Why everything looks the same
medium.com
medium.com
If I go to supermarket I don't want "shopping experience" - I want to buy bread and eggs - set your shop in a way where I can do it quickly and I will be coming back.
There are of course places/events where it should be an experience, like if I go to fancy restaurant I want "fancy dinner experience". When I am on the road and have to just eat something McDonalds does the job 10 mins and I am out even if it is not best choice food wise.
So setting up your page if it is webshop or streaming service - I don't go there to wonder how cool web design might be - I go there to buy stuff or start video.
There's a lot of value in a brand that promises you'll get what you came for, efficiently (and of course, delivers on that promise).
Bad branding is when there's a gap between what a brand promises and what you actually get. A store that promises efficient shopping but just puts stuff on shelves in wrapped packs of twelve, isn't really helping you efficiently get what you want. There are indeed a lot of examples of this (in all industries). But that's because these companies don't put any thought into what they want to be seen as and how they can (continuously) deliver on their promise.
So the promise itself (e.g. "no-frills supermarket" or "amazing shopping experience") is irrelevant, as long as the promise is fulfilled.
Whether there is a market for a promise is another thing altogether, but we're discussing whether positioning your store as the most efficient place to get what you want is detrimental to the brand, which it isn't, as long as you deliver on that promise.
Food. Get out of the way and let me buy the food so I can eat it.
Streaming site. Get out of my way so I can experience a story and feel connected to other human beings.
Or the reason I walk two minutes farther to a different place for my shopping - they have self checkouts fueled by a single queue. Far more efficient than the closer and cheaper place.
Utility first, uncompromisingly always. This is why we still use terminals. This is why I drive a smaller less cool granny car. It's why people still ride old terrible singlespeed bikes in denmark, and it works. It's why messy desktop icons can be peak efficiency. It's why everything good is good.
However, if you operate a webapp, Spotfiy, Gmail, Amazon, etc, settle on a "core UI" and don't change it. People don't want creativity in these kinds of sites, rather they want consistency.
I guess it all boils down to, it's all about the time and place.
You can see it in the way you're talking about them like "they don't matter - so do whatever you want". And you're right.
But I find that unsatisfying. We should be able to have it both ways - interesting aesthetic alongside utility.
The first occurrence of "website" in the second sentence was supposed to be "webapp", right?
It's the exact same amount of robot, just more dumbed down when it's customer facing.
I am picturing the hand model from zoolander, with the glass protection orbs, making someone else do absolutely everything for them.
The worker scanning and bagging my groceries is a service that makes my shopping experience more pleasant and less taxing on me. I'm not giving that up in exchange for nothing.
The ones I will never use are those which have a voice you can't turn off. Having to listen to those as I queue nearby, all I want for xmas is a HIMARS.
Also, you don't have self checkout "stores" here. Essentially every supermarket has a self checkout section. You can just make your judgement call in there on the fly. It's pretty much always faster though even if someone has a decent sized load due to the shared queue system.
I think if someone brought 50 items to self-checkout area, they would get knifed in the back.
There are usually at least 6 terminals, so if you have a incompetent idiot on one of them, it doesn't make too much of a difference.
About 90% of the time, there's no line.
... not that I've done it or do it... but worked at a grocery store a long time ago in high school and maybe coworkers frequently did this?
The website is built first and foremost as a way to find what you need. Buying online is almost an afterthought, there's one link in the header, and the only other indication that there even is an online store is once you click the exact item you want. Exactly where it should be.
It does exactly what it needs to and not much more. It's beautifully functional.
As long as the place is clean and well stocked with fresh items, anything else is worth approximately 0% to 5% to me.
The shop staff would correspond to gastric enzymes.
How big was the one you went to if they even had room to make a maze?
They run warehouses with a grid of rails and seem to be on a mission to automate as much of the logistics and delivery of products as possible. The website allows me to set up a regular weekly order, I can edit it up until the evening of the day before to add any last minute items. I think I pay £10 a month for unlimited deliveries over £40. Having someone bring a weekly food shop to your door for £2.50 is a great deal.
Not only is this a super easy to get food shopping done each week, I can do it from the comfort of my desk (great for when Retros get a little boring!). It also stops me impulse buying things.
I know I already have a December 23rd order coming full of Christmas food and I get to avoid the packed Christmas food shoppers and the depressing Christmas decorations and music in store (I'm a scrooge).
I don't want a better shopping experience, I want the best food, at the cheapest prices, delivered to me in a reliable way. I don't want to think about buying food any longer than I have to each week.
Being in a grocery store is not an important part of managing or using food supplies.
It's a shame they had to switch from Waitrose to M&S food. When they offered Waitrose stuff, it really was the best food and the best logistics combined. But the M&S quality and range are much less solid in our experience.
Nice, now do s/supermarket/Apple
I don’t goto YT to be mesmerized by their algorithm.
I am having more fun making content with OpenCV than anything I’ve done at a cloud job in 10 years.
Fingers crossed open ML implodes the tech labor industry by empowering owners of actual hardware rather than a bunch of middle men employees
They are very much a success on the shoulders of doing it differently.
You say that but I don’t think it’s entirely true. Ask around and people definitely have strong opinions about grocery stores. This one’s dingy and that one’s organized. This one’s cramped and that one’s too big. This one is laid out weird and that one is too bright.
Just because you’re not looking for a Disney-level experience doesn’t mean you’re not subtly affected (for better or worse) by all these little designed elements every time you go shopping.
The layout I don't care, I'll learn it. And the other 90% of design is up for grabs.
Some people are solely focused on the dollar price of eggs and bread and don’t care one cent about other impacts, while some others factor in things like animal welfare or organic ag.
Accounting for the options makes it less cut and dry. Do items get grouped by cost level or by item category? Which gets most prominent placement? Is it consistent across stores? How many options is right for each product category?
Article names it "... these regressive trends ..." - so here I disagree because not everything has to be "Disney-level experience" or even fancy.
Yes I go for cleaner supermarket and do less shopping in murky ones but in a way that is discussed in article we discuss *supermarkets are all the same*.
If there would be a supermarket that has some fancy shelve design or tries to surprise me each time I go there I would not care if it is clean and cashiers are supermodels - if I would have to deal with too much nuisance of their shelves to get basic stuff pay and get out.
This happens in the real world too. My wife wanted a Bulthaup kitchen. They were happy to give us a big book with their product line. But it wasn't a catalogue with sections for sinks, cabinets etc. Oh no, each section was photographs (basically no text) of built-out kitchens. No product names, part numbers, or prices. If you were interested in something you had to go to the shop and point at the thing in the photo to discuss it with a salesperson. A terrible company to do business with.
> I don't go there to wonder how cool web design might be - I go there to buy stuff or start video.
A gamer starts a game so they can play it, but that doesn't stop designers from making the menu both creative and easy to navigate. They aren't mutually exclusive. If game designers can do this, then why can't everyone else?
Trends follow fashion and capability and regulation. Cars all look the same now because they need to achieve a certain industry wide mpg set by regulation, therefore they follow the same aerodynamic constraints, leaving the makers with the same limited room to make a difference.
Room design follows fashion. You can have whatever you like, but when you want to sell a place you need to appeal to the mass market and so you go with the current up-to-date look.
And things like AirBnBs all having succulent plants and Nespresso machines - people like plants and succulents are the easiest to care for, people like coffee and Nespresso is cheap and easy to provide.
Many things are just waiting for some technical capability. Like folding phones - we'll get a flurry of interesting designs, but if they work out then eventually they'll all converge on the design that works.
No. At worst it just had a few shared aesthetics (which we associate with the 70s look). But far more divergence. And even the aesthetics were way more open ended (e.g. the color palette was huge, now it's white, gray, 4-5 pastels and generall very similar-looking hues that dominate most industries).
Look at the brand logos for fashion brands in the TFA, for an example of logos looking unique in the past and then changed to totally homogeneous.
If you came to a French batbroom now. You might not be able to tell. Specially in a modern appartement in a city
Cars seem to be all the same color these days too. Unfortunately, I think it's not just engineering constraints that are giving us "blanding" but a type of corporate marketing bean-counter that minimizes risk by selling to the lowest common denominator demographic. Apparently that LCD likes metallic-grey cars.
I'm disappointed that marketers (and perhaps too the buying public) have become so risk-averse when it comes to styling.
Lately it seems like ⅓ of the new cars I'm seeing are Nardo Gray. https://www.google.com/search?source=univ&tbm=isch&q=Nardo+G...
One difference was that retail branding was designed to be seen large: billboards, large print ads, TV. Now it is designed to be seen small, on phones.
Also, in the past, when you traveled, places felt more different: you didn't always see the same stuff everywhere.
Perhaps in the early 2020's the trend is corporatized blandness, the naked skeleton of capitalism showing through skin as thin as profit margins.
Airbnb apartments are tending towards the "hotel room" look because that's what most of them essentially are. However, every Airbnb I've been in over the past few years has not looked anything like that, so I suspect some bias from places the author goes.
Interior spaces most definitely don't look the same. I think this is just the author extrapolating from their Airbnb experiences. The middle class homes will definitely look similar because they all use the same source material (same as they always have - just websites now instead of interior decorator magazines).
Consumer brands are all over the map, just like they've always been. And it's not like we haven't had bland brands like General Mills and Polo and Sears for ages.
Apps and websites follow the trends because that's what you do in the media space. Nothing new there.
I wonder how much that contributes to road-rage?
But double the size of the car, and you have double the crumple zone.
An 18 wheeler is nigh invulnerable to hits by another car, even if both meet safety standards.
https://forum.miata.net/vb/showthread.php?t=758082
So you are correct that it is already the case to some extent.
I think the best defense for pedestrians, cyclists and even other cars is the design of our roads. Stroads are a great example of the worst possible outcome: deadly, fatal speeds, poor separation of different traffic flows and zero defense for pedestrians. Where there's conflicts of interests between cars and other users of the space we should be deferring to those other users, not letting cars fly through city streets at 30mph with naught but a bump of concrete protecting everyone else.
The latter includes the annoying seatbelt warning, that's why most (all?) cars sold in Europe have it.
I say this as a benefactor of the bigger-car-wins situation, as my father is still with me by virtue of being in the bigger car recently. It's selfish but it's also sensible if everyone else is going to be in a bigger car, and so I think it's something that could only be curtailed by regulation.
Let's take the late 60s, early 70s before the oil squeeze. Families were larger. More kids.
People would buy station wagons. Large, lots of seating.
But I think people would buy more what they needed, not just big "because".
Now I see modern families, with one or at best 2 kids, with huge SUVs.
Hmm.
Technology creates the conditions of its use. Aggressive looking cars nurture a culture of aggressive posturing, which in turn drives people to buy even more aggressive cars.
99% of cars on the road are ugly anyway, why are we compromising efficiency for the sake of making slightly less ugly cars? I don't want to car to have nice curves, I want it to be cheaper to make. I don't want the paint, I want the frame itself to be rustproof.
In terms of user function, the idea of a rustproof car really appeals to me since I live in Ontario and cars get literally covered in a thick layer of salt in the winter.
The exoskeleton also allow you to have more room inside.
As you probably noticed, I don't care much for it as a truck. I would prefer the same thing as a car, but hey, you gotta start somewhere. Hopefully this will tricked down to cars someday.
I think a significant part of road rage is due to conflicting metaphors. Children are taught to "wait in line" and "take your turn". The lanes on roadways emphasize the "wait in line" - but there is no line. So when people pull in front of you, they're violating a deep-seated upset-ness that they are cutting in front of you. But there is no line - so it is impossible for them to "get to the back of the line". I could write a very long essay on these conflicting metaphors and how our tricksy monkey-brain and lizard-brain are perceiving and sending conflicting messages.
Additionally, the semi-anonymous nature of driving has the same lack of feedback that posting on the internet gives. You will say and do things that you would never say/do to another human in front of you.
Add to that an appalling lack of driver education/training in the US and the question should rather be "why is there so little road rage?"
Finally, the public policy has been to make things so spread out that car ownership is mandatory. Zoning requires f(X) number of parking places if your business location can handle X number of customers. This is why all businesses (both retail and office) look like a box in the middle of a parking lot.
Then, they got out and walked 50m to the beach. Instead of fighting for a "spot" people just move along peacefully. There was no tension, no aggression, just a few thousand people getting sunburnt in peace.
I'm not sure what the point is, but it really made me think about how strange our behaviour is. As soon as we're back in "human scale" environments, we go back to behaving like humans.
I don't like tinted windows for that reason.
(the 18 year old that lives in my head is screaming so hard at me right now)
I have to believe there are more people like us, that want those regional cars, but can't get them.
It’s called market research. Marketers will influence designed based on surveys. The outcome in the past tended to be terrible until the rise of Japanese brands
I am convinced that the omnipresence of this style is going to make the rounded and friendly cars of the early 2000s increase in value in the coming years. Heck, they're only a few years from being eligible for historic plates at this point. My flaming hot automotive take is that the much derided "fried-egg" headlights of the late 90s and early 2000s era Porsches are actually great, and offer a nice contrast to the super-angular headlights we see today to create that aggressive look.
https://www.eurogamer.net/why-so-serious-nintendo-explains-a...
I like to watch real estate videos. In the high end certainly everything looks the same. You cannot even tell them apart if they mixed up the videos, zero local aesthetic, and generic contemporary grey minimalism seems to be what people want
I want to replace the grey vinyl floors, but it is hard to justify that cost.
I would never pass on a house for those reasons, at least not where I live since supply of alternative houses is so low.
Consolidation, not commoditization. Cars aren't barrels of oil or truck cars of coal.
It's just impossible to compete as a car company unless you are very niche, a billionaire or a state. The big 3 vertically integrated to the hilt and erected monumental barriers to entry and then became very, very conservative.
https://www.whichcar.com.au/car-advice/car-manufacturer-bran...
We have numerous Korean, Japanese, German, and American vehicles on the road with many varieties of sizes and performance.
And obviously you will need to have deep pockets to enter the car business, why wouldn’t you for such a complex machine? That does not mean there is excessive consolidation in the market.
"The big 3" is a phrase referring to the US automakers; Ford, GM, and Stellantis (formerly Fiat-Chrysler).
On a global scale you also have giants like Toyota, Volkswagen Group, Hyundai Group, Renault–Nissan Alliance, and Geely.
These companies make most of the brands you've heard of.
Obviously the barrier to entry to manufacture a hugely complicated machine will be high, but the data indicates it is not impossibly high.
When Toyota sells 10 million cars a year it's not news, they have basically reached peak growth. Tesla's valuation is higher because they keep selling more cars and still have room for growth (and because of Elon Musk himself).
The only differentiation that can arise then in is in terms of branding. That's exactly what cars are now. Identical metal boxes, captured by marketing, purely differentiated on intangibles like brand identity.
And even this differentiation is becoming less and less relevant. How many people still really care about their cars? (mostly men do, and even that's waning). They're basically washing machines now.
"Google does it this way, so we should too".
"Facebook has spent millions on research and decided to do it this way, we should copy them".
If you do anything different, you are immediately questioned:
"Why are you doing it like this? No one else does it this way".
The tech industry is basically controlled by non-tech and non-design people who have no unique sense or taste in anything to speak of. Even self-branded "UX Designers".
So there's a tension between "being boring and usefully" and "being original at the cost of forcing your users to adapt".
Case in point : I had to explain a feature yesterday to a user, and it's complex and not trivial, and what basically saved my day was saying : "it works like in X".
Like games, wasd is movement, so every other game copied that. If you try to change, people are going to be mighty confused why the controls aren't "normal".
A wave of games that wanted you to play with the mouse and keyboard simultaneously made using the arrow keys impossible, unless you wanted to use the mouse with your left hand. If the auxiliary part of the keyboard had been to the left of the main part instead of the right, movement would most likely never have come off the arrow keys.
Sometimes though it is for the better. A lot of games in the 80s, especially on ZX Spectrum, etc, used QAOP for movement (QA vertical, OP horizontal) for some reason.
Of course the best is to have these configurable - both the Speccy games of yesteryear and modern games allow you to change the controls to your liking, so people who for some reason still prefer QAOP (is anyone still out there, i wonder) can still use that scheme in modern games.
QAOP requires two hands.
A common complaint from the French is that games have messed up movement. Why? The French keyboard looks like this:
A Z E R T
Q S D F
W X C
Even if you rely on scan codes, you're only guessing the button placement. They can be arbitrary, as long as user's key map matches.
Now you're down to arrows. They have an embedded meaning: directions! You can rely on them being placed in a way that makes sense to the user, even if it's not necessarily the standard WASD positions.
Even if you're worried about weird layouts, the biggest issue you'd see by far is keyboards that don't have arrow keys!
Even controllers assign buttons a meaning, rather than location.
> Even controllers assign buttons a meaning, rather than location.
Not really? There are arbitrary labels that change from controller to controller and the game displays whatever it thinks you have. Like keyboards.
But, again, if you're going to say "you can use the left part of the keyboard for directions", then you have different options, it's just probably safer to use wasd for QWERTY, qsdz for AZERTY, etc... rather than anything else.
A design targeted to the occasional user can spectacularily fail for power users that use the thing 4 hours every day. Sure it is easy to understand and self explainatory. But this is an advantage once at the beginning and might cost your users every day after that.
Having a steep learning curve is not a feature, but sometimes easy to use means a UX sacrifices fast and efficent workflows (cue notepad.exe vs vim).
Sure, notepad.exe is easier to use (and probably has more users in absolute numbers) than vim, but if your target group is power users, guess which one might feel more worth investing into for them?
However if you are programming all day vim has a lot of powerful features that notepad cannot touch, so if notepad is your other choice of course it is worth learning. However if your other choice is something more powerful - it turns out there are programmer editors that are just as powerful and a lot easier to learn. The question then becomes is it worth spending hours learning all the commands - including for things you rarely use - for the few ms it saves you each time you use them. (make sure you check with a stopwatch - people often feel that something is faster when the stopwatch says otherwise - as any UX engineer should know, but most vim advocates do not admit)
My point was only that some things need to be simple and self explainatory, even if it creates friction and reduces the power, because:
A) they are not used all that often so the friction does not matter
B) the thing is public and must be usable by potentially everyone
On the other hand some things that are meant to be used for hours at a time should make the same tradeoff between reducing the one-time mental burden vs reducing the friction in daily use by power users.
A cash register that is operated 8 hours a day by one person for 5 days a week for years at a time can (and I argue should!) be designed differently than a check out register that is used by new unexperienced customers for example.
If an action the cashier does 200 times a day takes five seconds longer it makes a difference of 17 minutes a day or 83 minutes a week. That is a workday wasted on nothing in a month.
The same workday could have been spent to train the cashier on a faster cash register that has a tiny bit more powerful user interface.
Five seconds are a tad bit much, but even if you take one second, that number would add up to day in five months of work.
And that is the capitalist efficiency perspective — it also annoys cashiers if they are slow to do the one thing they have to do 200 times a day.
There’s no deductive logic that says “Facebook has spent millions on research so it’s correct”, but common sense says this isn’t a bad strategy. UX research is a legitimate undertaking, and Facebook definitely had the chops to hire people who have invested their education in understanding the nuances of when to use which design elements. It’s literally a science.
UX design (I’m not speaking of other aspects of design) isn’t really a creative process as much as an engineering discipline. There’s a best way to achieve any particular outcome. Maybe taste is involved in where you hide the rubbish of your application, but the basic functionality has a “best flow”. Copying one of the giants is the best way to get this flow for the average person.
It may be state of the art, but it doesn't mean that there aren't alternative perspectives which would be equally as successful if given a shot.
Personally, designers SHOULD be more restricted, the problem space itself should restrict what they are able to do, but it often times isn't.
At one point someone decided the shuffle button for the iphone needed to be hidden for whatever reason. I wish the designers had been restricted by someone's personal wishes during those discussions.
I beg to differ. A/B testing minutiae like the exact shade of color is not UX research; it's merely the pretense thereof.
All the people doing this research are not exceptionally brilliant: this is easy to deduce by noticing how everything is getting objectively worse.
> UX design (I’m not speaking of other aspects of design) isn’t really a creative process as much as an engineering discipline.
Absolutely wrong. It's creative in the sense that you can't quantify it with scientific measures.
UX is coming up with the iPhone when all the smart phones in your era had a small tiny screen and a 4x4 keyboard.
I can assure you that engineering departments do in fact teach classes in which the lecture material is based on research regarding the color and other aspects of design elements. The parent discipline is “human computer interaction”, and “user experience” is a narrowing.
I’ve sat through an hour long presentation about a single button used to meet an accessibility mandate in California. The presenter spent months employed with the purpose of designing the button and designing tests to ensure the correctness of the button. The size, shape, color, and sub-images of the button all contribute to its effectiveness.
Coming up with the iPhone as a creative example of UX doesn’t make me wrong. It’s at the intersection of design and engineering in the same way UX scientists have to brainstorm research directions. My comment was specifically regarding the formal field of UX as a subfield of HCI, and it’s correct and relevant to the subject matter of the article in that websites and apps look the same because there is a state of the art in the engineering discipline of UX.
Overstyling just introduces cognitive load and makes it hard to figure how to get things done, especially when designers feel the need to reinvent basic navigation flows and deviate from the boring established practices.
IMO as an industry we should fight back on the user's behalf against needless styling in the name of branding or design or whatever. Nobody cares. Nobody.
I think that's a really good question. Doesn't mean that it won't have a good answer, but if the answer is non-obvious then why shouldn't it be asked?
The most frustrating experience for our team was regarding the design of a widget meant to convey a number of properties and statistics about some in-game object. Our very experienced Senior UI Designer came up with something which was simple, clean, and looked great.
A manager without UI knowledge didn't like it and mandated that it was replaced by his own unique vision, despite protests. This resulted in half a year of iteration and tests, bumping against problem after problem which needed to be solved. Readability, contrast under different circumstances, data edge cases, you name it.
Meanwhile, our senior designer was forced to follow along, protesting and reminding everyone at each step that he had a perfectly fine solution to begin with. In the end, after months of painful iteration the manager had a brilliant idea, suggesting a fix for the final remaining issue. He had now, by ordering our Senior Designer how to perform each iteration and then evaluating it together, designed the perfect widget. Our senior opened up his original rejected design and showed that it, indeed, followed that specification to a T.
Well here's why you're wrong!
hint: you're not wrong. Even as a technical person it drives me nuts when interfaces change for the sake of it.
I've come to dislike designers over the years. Not because I dislike designers, but because it seems like form has taken too much precedence over function and often that form changes as the old guard is replaced with the new.
This is very easy to disprove:
UI design follows trends.
The current trend is flat UI, so everyone is doing it. Before that, there used to be a different trend, and everyone was following it.
These trends have nothing to do with helping users.
Doesn't flat UI confuse and frustrate users? My contention is that it does, yet everyone is doing it.
Constant popups to remind people to sign up for news letters? Frustrating.
Too much negative space and not much useful functionality on the UI? Confusing and frustrating.
Hiding features that people want to use all the time behind a hamburger menu?
Removing functionality all together because the designer couldn't figure out a way to fit it into his design?
Almost everytime some application does a "redesign" to "modernize" their UI, they do it by following current trends, and the result is an objectively worse UI:
- Users are confused and frustrated.
- Previously accessible functionality hidden behind more menus or removed altogether.
- Slower/Jankier overall performance.
Really nothing about it has anything to do with caring about the actual user experience.
It is a principle rooted in game theory that explains why similar businesses clump together (ex: the McDonald's next to the Burger King). It it exemplified by the ice cream stand problem: two competing ice cream stands on a beach front, similar in every way so that proximity is the only criteria for customers to choose which stand they will go to. Both stands will chose to go towards the center in order to maximize their area of influence. In the end, both stands will be at the center, even though it is not the best for customers, because neither have an incentive to leave the center.
I would love to point out that Zoomers are out here voting, and some of them are in their 20s. Millennials are not young people anymore.
> A 2021 Road & Track article titled “Why does every new car look like every other new car?” compares the form factors of midsize SUVs from 24 manufacturers. Despite a wide range of price points, they’re more alike than they are different:
This has been true for decades, and unlike the other points I think this can be fairly characterized by industry required risk avoidance. Bringing a car to market is wildly expensive, having one flop because of an edgy design would be, and has been, very consequential. I think as we move into our electric car future we might see more radical designs and more bespoke manufacturers as drivetrain stops being such a big cost and differentiator.
> Website design, especially for SaaS companies, is depressingly mundane
I like to take a stroll through the Japanese web from time to time, it's an alternate universe that looks nothing like the western web.
But then we're just building supermarkets and it makes me angry, well because, supermarkets are ugly.
I'd argue that the "most sellable experience" is almost never the "most beautiful experience". In fact most of my memorable experiences are ones that are NOT mass-marketed. This is also the reason why the "blockbuster hollywood movies" are always worst compared to a more unique indie experience.
This is also why I think the "AI-diffusion" future where new experiences are created off of old massively marketed ones is doomed to fail.
People want diverse unique experiences that have been thought out by experts with decades of experience and with a craftship-level mindset; not things that have been copy/pasted from an AI neural network.
Bland and predictable apps are so much nicer. It's not an art project, just a barrier to getting something done... please don't go crazy with it...
I read that as a teen, and it was the first time that my eyes opened up to the absolute homogenization places undergo when they try to appeal to "tourists" (or, as is talked about in the book, when they are forced to appeal to tourists just because of the massive, overwhelming numbers of them).
It's simple:
The more global communication gets, the more global the styles and patterns become.
Avocado and salmon on sourdough is just good breakfast, no matter where you woke up. And plain concrete rooms have a good aesthetic quality everywhere. Not sure if needs to be advertised on blackboards, written in chalk, though.
It's only a "good breakfast" for those that have internalized a mostly western-centric aspirational idea of breakfast. Most people in these parts, or say, in Asia or Africa or Latin America, you know where 80% of the global population lives, don't want to have said "good breakfast" 99% of time if they have the choice. We have our own foodstuffs and breakfast preferences...
>plain concrete rooms have a good aesthetic quality everywhere
Yes, which is why the Eastern Bloc looked so nice
Bad jokes aside, unless I missed it, the author forgot one major reason for everything being similar: cost and globalization ie everything is designed and made by respectively the same people and countries. If blandness is the price for people in developing countries being able to afford what we have, it’s a price I’m willing to pay.
Given that things used to be less flat, uniform, and globalized, and now they are more, with no signs of the trend stopping, it would be more accurate to call these trends not regressive, but progressive.
This is rather a perfect example of conservatism: refusing to extend beyond comfort zone boundaries because of a strong sense of risk avoidance, for fear of missing out on market opportunity. This conservatism has always existed but has a much broader reach in the era of the global community, and expresses itself in paradoxically new and exciting ways as it froths through the reactors of specific cultures.
I believe "regressive" is used in the sense that the aesthetics are "regressing toward a mean", which is true almost by definition, assuming you believe the postulates in the article.
Not that other time periods didn't have their fads and fashions, of course. But those fads and fashions are now kind of charming, where they've survived. Will the 2010s and 2020s interior decor induce nostalgia 50 years from now? Who knows.
Also, how long until some smoothbrain who thinks it's hilarious to drive around drinking Liquid Death gets pulled over by a cop who thought (or were willing to claim they thought) they saw a beer can, and said smoothbrain ends up getting arrested for the other stuff in their car?
> “Kevin likes potatoes because they, like people are all different yet immediately identifiable as being essentially of the same species,”
[1] https://petapixel.com/2016/01/21/this-photo-of-a-potato-sold...
For what it's worth this is a term from architecture, IIRC coined by Pascoe about 25 years ago, using airports as the jumping off point. Unfortunately most of my books are in storage so I can't confirm the name at the moment, but I know the book is at least a quarter century old.
This is the underlooked factor. It's why movie posters all looked the same for a while, a guy standing in front of a large expanse, often with his back facing you. When faced with ambiguity, it's just easier to copy everyone else rather than take a risk.
1939 World's Fair parking lot: https://www.1939nyworldsfair.com/worlds_fair/wf_tour/zone-7/...
1959 Boeing employee parking lot: http://forums.pelicanparts.com/pacific-northwest-us-wa-id-ut...
1979 Omaha parking lot: https://www.reddit.com/r/classiccars/comments/5dk8iy/omaha_p...
The 90s was actually a brief period where cars did look a little different because you had the prime of the minivan explosion and the beginning of the transition to SUVs along with regular passenger cars.
Then in the 2000s SUVs and desperate hunts for aerodynamic (and thus fuel efficiency) performance took over.
Here are some silhouettes of pony cars from the 60s and 2000s: https://silhouettehistory.com/post/146062752267/pony-retro-s...
They're the same, unless you are a hardcore car nut and can tell models apart from the rake of the B-pillar.
Actually I would argue that the three modern pony cars look more different from each other than the ones in the 60s and 70s did.
Of course there were exceptions, with classic sports, luxury, and utility vehicles standing out from their "normal, consumer" peers, but the same is true of today.
Nobody is going to mistake a Lotus Evora for a Toyota Camry.
But the 1968 Ford Fairlane and Chevy Impala were extremely similar-looking: boxy shape, long chrome stripe running down side, louvered vent below windshield, chrome trim around windshield, four sealed beam headlights, big chrome bumpers, similar windshield angles, wheelbase only 3 inches in difference. The same is true of the other car segments: one compact car looked like another, pickups looked the same, station wagons looked the same.
I think what might be happening is that, yes, all automobiles of the current generation and type look similar-- but so did all cars of the past generations and when making comparisons they're remarking on how different generational "cohorts" look different and mistakenly thinking that meant vehicles within the cohort looked different.
For example: https://www.hemmings.com/stories/
Buildings are permanent in ways apps and restaurant interiors aren't, and I think we're losing something we may not miss until it's gone.
The main reason left for major country differences (EU vs US) comes down to building materials, mostly. Much of the US is still "stick-built" but lots of EU buildings are brick/concrete.
You don't have to do any of the above. However it only takes a little thought to realize that you demand the above.
I think the biggest sad example of this is how uniform counter heights are in the US, even on multi-million dollar completely custom homes. It's not expensive or hard at all to adjust to fit the user, but it's still sooooo rare.
This is why websites, apps, and ads look the same. They have been optimized to capture the attention of your lizard brain. These aesthetics have been carefully analyzed and fine-tuned through A/B experimentation to capture the most eyeballs, produce the most clicks, increase the dollars in your shopping cart.
Maybe it’s too much a focus on math and statistics instead of design in other spaces too? Is that what you mean?
As long as the buyers are willing to pay more for winning than other aspects of the sport, then that is what the sports owners will optimize for.
Anyway it seems like it got much more boring to watch if most people strike out.
It's the reason every furniture is beige, every company turns into an advertising company and even creative industries like Hollywood can only make superhero/franchise movies.
Risk aversion, margin squeezing and exploiting established consumer bases as much as possible.
Race
Gender
Education
Socioeconomic background
Geography
Also that "Liquid Death" is a really dumb example. It's a beverage. Why are you trying to differentiate beverage by design elements.
People want to see brand name and you have already established brand - why would you make it harder to for people to see who you are.
I can understand if you are a startup that wants to catch an eye - but established companies not really.
I think that the current minimal aesthetic really started in the early 00's with Apple's iPod. That design was striking at the time and was the antithesis to 90's grunge aesthetic. I was also a big fan of minimal techno back then and I almost felt like Apple was making nods to that lifestyle. We were certainly using their computers to produce it!
Now minimalism is old hat. I suspect that Gen Z will make some minor statements against it. But the big disruption won't come for another generation.
I recently read Generations by Neil Howe and William Strauss. In the book they make the case that their are 4 archetypes to a generation cycle - Idealist (boomer), Reactive (gen x), Civic (millennial) and Adaptive (gen z). Idealists and Civics are the dominant generations. While Reactive and Adaptive are the less so (one reacts against and the other codifies).
We will soon repeat the cycle sometime in the 2030's. The generation following gen z will be an idealist generation and will disrupt the current "blanding" trends we are living with. Think about the last time this happened. In the 1950s the silent generation (the last cycle's adaptive generation) was coming of age in an extremely conformist era created by the GI Generation (civics). Then the boomers came to age and the 1960s happened.
Unix users had flat designs on Fluxbox/Blackbox and lot of themes.
On the rest of the platforms, I remind you System6 and 7 on Apple were minimal and flat.
> The evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornamentation from utilitarian objects.
> Ornament does not heighten my joy in life or the joy in life of any cultivated person.
and
> Freedom from ornament is a sign of spiritual strength.
There was not a history of minimal aesthetic before this era.
I'm not sure how this fits into any generational cycle. I'm not too keen on generational reductionism.
1. https://idoc.pub/documents/adolf-loos-ornament-and-crimepdf-...
people just want their information or to use their app and be done with it. i'm fine w/ all my apps having similar layout and design if it helps me get shit done. maybe a new paradigm or industry will open that creativity once again.
Sure it all looks the same, but if it works... design is no longer a differentiator, perhaps.
Just like when making an electronic device, it behooves the maker to use silicon 99% of the time.