another parlor question

[queenlua]

What's a recent trend in your field (or topic of study, or art form, or whatever) that you think is nonsense?

I was thinking about this while reminiscing over an old job I had—I worked closely with a dude who'd been a DC-area public school teacher for several years before becoming a programmer, and he was comparing the latest nonsense javascript framework to the weird, cyclical trendiness of various trends in education. (i.e., there was a trend in the 1970s where people tried to do classes with no rooms, with the idea kiddos could freely drift to whatever teacher was teaching stuff most relevant to their skill level, instead of having to stick with just their age-grade. This led to building a lot of schools with very open rooms, and those rooms were partitioned via awkward cardboard-ish barricades shortly after everyone realized this is total chaos and not helpful to anyone. Apparently that trend made a brief comeback in the 2000's!)

I asked a literature PhD student this, and he pointed to thing theory. Medical resident friend said medical science probably suppresses more avenues than it should, leading to a bit less of such trendiness, which is an interesting alternative spectrum.

I could... write a book about everything I think is a dumb trend in software, of course :P

Comments

[lassarina]

hyper-minimalist design. HYPER. MINIMALIST. DESIGN. Yes, it's lovely for the three most common tasks, but the minute I need to do more than that, it's fucking impossible, kill me.

[queenlua]

my favorite is when there's a settings menu but it's not in a place labeled "settings", or even behind one of those gear symbols, it's nested eighteen layers deep behind a bunch of irrelevant shit, because god forbid someone want to tweak the settings on this ~perfect beautiful crystal~ of a minimalist app, smh

[lassarina]

OH MY GOD YES. just. fucking. label. things. WORDS MATTER. *screams*

[kradeelav]

graphic design: tiny ass fonts and sites that were clearly built to operate on a phone first when they straight up break on desktops asdfghjk. the macro problem is more related to the fact that trendy-first-designers apparently have a phobia called 'usability'; they're the category of folks that tend to design projects to look good for behance/their portfolio/agencies first, and then all the priorities from there run downhill. there's a bit of a, hahah - rivalry between them and what I'd loosely call 'corporate designers' - designers who go for function first and who actually know how to goddamn compromise and work with the system. (some of them do compromise *too* much but it's also heavily relevant on the politics of the company.) it gets trickier when executives love agencies/agency-designers because their works are that much prettier to an untrained eye so there's a lot of outsourcing there, which just leads to this ouroboros of corporate designers fixing their shit > execs not being happy with the finished project > 'hire moar agency designers!' > etc

/thousand yard stare

[queenlua]

whenever i hear a designer use the words "accessibility" or "usability", my heart sings; i used to work with a bunch of 'em when i was back in the education space and they were absolute gems

[lassarina]

OH GOD DESIGNERS AND ACCESSIBILITY. I lobbied really hard for one design company when we were in RFP because they specified that by default all their design is California-ADA compliant and I was like YES. THIS. OUR TARGET AUDIENCE HAS MANY ACCESSIBILITY NEEDS. THIS. (I was the loneliest drum-beater about accessibility for YEARS. And we serve ELDERLY POPULATIONS.)