited resources but very limited accountability and management, and leave them to run the show.

Anyone who wants to do better certainly can do it, just by studying relevant fields like graphic design and usability and by acquiring the necessary skill and experience (or, for businesses, by hiring people like that). But unsurprisingly, the people who are willing to go against the grain tend to be those who have been around for long enough to have other ideas and to have seen the same sorts of mistakes made before, and who wants to listen to them when you can go watch someone from the Apple team wax lyrical about their new barely legible font, someone from the React team misunderstanding basic MVC, or someone from Google who has never run a small business web site in their life telling everyone what makes good quality content?

More so than that, looking at website design from a monetary perspective: It's fast, cheap, and easy. It takes alot less time to put together a sleek modern website that utilizes the flat but nifty new CSS3 features than sitting down at the drawing board and creating something truly beautiful... which, when you're done, may or may not turn out how you dreamed. With websites in high demand, it shouldn't be any wonder than a typical but FAST-and-CHEAP-to-produce site will win out for the majority of cases.

That said, it's about nuances... In the end, I find that starting text only, and laying things out in a text editor (like an ansi menu screen) is a pretty good place to start... If you can't fit it on an ansi screen 80x25 for desktop and 40x50 for mobile, then you need to adjust your workflow to be simpler.

You don't need everything on one screen with magic scrolling effects... by the same note, if it's a simple form, you don't need to make it a wizard across six screens either.

Problems with Material Design include:

    - overly bright/saturated colors
    - too much animation
    - obnoxious easings
    - an overly dry look -- kind of like formal stationary or plastic
    - centered text and content at the tops of pages (I don't know if the specification encourages this, but it's become more common)
    - bad usability with forms. A text input should be a box, not a line, and it doesn't need to distract users with animation when clicking on the input.

Animation, if it doesn't detract, or actually adds to the experience, sure, but agreed, some of it is superfluous.

Easings, that goes with the animations.

The dry/stationary look, I think is intentional, and I like it.

Centered text/content is arguable, I think it depends on the form and can vary.

As to the text inputs being lines, I actually prefer the material way, it's closer to what you'd see on paper forms... it's less intuitive compared to what we're used to on a computer, less so when you compare to many paper forms. The boxing that you get in say Bootstrap, by comparison I find a little more distracting than the placeholder->label animation you get, which is similar, but different to a paper form... and works exceedingly well for phones/tablets, though less impressive on a desktop, but that leaves room for additional details.

The docs say:

"Material takes cues from contemporary architecture, road signs, pavement marking tape, and athletic courts. Color should be unexpected and vibrant."

Things like pavement marking tape, road signs, and athletic courts are not aesthetically-pleasing models of design, and it shows in the final result.

Recommended colors like #e91e63 and #ff5722 look terrible on many monitors. Looking away from the monitor leaves a reverse impression of the color in my vision.

These recommended color schemes are distractingly unpleasant: https://material.google.com/style/color.html#color-color-sch...

Many sites these days don't consider that some people get disoriented by animation. If I'm trying to read an article, and parts of the page are animating with parallax effect or growing/shrinking, it pulls my attention away from the content. I don't want components to flip over, bounce, or use other "cute" easings. I sometimes stop using websites just because of that.

> Centered text/content is arguable, I think it depends on the form and can vary.

Centered text is the Comic Sans of page layout. It's one of the tools that people who don't know about design reach for first. Centered text should only be used extremely sparingly, so that the viewer doesn't really notice it. Lately, centered text is becoming the focal point of web pages. Some sites are even creating "pyramids" of focus at the tops of pages, using centered text with a user profile picture on top. It looks really bad.

> As to the text inputs being lines, I actually prefer the material way, it's closer to what you'd see on paper forms

A web page is not paper, because you can't "write" anywhere on a webpage. It should be clear where one can enter text -- a line does not communicate that well.

Also, having the line animate when clicked on does nothing useful except distract. When I click on an input, I will know that it's focused by the existence of a cursor in the text area.

The end result is that multiple areas of a page are animating at the same time. The interfaces become confusing, because animation says "look at this part of the page", but multiple areas are animating without coherent reason.

Meetup.com's new app and color scheme is a recent example of the serious problems with Material Design. Even my group's members are complaining about it.

Basically, Material Design has a very strong personality, and it's the kind of personality that many people are not compatible with. In my opinion, it might be okay for a niche product, but is not a good choice for websites aimed at large audiences.

I'm afraid this is probably the main reason flat design caught on. It's achievable by developers with little design background, and can be implemented with little more than a bit of boilerplate from some CSS framework for a web site or the equivalent in a UI builder for an app. No need to hire anyone with digital artwork skills or experience designing more complicated UIs, and no need to prepare and serve the associated assets as part of your site/app.

Unfortunately, from a usability and accessibility point of view, current trends in design and typography are still objectively awful in various ways, and from a brand distinctiveness point of view, it's still a severely limited style to work within. There's an (actually quite reasonable) argument that a lot of designers and marketers who promote branding aren't generating particularly good returns until you get to large, well established, well known businesses anyway, but the usability and accessibility flaws hurt everyone.

I think these incremental steps are good, but it's going to take the equivalent of the Bauhaus to solve this problem. You need a strong foundational movement to anchor people's work. You're right that the problems have been solved, but they aren't being upheld very well.

There is something to be said from experience as an ansi artist and a sysop in the bad old days before the web.

First time users are probably what you focus on, the rest just has to be a tad better than the competitors. First time users need to be convinced by pretty design and a super simple linear workflow that solves just one problem.

Power users couldn't care less about design (SAP is still alive). They love it feature packed and want to access as many options as possible with few clicks. The extremes are icons without labels, color coded shortcuts on every keyboard key¹ or command line interfaces.

¹Avid-Keyboard for Video editing: http://www.drted.com/IMG_1225.JPG color coding in general is mostly ugly, but helpful.

edit: but in the end there is just a lot of bad design, that at best makes things pretty, but often not more useful.

It's old, but still useful.

Political views aside (and the post doesn't concern those either), this is quite relevant:

https://signalvnoise.com/posts/1407-why-the-drudge-report-is...

Maybe once you're "used to it" it becomes easy to parse but I've just spent a minute looking at it and I'm not even entirely sure what the site is about? It's compared to mainstream news sites so is it meant to be a news site?

For example the main headline right now is "TONIGHT: HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP!" What does that even mean?

Everywhere? It's a page full of selected news headlines. You're not supposed to look at some particular place (except the big letter, highlighted few headlines that are presented as the most important), just to check which ones you want to open.

So, not totally unlike the first page of HN.

>For example the main headline right now is "TONIGHT: HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP!" What does that even mean?

That tonight is the big battle between Hillary and Trump?

The front page of HN is a single list with headers at the top of the page and a footer at the bottom. It is a numbered list which shows me the title of the article, #votes, #comments, the domain name, who submitted it and the time since posted. At the bottom of the page there is an FAQ to explain to me what the page is if I've never been there before. Even if I've never heard of it before the title "Hacker News" gives a good indication of what it is.

The drudge report has none of that. What are the three columns? Why is there a single column of content above that? How is the content divided / presented, is it just random? How fresh is the content? Where do the links lead? Are the links user submitted or is it run by someone? There is precisely zero context on who the page is by or what the site is. In addition, in the few places where I am given a picture for context which is clearly linked to a story I can't even click on the image to take me to the story.

Baffling that someone could think this is a well designed site.

Edit: After searching on Wikipedia to discover what the Drudge Report actually is I'm still far from impressed. For an example of what I'd consider to be a good "aggregation site" here is one http://www.jimmyr.com/

Because it doesn't need most of them. It doesn't have comments or voting -- just suggests stories the Drudge guy likes.

>What are the three columns?

Just 3 columns.

>Why is there a single column of content above that?

Because those are the "headline" stories -- as evident by the larger font too.

>How fresh is the content?

Quite fresh/breaking.

>Where do the links lead?

To news stories. Just clicking one or two makes that evident.

>Are the links user submitted or is it run by someone?*

It's the Drudge Report -- so, we can assume it's Drudge's report.

These questions are basically just questions someone just landing there might have. Not issues that hurt the actual readers of the site -- like the one's the original post complaints about.

In fact I find the HN front page more than a little overwhelming too. Over time, I have learned the content is worth the parsing effort.

BTW: I assumed "heavyweight championship" referred to boxing, not to politics. See the problem?

I'll bite: what kind of news website you don't fine overwhelming?

>BTW: I assumed "heavyweight championship" referred to boxing, not to politics. See the problem?

That's not about the site's design though, just the phrasing of some particular headline.

Traditional blog-like fromats, e.g. Slashdot, where each headline comes with the top para, which you can skim. If you don't skim it, then it's welcome filler spacing out the headlines.

Of course, content matters more than presentation. HN is better than Slashdot, and probably needs to keep its denser format.

>>BTW: I assumed "heavyweight championship" referred to boxing, not to politics. See the problem?

> That's not about the site's design though, just the phrasing of some particular headline.

The problem is inadquate info on the front page. I.e. only getting a headline.

Both of them emulate tabloid newspapers (Drudge at least does it on purpose). But that's why I don't like to read them. Small bits of information everywhere, unsatisfactory individually, yet too disorganised to be treated collectively.

However, I can pick a column and double-tap it. The Android browser smart-zooms, and I can read the content just fine. If something's too small, I can finger-spread.

For instance, it's easy to smart-zoom the link list in the center column, scroll down to a columnist, finger-spread to increase the target size, and click through to his latest.

Was it at least to add features? to improve features? No, there are less features, it takes more operations to achieve the same features, and there is a whole new set of bugs, while the previous set had been corrected along the years.

Moreover, the result is generally more sluggish and ressource-consuming than the previous version.

I agree with you. But what I find hilarious about it is that in the 90s, there was a meme that software engineers cannot do usability very well, and you need specialized designers.

I think it all comes down to humility. Think about and respect the user. Do usability studies and follow their results, like Microsoft used to do in 90s. Don't let your notions of aesthetics overrule the needs or wishes of the users, and especially wish for things not to change.

the fact that many of the developers are also users and as such are pretty opinionated while the designers that come to open source might often be very eager to "set their mark" on something?

I' even doubt the premise that there are terrible open source UIs created by designers. The vast majority of OSS GUI apps were probably styled by programmers, and I think they proved quite well over last 20 years that they chose well when not becoming designers.

The problem with design is also that it doesn't work very well in the "bazaar" style of development. Consistency is possibly the single most important feature of good design, and it gets hard to achieve without central authorities.

However, I don't think users care that much about consistency, unfortunately (even though I think it's important aspect of design). Look at web, every website is different and it's considered a good thing by designers. There is no consistency on web and yet desktop apps struggle to compete.

With GIMP it's the sliders in the tool options. Once you have them figured out (the trick is, they behave differently when you drag on the top half of the slider or the bottom half ... it's indicated by the cursor changing, but still) they're kind of usable, but still awkward. If you don't know how they work (and they're quite unlike any other GUI widget I've encountered), you click and now your brush size is 1233.12 pixels, so you just decide to enter the value manually by keyboard. There's a couple of truly useless default values for some tools. Third, if you want to adjust or create a new brush, or gradient, the workflow has about 2 popup dialogs too many. I could go on ...

In InkScape, my main beef is the gradient editor. The old one was awkward and counter-intuitive when adding new stops. Then they made some huge upgrades (honestly, a lot of great improvements btw), also changed the gradient editor. Now it's slightly less awkward and slightly less counter-intuitive, but not much.

These are two great pieces of software and I love using them for the most part (although GIMP really needs to grow up and support 16 bit colour), it's just that these are some really odd choices for a couple of UI widgets that get a serious amount of use in most workflows. And I don't understand why, they could literally implement a design based on any vaguely similar control widget in other software and it would be 10x easier to use. Yet they choose to roll their own very unique behaviour that honestly just doesn't work very smoothly.

I think the problem really is lack of humility of some designers, which was trend-set by Steve Jobs. SJ didn't do what users wanted, he had a very strong sense of his own aesthetics (lack of buttons, for instance). This IMHO works if you can create fashion trend around it, but otherwise, it leaves a lot of people (maybe even majority) in the cold.

He didn't have strong opinions on many things, he had a very compotent team and he continually pushed his teams to their limits.

iPhone was the result of a long and iterative design process involving many smart people.

Here is the ancestor of the iPhone from 1983: http://gizmodo.com/279688/apples-original-iphone-1983

Apple was working on the tablet project (iPad) long before they were working on the phone project. First iPhone designs indeed had physical buttons like iPods of the time. Then they decided to marry the phone project and the tablet project. Hence a phone with a multi-touch screen.

Of course all of these are marketed as if Steve Jobs was a genius and everything was so obvious to him from the beginning. That's just not true.

Isn't Ribbon UI based on such usability studies? Yet it's something that's constantly being criticized.

There must be more to it than just following the studies.

But to the point, I think the "more to it" is simply inertia of existing user base. Which is no small consideration apart from just usability.

Addendum: Actually, lack of customization in modern software is also very interesting topic for a discussion.

Anyway, I don't understand your distinction there, since every part of software can be customized however you like. Most users don't customize, and don't have any need to if the the software was properly designed for their use-case.

Two reasons. First, you don't want to, just like you don't want to customize main menu. There should to be a place that has every option, which you cannot unintentionally mess up.

Second, ribbons are very carefully designed for looks, and it makes them hard to customize. I think it could be done, it's just not trivial.

So, for example, in MS Office, they don't bother with customization. If you want to look at how customizable software looked like in the past, look at for instance AMI Pro. You could redefine keyboard shortcuts and toolbars any way you liked.

And we are not even talking about software like Emacs, which can be customized very deeply.

I think some users would customize, it's very paternalistic to think that they wouldn't, and it would make them more productive. But it's just not in the fashion right now.

I don't think it's possible to design general purpose software like word to any specific use case. There are simply too many users and too many use cases, from grandma writing a letter to professionals doing mail merges (or whatever people do with word).

You can't win. Gnome does usability studies and follows them, which gives them vocal opponents who don't want their software dumbed down.

I think what's changed is that engineers do not work in a vacuum anymore. You can follow Apple's or Google's UI well-known guidelines with a little branding and your app will be fine. Of course, that requires humility as well.

To be clear though ux designers are often better than non-ux people but people confuse "designers" with ux designers.

Today, it is not a requirement of designers to build something usable. A lot of designers don't even build something interactive, just a Photoshop design that has to look good.

The necessity of good ux on a site is as apparent to somebody that doesn't know ux as the necessity of a test suite is to someone who has never programmed.

...And then when the page loads, I accidentally click an ad instead of a link because the ad moved over the content that I was reading to offer me 10% of joining the exclusive mailing list.

Further, on my phone especially, I like to read articles while on the train. My trip has cell signal at every stop along the way, but not between stations. Before Apple allowed adblockers in Safari, I'd have about a 1/10 chance of actually getting the article to load before I lost signal. Now, it works great just about every time.

I deliberately set it to allow the bing/google ads and the analytics, but I'm not allowing everything under the sun.

Me too. In fact, it concerns me how angry stupid decisions make me these days. I just want to sit folks down in a chair and ask them why they hell they broke something that needed no fixing. It wasn't a problem, and now it is. I want to quote the 90s classic Billy Madison at them:

> Mr. Madison, what you’ve just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.

I read websites on a daily basis where image loading is broken without JavaScript, and where focusing the page takes over a second while it loads images — when HTML has supported images for over two decades. I read websites where even with every blocker I know of used at once can't keep them readable. I use software clearly designed to only be usable by a teenager with perfect vision and thirteen thumbs. Why do people do this?

Are you me? I'm the epitome of the old grumpy programmer. I have this love/hate relationship with technology. One the one hand I still love it, on the other hand I hate 99.9% of the tech I come into contact with because it's always shit for some reason or other.

Did it ever occurs to you that they had far less functionality when these examples were created? Backend programmers kept piling functionality into these apps and at some point no matter how good a designer is it just gets overwhelmed.

Wow that's the first time I have heard the problem phrased this way. Usually it's the other way around -- the designers and product leads want to pile on so many features and the backend devs can't keep up, so the codebase turns into a rotten pile of shit.

1. BizDev and/or Sales identify a feature set that would enable a deal or broaden the market suitability.

2. Dev team tasked with adding feature XYZ.

3. Designer brought in to figure out how to add the feature to the UI with minimal effort.

4. Repeat.

I think this version is much more common in enterprise software and less so in mass consumer stuff. As we all know, enterprise software is unsexy and not worthy of YC/Startup culture. High touch sales also favors fewer deals with more customer leverage and really fat commissions for sales people.

Customers don't have to consider things like applicability to other customers, stability, performance or maintenance.

What you are talking about is product people or product owners not designers.

That's what's fashionable today (or yesterday? I can't keep up), but it hasn't always been the case.

For the last 20 years I have been doing this it was the case. Before that too.

So not sure what you are referring to.

You sure you are not confusing campaign sites with actual digital tools and resources? It's never been a trend by designers to want to overcomplicate the design. The strive for whitespace runs so deep in most designers that you simple don't get the used car salesman mentality where every little pixel left untouched is one to much.

It's entirely possible my experience was atypical, the I did a lot of reading about UX at the time and this seems to be what the "best practice" was at the time.

So if a dialog was shown the best way to do it was to have the dialog expand from the clicked element for instance. Now dialog's are frowned upon.

Specifically, one was primarily a visualization tool. It was trivial to add various data transformations. However, the UI to render and interact with any one of those transformations would take substantially longer.

  Designers are ruining software in general.

One huge problem with interface design in industry segments for which I am a heavy/detailed user is that the major design choices are made by people who have never actually used the system in question and seek no input from those who have (e.g. Focus Groups, or simply observant-to-potentially-annoying-degrees users like myself).

Case in point: ticket management and sales systems. Example 1: Ticketmaster's mobile resale interface that was replaced in 2014 or so. It was so stupid that if you were seeking, say, 3 tickets for an event, it would show you all listings offering 3 or more... even if you could not possibly purchase 3 from those sets! Many customers unknowingly bought more tickets than requested. Any knowledgeable user would have spotted that; I did in 10 minutes. It remained unchanged and without warning until the whole site was redone.

Example 2: Tickets.com "My Tickets" account interface. In the general case, a given ticket has a barcode; they changed the mobile site to display the barcode when you drill down to ticket detail. Nice idea, since you could then just show your phone at the gate if you forgot your hard tickets. Anyway, also, in many cases, a ticketholder may want to make a note pertaining to a given ticket, e.g. "Given to Dave and Carolyn for anniversary; don't resell these, you idiot."

So, in Spring of 2014 (I think), they decided to have the desktop system allow display of barcodes as well. Um, OK. However, they implemented this by having that overlay/replace the Notes, so therefore you could not only not see any given note, you could not even see that any note had ever been entered. See the hazard here? Poor Dave and Carolyn get shut out at the gate and embarrassed because you later resold their tickets because your careful notation was silently disposed of.

Anyway, after I pointed that out to them, their solution was to roll back and give up on the barcode display feature altogether, rather than provide access to both.

All of these problems (and many others) could have been avoided simply by inviting and encouraging feedback from your power users before tearing out your load-bearing walls of code.

The last time apple did that to me I stopped being able to turn randomize on and off in the music app (they did eventually bring it back, but I was floored that it was ever removed in the first place).

The thing is, I have exactly 0 complaints about the map app. They can only make it worse.

So I'm avoiding the entire update because I'm afraid they're going to do to the map app what they did to the music app.

You know what I really hate about reddit? The inconsistency of the links. If the link is a self.subreddit link, it goes to the discussion thread, if it was a submitted link to a location outside of reddit, the link goes to that page and to see the discussion thread you have to click on the small 'comment' link.

I wouldn't say reddit works any more than a 'designed to death' site, just that it hasn't been 'designed to death.' It is full of it's own problems.

    What is the most 2000s thing you can think of?
    submitted 5 hours ago by enormous-radio to /r/AskReddit
    4741 comments share

    Police vehicle rams protesters at anti-U.S. rally in the Philippines  
    Link: somewhere.latimes.com  
    submitted 7 hours ago by wilson_rawls to /r/news
    561 comments share

That being said, they've made a few steps toward something closer to your suggestion in some places. For example, if you do a search, the search results behave this way, where clicking the title always takes you to the comments and there's a separate link (with a chain-link icon) to go to the linked content.

The same thing annoys me here on HN.

The link goes to the content, wherever that is. Reddit was designed to share content. In the early days they didn't even have comments.

Moreover, developers are ruining software as well, just in different ways. Many developers focus on getting the internal design (design patterns, architecture, database design, whatever) of a software product right but tend to neglect the external, user-facing design because "UI is just a minor detail" real engineers can't be bothered with. Just have a look at applications like SoapUI or pgAdmin. They do a great job in terms of functionality but it's obvious that good usability wasn't exactly one of their requirements.

While I agree we're overdoing design nowadays, I don't think it's just for the sake of it. I think the problem is there are too many goals a site has to achieve and being readable is just one of them.

I would prefer to focus on specific group of people and cater to them, but very few businesses do this. Instead they want email subscribers, social engagement, comments, ads, CTA clicks, Sign ups, everything. So you end up with a mess, BUT the site satisfies measurable goals. Newsletter modals sure piss of a lot of people, but they work if your goal is getting subscriptions.

Or, is it the overload of 3rd party scripts meant to harvest your information and sell it off to affiliate marketers?

Or is it some of all of the above?

I think some of the newer age design techniques, such as responsive design, are very elegant compared to any slight performance costs of some of CSS3's new features.

As another example, iTunes was really soul-killing at its introduction of Apple music, making most of its tabs functioning related to Apple music. You can tell the Value decision was to make Apple Music take more precedence over management of one's own music. From a "stylistic" or aesthetic standpoint, the Desktop iTunes hasn't changed in its overall "design" from iTunes 3 to iTunes 11 (bit of an opinion here). Now, more recent versions did add more icons which makes the UX more miserable, but my take is iTunes/iOS music app was killed off by its feature overload. :ED: clarification on final <p>.

With that in mind, it seems that simple text and links is perhaps not the optimal experience for every web site.

Have you ever compared the page load times of reddit with and without RES? It's horrific. And adjusting the settings? they have search functionality for the settings because there's so many settings.

The only things I use from RES are the account manager and the subreddit manager. I hate the never ending reddit with a burning passion, and don't even get me started on the highlighting posts that you've clicked on crap.

RES is a bloated monstrosity.

Hi Hannibal.

Edit: and yeah, i have had similar thoughts about designers ruining things. My particular hobbyhorse in that regard is _nix desktop environments.

Oh yes, that reminds me: GNOME now pops up a message bar informing one that one has no messages every time one's mouse hits the bottom of the screen, and steals focus from the currently-running app. Why? I never used to worry about messages, I still have none, and I keep on dying while I'm playing computer games because suddenly the game no longer responds to my input.

I realised long ago that the GNOME developers neither like, nor respect, nor indeed care for their users (c.f. the fact that after a decade it still hasn't added the ability to properly configure the screensaver), but even this seems a little much.

I think this says more about the devs than it does the desktop environment, unless the fact that GNOME used to ship with Ubuntu skewed things.

I found a home in i3 and would never go back, even if KDE went back to the old desktop. When in Windows land I use virtuawin, but it doesn't touch i3.

Like Stack Overflow making the lower rated answers less obvious (at the bottom).

Oh, and SO greys out text too.

On mere discussion sites, quality does not equal popularity. Equating these two things leads to echo chambers.

If all your friends all jumped off a bridge, would you do it too?

I agree completely. Take a look at sites like Craig's List, Google, Amazon, Ebay, Reddit, and Hacker News. Fancy design doesn't make a website good, but it often makes a website bad.

Two of the worst trends at the moment are bright colors and senseless animation.

I mean, I can read that. On anything. Compared to most of the modern half-grey stuff, it's excellent.

Some of these apps are targeting a younger demographic exclusively. If you do stuff that pisses off 25% of your base or makes your app unusable, the complaints will be swift..... then management is on your ass.

I run a few online store..... know exactly when the payment proccessing app or cart is having issues/ unusable becuase my customers will call me.

Designers and Engineers collaborate to make products.

Some suck, some are great.

Blame bad design on bad designers, bad software on bad engs.

Don't blame design or eng for existing.

That statement literally made me slightly irritated.

Sane people don't pound fists on desks because of what some lights on a screen are doing.