Discussion Software design bad practice: 2023 edition

[mikeymikec]

I propose two entries for Worst Software Design Practice of 2023:

1 - Making a feature require the cloud for nothing other than self-serving purposes. The most obvious example of this is by HP, with the 'HP Smart' app (and seemingly only their lower-end printers) and mandating that scanning paperwork with their software requires a HP online account to store the scanned files in. I stated 'require' in the opening sentence, but I'd be happy to trade 'require' for "make the user go out of their way to not use the cloud".

2 - Asking users for the umpteenth time why they're not using the software in exactly the way the company intended (usually the settings that allow the maximum amount of information to be hoovered up into the cloud). Microsoft is usually the biggest offender, at least in my experience: Not signing into Windows with a Microsoft account? No OneDrive / Windows Defender auto file submission / Edge as the default / Bing as the default search in Edge? It needs to nag you at least once a month for each offence. However, Google has started doing it too: Approximately on a monthly basis, Google Photos (Android) will ask me if I want to back up my photos to the cloud. No? Well how about specific photos to the cloud?

Honourable mention: Starting Edge for the first time and it wants to ask about 5 questions before I can look at a website. How about this for a crazy thought: Relegate those questions to a priority whereby the user has to go out of their way to answer them. Firefox has also started doing this crap, but (AFAIK) at least with FF it's just innocuous questions like "would you like the UI to be a particular colour". Still, annoying.

Feel free to make more suggestions

 

[Exterous]

Any company that makes enterprise software that refuses to respect common install flags

Software that refuses to have any mechanism for reasonable offline key activation. No it's actually not easy to get internet service every 30 days in the Amazon or in nowhere Africa to keep a local install active

 

[lxskllr]

I'm pretty sheltered from all of that. Debian asks nothing from me. I'll submit amazon asking me for a phone# for whatever reason, and not including a [When hell freezes over] button.

 

[Fenixgoon]

Accounts and launchers within launchers.

For example, I recently bought BG3 on GoG. Happy to support DRM-free purchases. When I fired up BG3, I then had the Larian launcher, which required me to make a Larian account.

I still love BG3, but damn that infuriated me.

 

[KMFJD]

I propose two entries for Worst Software Design Practice of 2023:

1 - Making a feature require the cloud for nothing other than self-serving purposes. The most obvious example of this is by HP, with the 'HP Smart' app (and seemingly only their lower-end printers) and mandating that scanning paperwork with their software requires a HP online account to store the scanned files in. I stated 'require' in the opening sentence, but I'd be happy to trade 'require' for "make the user go out of their way to not use the cloud".

2 - Asking users for the umpteenth time why they're not using the software in exactly the way the company intended (usually the settings that allow the maximum amount of information to be hoovered up into the cloud). Microsoft is usually the biggest offender, at least in my experience: Not signing into Windows with a Microsoft account? No OneDrive / Windows Defender auto file submission / Edge as the default / Bing as the default search in Edge? It needs to nag you at least once a month for each offence. However, Google has started doing it too: Approximately on a monthly basis, Google Photos (Android) will ask me if I want to back up my photos to the cloud. No? Well how about specific photos to the cloud?

Honourable mention: Starting Edge for the first time and it wants to ask about 5 questions before I can look at a website. How about this for a crazy thought: Relegate those questions to a priority whereby the user has to go out of their way to answer them. Firefox has also started doing this crap, but (AFAIK) at least with FF it's just innocuous questions like "would you like the UI to be a particular colour". Still, annoying.

Feel free to make more suggestions

JFC do i ever hate HP because of their HP Smart software....another one that frosts my balls was Brother software (?) requiring you to install the software under the local admin account and not an account that just had admin privileges

 

[purbeast0]

The only thing that I really hate now a days is that you need to create an account for nearly any piece of software or even websites. That shit grinds my gears.

 

[brianmanahan]

all of it

after 20 years of writing this crap i'm just sick of it

 

[[DHT]Osiris]

Console ports without an exit game button (alt-f4 randomly to close).

Any game without pauseable cutscenes, shippable cutscenes, or any other unpauseable anything.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I agree with all what has been said so far. I especially hate stuff that requires any form of cloud connectivity or account.

Some more stuff off top of my head:

- Getting rid of title bars, or stuffing crap inside the title bar. This trend seems has been bad this year. Makes it hard to move the window around and it just looks ugly. We recently got moved to Office 365 at work, Outlook is horrible for it. Need to have laser precision with the mouse to try to find one of the few pixels that let you move the app instead of clicking on some random thing. There's even a search bar in there! What would I even need to search for all the way up there?

These kind of go together and Windows 10 is the most guilty of it:
- lots of empty space for nothing
- making UI elements super huge for nothing
- No definition between different UI elements, such as buttons, or things you can click on and empty space

- Overuse of javascript or interactivity on web pages, to the point that the site is sluggish, buggy, and slow. Facebook and Twitter are very guilty of this.


I might add more if I think about more, I feel I'm missing stuff.


And keeping this one last as it's more hardware:

- Stuff that requires phone apps just because. Action cameras, drones, appliances etc. I've even run into routers that do that! Phone apps are very proprietary, rely on a walled garden of either Google or Apple, and are planned obsolescence by design. There is no real advantage from a dev standpoint to this either, they are harder to code and you need to duplicate the work for each platform and keep up with OS updates so the app keeps working, it's a constant rat race. Would be better if these devices just ran a mini web server that you access from a web browser instead. Then you don't need a specific OS or specific software or google/apple account to use it. Any OS/browser will do including phones. (just don't use crap like Flash, Activex or Java!) If they want to make an app at least make it a desktop app. Not a HUGE fan of that either since 99% of time it requires Windows, but at least Windows is not as much of a walled garden as phones are and is generally hardware agnostic or can even be run in a VM, backed up, imaged, etc.

 

[[DHT]Osiris]

Oh you know what I thought of another one, software where the window borders are flat white, mainly Microsoft shit. Can't tell where the edges are.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Oh you know what I thought of another one, software where the window borders are flat white, mainly Microsoft shit. Can't tell where the edges are.

This too! Worse is having multiple windows stacked can't even tell where one ends and other starts.

On similar note, invisible or nearly invisible scroll bars are terrible too. MacOS is very guilty of that, and to make matters worse, their mice don't even have a scroll wheel. I always get annoyed with that at church when I have to run Zoom since they decided to go Mac.

 

[sdifox]

Oh you know what I thought of another one, software where the window borders are flat white, mainly Microsoft shit. Can't tell where the edges are.

Bitch about white border and the next update it will be rgb...

 

[jmagg]

Devs have the week off but deadlines remain the same.

 

[BFG10K]

For example, I recently bought BG3 on GoG. Happy to support DRM-free purchases. When I fired up BG3, I then had the Larian launcher, which required me to make a Larian account.

The Larian launcher is optional and not required. It's also easily bypassed.

 

[[DHT]Osiris]

Bitch about white border and the next update it will be rgb...

At least I could see the fucking things, make it neon pink for all I care, as long as the foreground and background are different.

 

[mikeymikec]

Oh you know what I thought of another one, software where the window borders are flat white, mainly Microsoft shit. Can't tell where the edges are.

I enable the two 'show accent colour' settings at the bottom of personalisation > colour, which produces a very thin border of a colour being whatever the accent colour is set to. Works on Win11 23H2.

The other setting I change (also in settings > personalise > colour) is 'choose your mode', set it to custom then set the default Windows mode to dark (and the default app mode to light if you like it that way), then the taskbar, traditional window title bars and window borders match the accent colour.

I had hoped that it was still possible to change the border thickness like you could on =<Win7 but apparently not (at least not without third party assistance / registry key changes).

 

[sdifox]

At least I could see the fucking things, make it neon pink for all I care, as long as the foreground and background are different.

You have white background?

 

[[DHT]Osiris]

I enable the two 'show accent colour' settings at the bottom of personalisation > colour, which produces a very thin border of a colour being whatever the accent colour is set to. Works on Win11 23H2.

The other setting I change (also in settings > personalise > colour) is 'choose your mode', set it to custom then set the default Windows mode to dark (and the default app mode to light if you like it that way), then the taskbar, traditional window title bars and window borders match the accent colour.

I had hoped that it was still possible to change the border thickness like you could on =<Win7 but apparently not (at least not without third party assistance / registry key changes).

Yeah I know the color scheme for Windows can be adjusted but that doesn't necessarily apply to every peice of software, also it's the default so every system I touch (non domain joined if I feel like making a gpo for color schemes which is fucking stupid) I have to dance around Microsoft's dumb shit UI decisions.

 

[[DHT]Osiris]

You have white background?

Like all of windows is white now. Open two explorer windows and stack them, then play find the border. Add edge, repeat, add settings, repeat

 

[lxskllr]

I agree with all what has been said so far. I especially hate stuff that requires any form of cloud connectivity or account.

Some more stuff off top of my head:

- Getting rid of title bars, or stuffing crap inside the title bar. This trend seems has been bad this year. Makes it hard to move the window around and it just looks ugly. We recently got moved to Office 365 at work, Outlook is horrible for it. Need to have laser precision with the mouse to try to find one of the few pixels that let you move the app instead of clicking on some random thing. There's even a search bar in there! What would I even need to search for all the way up there?

These kind of go together and Windows 10 is the most guilty of it:
- lots of empty space for nothing
- making UI elements super huge for nothing
- No definition between different UI elements, such as buttons, or things you can click on and empty space

- Overuse of javascript or interactivity on web pages, to the point that the site is sluggish, buggy, and slow. Facebook and Twitter are very guilty of this.


I might add more if I think about more, I feel I'm missing stuff.


And keeping this one last as it's more hardware:

- Stuff that requires phone apps just because. Action cameras, drones, appliances etc. I've even run into routers that do that! Phone apps are very proprietary, rely on a walled garden of either Google or Apple, and are planned obsolescence by design. There is no real advantage from a dev standpoint to this either, they are harder to code and you need to duplicate the work for each platform and keep up with OS updates so the app keeps working, it's a constant rat race. Would be better if these devices just ran a mini web server that you access from a web browser instead. Then you don't need a specific OS or specific software or google/apple account to use it. Any OS/browser will do including phones. (just don't use crap like Flash, Activex or Java!) If they want to make an app at least make it a desktop app. Not a HUGE fan of that either since 99% of time it requires Windows, but at least Windows is not as much of a walled garden as phones are and is generally hardware agnostic or can even be run in a VM, backed up, imaged, etc.

Sounds like you haven't used gnome recently. I used to love gtk, but I've been on the verge of switching my home machine to plasma(qt) for awhile. What keeps me on xfce is theirs, and debian's glacial development pace. It insulates me from a lot of the changes. I especially hate csd. I want a discrete titlebar/border, and have all the controls inside the window. My latest thunderbird update defaulted to csd, and I kept inadvertently closing the window. Luckily, switching it back to a sane interface was a simple checkbox.

Along with your comment about requiring a (cr)app for everything... The general software landscape feels much more adversarial these days. Every install is a deep contemplation of how that particular software package is gonna fuck me over. I don't run into it often since I'm on debian, and 99.x% of my software comes from fdroid, but I still run into it. I got a novelty light that projects a nebula and starfield on the ceiling. It has a few builtin settings, but to get more features, you have to install a (cr)app.

I get it. A phone is a pretty decent interface for that kind of thing. Keep the device itself simple, and offload the work to a real(ish) computer. What kind of security does that Chinese software have? Where's the source code, and why won't you let me see it? What's gonna happen two years later when your nebula box doesn't sell as well as you hoped, and you shut everything down? Everything's developed for the company's benefit, and not to make a great product for consumers. It's not even solely on low cost nebula boxes. You can pay real money, for real hardware, and companies still want to track the shit out of you, and extract more money to make the hardware work the way it was advertised on the box.

 

[Fenixgoon]

The Larian launcher is optional and not required. It's also easily bypassed.

go on....

 

[DigDog]

Microsoft is usually the biggest offender, at least in my experience: Not signing into Windows with a Microsoft account? No OneDrive / Windows Defender auto file submission / Edge as the default / Bing as the default search in Edge? It needs to nag you at least once a month for each offence.

funny, that doesnt happen on my W10 OS.

Spoiler

wink wink

 

[sdifox]

Like all of windows is white now. Open two explorer windows and stack them, then play find the border. Add edge, repeat, add settings, repeat

I am hanging on to win10 for as long as I can xd

 

[Brainonska511]

Accounts and launchers within launchers.

For example, I recently bought BG3 on GoG. Happy to support DRM-free purchases. When I fired up BG3, I then had the Larian launcher, which required me to make a Larian account.

I still love BG3, but damn that infuriated me.

You don't have to make a Larian account. There is a little skip button.

But I do agree that it is annoying. BioShock Infinite does this too - tries (and fails, since I don't have one) to log into a Rockstar account whenever I start the game, making the loading ever so slightly slower...

 

[Red Squirrel]

Sounds like you haven't used gnome recently. I used to love gtk, but I've been on the verge of switching my home machine to plasma(qt) for awhile. What keeps me on xfce is theirs, and debian's glacial development pace. It insulates me from a lot of the changes. I especially hate csd. I want a discrete titlebar/border, and have all the controls inside the window. My latest thunderbird update defaulted to csd, and I kept inadvertently closing the window. Luckily, switching it back to a sane interface was a simple checkbox.

Along with your comment about requiring a (cr)app for everything... The general software landscape feels much more adversarial these days. Every install is a deep contemplation of how that particular software package is gonna fuck me over. I don't run into it often since I'm on debian, and 99.x% of my software comes from fdroid, but I still run into it. I got a novelty light that projects a nebula and starfield on the ceiling. It has a few builtin settings, but to get more features, you have to install a (cr)app.

I get it. A phone is a pretty decent interface for that kind of thing. Keep the device itself simple, and offload the work to a real(ish) computer. What kind of security does that Chinese software have? Where's the source code, and why won't you let me see it? What's gonna happen two years later when your nebula box doesn't sell as well as you hoped, and you shut everything down? Everything's developed for the company's benefit, and not to make a great product for consumers. It's not even solely on low cost nebula boxes. You can pay real money, for real hardware, and companies still want to track the shit out of you, and extract more money to make the hardware work the way it was advertised on the box.

Yeah I have not been a fan of Gnome since they came out with Unity. I imagine it must be even worse now. I'm on Mint Cinnamon which is much more tame and usable. (I think it's based on KDE?). I've used KDE as well which I find nice... but buggy. XFCE is ok too, I've used it on lower power machines.