Why does it snow on that website? That's unpleasant.
Anyway. Yeah, a lot of modern UI stuff seems bad. I can only assume idiots are in charge everywhere now.
this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2026
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Crappy Design
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Poor designs resulting from incompetence. This covers unintentional artifacts. (Intentionally malicious/anomalious designs belong in c/assholedesign)
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I think, a big part of it is that people are now generally used to computers, so user interfaces don't have to be as intuitive anymore. A crappy interface won't directly affect your sales anymore, so corporations will naturally invest less money into it and may choose looks/branding over usability.
Having said that, that they took their perfectly fine icon implementation and made it worse, that necessarily involved an idiot in charge. A non-idiot would've just left it as-is, at no cost at all.
haha you can turn the snow off at the top, I guess holiday spirit and all that
The irony is amazing. What terrible design.
If you're on desktop, you should try the dark mode on that webpage.
...Point is, he's well aware that it's horrendous. These are joke features.
As someone who works on UI's a lot, I always have trouble knowing where to use an icon, where to use text, and where to use both. The problem gets amplified to when we're trying to make apps that work on all size devices... where horizontal space is limited, you almost always want icons only.
The article makes a good point about decluttering dropdown menus / vertical lists, but it'd be nice to see where it makes sense for all the other UI elements.
The fact that having too many icons creates clutter is something I didn't think of before, but makes perfect sense in retrospect. Putting icons next to items that are most commonly used helps draw attention to them, and when you see it side by side it's clear that being selective works a lot better. Good UI design is really hard to do, and not always intuitive I find. Apple used to put a lot of work into doing actual UX research, and they've published a lot of interesting insights over the years, but seems like they just kind of stopped caring now.
It'd be really nice if there was a site listing and comparing a lot of design decisions. I usually just go by google's material design standards, but its not always the best.
For sure, it'd be interesting to see why different systems make particular design decisions compared side by side. This is one of the reasons I found older apple HIG docs interesting because they give actual rationale for the decisions, so it doesn't feel arbitrary. It's osx focused, but a lot of it is generally applicable and definitely worth a glance https://blog-geofcrowl-static-images.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/2020-02-17-collection-higs/Apple-OSXHIGuidelines-2009.pdf
Nice thx, I'll check it out.
Appropriating a sacred Indigenous word for your shitty icon set. Classy.
Blame Apple. "tahoe icons" is a reference to the "icons in tahoe". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacOS_Tahoe
I used to have a fondness for OSX because it felt more "quiet" and "polite" than windows, the beginning of the end of Mac feeling that was was around when they stopped naming OS versions after big cats.
Now that you mention it, that really does check out. In my opinion it started going downhill around 10.6 or so. It used to be fairly lean and everything felt like it was put together with thought behind it. Then they just started adding random crap nobody asked for, while making the whole thing bloated and unstable.
Adding icons, even if they are not perfect? Hell yeah! I find it difficult scanning through text, it all seems the same. Even just crappy icons will improve my orientation because every menu becomes a recognizable map. Now if we added colors, that would make it perfect...
the problem is that when you have too many icons they become noise, having icons for common tasks quickly draws your attention to those tasks and makes it easier to find them