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Comment by willmorrison | Hacker News Reader

The author did design for Gen-Z aesthetics. At the end of the post, he says they may even complete the feature.

They did design it but in the whole post he was making fun of it. This Gen-Z mode that he designed is not made out of compassion for the users but rather as a parody of Gen-Z aesthetic.

I had fun reading it but I feel it is a bad business move to attack your user base, and I assume that they have more users around the 18yo of the spectrum than 75.

Would he also make fun of a boomer mode, with large buttons everywhere and "get me out of the app and just call person" feature?

Why do you think it was parody or an attack? It fully admits that millennial design is intentionally boring and sterile and it tries to figure out what Gen-Z wants instead.

From the "You are unique. You are different." in the screenshot which is parodying the style so hard, but also the random clap emoji. It feels like googling "Gen-Z tropes" and then applying every single of them. But also the "Of course you are." which is extremely dismissive.

There is a way to design a more "fun" experience but just slapping the biggest tropes on like your users are 5 year olds is probably not it.

Gen-Z is a parody though. Culture parodies itself time and time again. If you can't see that in the trends of the 90s in our own generation, then perhaps you respect generational preferences a bit too much..

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