from Hacker News

Light mode, Dark mode, and Gen-Z mode?

by beweinreich on 3/15/22, 2:16 PM with 332 comments

by rchaud on 3/15/22, 4:48 PM
First things first: I don't think there's anything wrong with the design based on the screenshots. At least, nothing stands out as being so unusable that users would flee for your competitor.
As for "Gen Z preferences", I don't think there's enough to go on here to prove that. I'm over 35 and have watched user interfaces go from the the fun, colourful and UNIQUE designs of the 2009-era iOS apps to the hyper-corporate, boring af grid system that's "Apple Approved". Android is similar, w/ Material Design. I think they have a new one now that replaces MD, but I can't be bothered to look it up.
You're creating a video speed dating app. Dating is supposed to be FUN. Why design it like Zoom? Have you used trivia apps like QuizUp? You'll notice how different the design and dynamics are compared to most apps that are designed to render text/image data in specified fields.
Also look at TikTok/Douyin for an example of unconventional app design. They could have just copied Instagram, which is blandness personified. But they went with an unfamilar style that nonetheless took off. Nobody's asking "how do I turn my camera on" there, are they?
by munificent on 3/15/22, 4:38 PM
> I stare at the page for a second. My brain hurts. I hate it. It felt... distracting, maximal, cluttered, weirdly transparent. Little sparkles animate over the page.
> "How old are you?" I asked.
> "Twenty-five."
> "Of course you are."
You will never, ever, ever do good design while holding your audience in contempt.
They are fully and completely entitled to their aesthetic preferences and those preferences have absolutely no bearing on their worth or right to enjoy the products they use in whatever way they choose to use them.
If you can't have enough compassion for your users to design something they love respecting who they are then you shouldn't be designing for them.
by cptcobalt on 3/15/22, 5:26 PM
As a product manager, I read this and found a founder clinically dismissive of user perspectives and feedback that doesn't align with their own internal viewpoints. Confirmation bias to the n-th degree. His quote of her feedback ("It's so exciting. Every time I open it, it makes me happy. Sometimes they have doge pop up!") is almost certainly embellished and is a non-empathetic take on a genuine user perspective.
The mock [1] even radiates the "millennial snowflakes" energy that used to be prevalent, with the "You are unique. You are different".
Thinking about it further, I actually think this is a super clickbait way to get hits and link clout? If you look at their blog [2], it's really just advertising all of the different dating verticals this company runs. And gosh, the names are horrifically cringey. "Sappho Dating", "Matzoball Dating", "Subtle Curry Dating"?
1: https://uploads-ssl.webflow.com/6197f007be798d88368f80d7/623... 2: https://www.getfilteroff.com/blog
by dugmartin on 3/15/22, 2:49 PM
At age 50 now, I'd prefer a Gen X mode where the font size is 125% and the text is high contrast.
by jdlyga on 3/15/22, 2:53 PM
The "Gen-Z" look feels wrong. But if you step back a little bit, all the "flat design" trends of 2011 also felt wrong in the exact same way. "You mean that after all the advances in computer graphics we're going to just go back to text on top of a rectangle like Windows 3.1?" A lot of people forget this since flat design is just how everything is done nowadays.
by lancesells on 3/15/22, 2:33 PM
I'm late 40s and would prefer the Gen-Z mode in a dating app. Give me clean and utilitarian on a note taking app or something where I'm creating. Give me something fun (but usable) for something that should be fun.
by graderjs on 3/15/22, 3:57 PM
Gerald took off his glasses and rubbed them a little on the tablecloth. He was bewildered. How could this be, he kept thinking to himself. No--how, literally, could this be?
He couldn't have known it, but at that very moment, the same conversation, and the same bewilderment, was being had, in offices over lunch hours, around dinner tables in startup work condos, all across America. Something had shifted.
In later years this age would come to be known as: The Dawn of the GenZ School of Itinerant Design. GenY art historians with goth hair and overcoats tried and failed to analyze it as a "return to the retro-aesthetics of MySpace and Geo-cities, heralded by Glitch", but the labels never stuck. Older, wiser and more bitter professionals, fustily defogging their glasses while seated defeatedly at their architect-style slanted drafting desks (with optional standing desk accessory), would oftentimes mutter to themselves, alone at night in their downtown 23rd-floor apartments, lit only by the synthetic warm-LED glow of their ironically chosen "Banker's lamps", a different name for this cultural watershed: "The End-times' Madness." But nobody listened to them anyways, and they didn't much care.
by dec0dedab0de on 3/15/22, 2:32 PM
At one point the entire web was fun and quirky, then myspace came along and everyone stopped making their own webpages opting instead to customize their profile in crazy ways, then facebook came along and only allowed rigid government like structure. Tumblr was a beacon of hope for a time, but then wild creativity moved to sanctioned playgrounds like minecraft, or to the personal web pages of highly skilled artists.
by burlesona on 3/15/22, 2:40 PM
Design trends come and go. Minimalism is has probably already peaked, and typically when a trend peaks the next trend intentionally runs against it.
The "gen-z" look reminds me of the early web when people thought that <blink> and <marquee> were really exciting html elements. Those were noisy pages, but they had the feeling of an enthusiastic hobbyist scrapbook, and that was part of the appeal. "I could make something cool like that." That "artsy teenager's notebook" aesthetic is like the 90s web reborn in high def, this time with 40mb of javascript along for the ride.
by user_7832 on 3/15/22, 3:25 PM
I am a little surprised to see no one question the author's description or assumption of "Gen Z".
As someone presumably from Gen Z, I find both interfaces either bad or terrible. The partiful design is outright tacky and looks terrible (nothing homogeneous, questionable design choices etc) but Filteroff has so much whitespace it feels like it was designed by soulless corps at Uber or Facebook who just studied from Pinterest.
And as a GenZ who's immersed in tech (news), the fact that this is the first time I'm hearing of Gen Z design definitely raised my eyebrows.
by mamoriamohit on 3/15/22, 2:48 PM
I remember the time when I first used <marquee> and I jumped like a little kid. Fast forward a few years when I started designing for web as a career, and I was sad to see that nobody used <marquee> in production. It turned out to be a toy.
Heart broken.
But I grew to love the minimalism design.
Recently I started Youtubing and make designing thumbnails, minimal doesn't work. The demography 18 to 35 year old prefer something that quickly grabs their attention.
Amused to see the trend seeping into UI/UX as well.
by asciimov on 3/15/22, 3:56 PM
Millennial here, I welcome anything to break up the current design aesthetics. I never liked material design and designs from Apple and Google both look tired.
I did dark modes before it was cool, but now that I'm getting older, I want some kind of grey mode. Something that doesn't feel like I'm looking down the barrel of a flashlight nor something that's gonna cause eyestrain.
As for all the flashy doodads and movement. That's more designing for psychology than aesthetics. Movement looks exciting, and has been used successfully for years in other mediums.
by hammock on 3/15/22, 2:33 PM
I first noticed this "Gen-Z" mode trend when I played Mario Kart on Wii. Compared to N64 or SNES, the screen was so busy. I honestly had a hard time keeping track of where my player was and where the "track" was compared to all the colorful fast-moving background cruft.
I'm not a gamer so maybe I'm just not used to it. Fortnite seems like another example of how "Gen-Z" and headachy a digital environment can be.
For sure people will downvote me for not being a gamer who gets it, or for being an old fuddy-duddy. Wanted to provide the perspective though.
by whywhywhywhy on 3/15/22, 4:13 PM
I don't think it's cheugy at all because none of this aesthetic is try hard.
Think it's just more the SV aesthetic that was spawned from iOS7 and Material design era forwards was originally meant to be the glass of water in the land of skeuomorphism has instead become the aesthetic of all products the optimize for conversion rather than experience.
All your kind of miserable experiences in the notification misery mobile world have the background muzak of iOS7 and Material design. It's almost like carpet and celling tiles of the DMV.
And west coast/SV just doesn't understand anything beyond this aesthetic anymore, there is no charm or whimsy in any of their products, even when they try to forcefully inject charm into it like with Memoji the end result comes across like a robot make it, it's just not actually cute or funny just feels gross somehow like there isn't any cuteness, humor or wit to any of it and it's super apparent when you compare it to similar products like Line Friends or even Bitmoji manages to have wit to their work.
You've pushed a whole generation of designers in SV to focus on the wrong thing really and this is why all these SV platforms will eventually be up for grabs and the ones that dethrone them are going to be coming from strange places and wont be understandable to the current platform barons. Look how alien Tiktok was to IG they're still trying to replicate it but its almost like they can't understand it and I don't mean because it's a Chinese product I just mean the muscles required to understand what make it great have completely atrophied in SV product designers.
by zthrowaway on 3/15/22, 3:09 PM
> I'm a 33 year old straight male
Completely off topic, but why do I need to know your sexuality? Seriously, can we stop doing this? It does not matter.
by wrycoder on 3/15/22, 2:43 PM
I hit partiful.com and found this after scrolling a bit:
The Recyclable Camera Includes development, a prepaid mailer, & free shipping.
Photos are sent straight to your phone, where you can upload them to your Partiful party page.
Go ahead, make some memories
(The specs: Premium Kodak 400 ISO 35mm film with 27 exposures.)
Really? Everything old is young again!
by aasasd on 3/15/22, 5:58 PM
I'm way into my middle age, and I find the author an obnoxious and boring stuck-up who thinks that our collective recovery from the 90s' excess is now a sacred cow. Meanwhile, the discussed design is just a rather restrained and so-so exemplar of post-Tumblr aesthetics—which by themselves are the first good visual trend in ages. If the author thinks that this is bad, I wish upon him a prolonged experience with approximately-15-year-olds, with some Japanese TV on the side. And if the author is like this at 33, I probably don't want to read his writings ten years from now.
Perhaps the author should also learn that just like there's a ‘fashion statement’, so there's a ‘design statement’—though I'm not sure of a proper term for that.
P.S. The imagined ‘Filteroff for Gen-Z’ screenshot is barely less sterile than the baseline, and it's almost textbook corporate bells-and-whistles to ‘reach the young audience’. Perhaps the author would want to run the imagined design by Anya again.
by wwilim on 3/15/22, 2:48 PM
Somewhere along the line we forgot there was end user interface customization other than light and dark mode. It was called themes.
by yakubin on 3/15/22, 3:53 PM
Every single element of design featured on this page looks terrible: the apps and websites visible in screenshots, the blog itself. The excessively rounded ages make me feel as if I was in a children's house, where everything was rounded so that children don't hurt themselves hitting their heads on corners, or even on a children's carousel. The text on the website isn't evenly centred inside the boxes (top padding is smaller than bottom padding). Generally the spacing between elements, and between elements and text makes the site cause nausea. Also, compare how much space there is between the word "Date" and the enclosing box (claustrophobic) with how much space there is between the "+" sign and the enclosing box (agoraphobic).
Overall, modern design is awful.[1]
Regards,
A Gen Z-er bitter that Win11 is going to bring round edges back[1]
[1]: Yes, it looks like I've run out of positivity for the day.
[2]: Rough edges of Win10 were the best thing about its design, that was otherwise questionable in other places.
by altcognito on 3/15/22, 3:32 PM
Very little character and "authenticity" in websites that default to very safe choices and heavy use of whitespace for a low density of information.
I'm not a designer, but that's the first thing that comes to mind when I see the "correct designs." You have zero branding. What website am I even on?
by josho on 3/15/22, 2:52 PM
The author is close to an epiphany, but I feel doesn't quite reach it.
Yes, the last few years has seen iOS design trends to learn towards sterile apps where there is little uniqueness across apps.
This is good for novice users, the consistency makes it easier to onboard into a new app. The downside however is that many apps feel the same and have little differentiation.
The solution is to invest in UX and design to find ways to give your app a personality while keeping with the visual affordances users have learned. The solution is most certainly not to add sparkles and off angle text boxes.
by usui on 3/15/22, 2:28 PM
Gen-Z mode would get me more excited, interested to use the app for its intended purpose. Shouldn't all apps aspire the same?
by diegoperini on 3/15/22, 2:28 PM
I'd really like the author to ask the same question to their friend again in 8 years. That'd be a nice experiment.
by andrewzah on 3/15/22, 5:44 PM
1. You made a boring design. It's not a gen-z thing to dislike sterile, clinical designs that look more suited to businesses.
2. This is an ad, and seems like it was intentionally written as flamebait.
by mellosouls on 3/15/22, 5:15 PM
There seem to be quite a few negative comments assuming contempt/stereotyping/whatever in what seems to me a tongue in cheek and equally self(cohort) mocking article. It seems fair enough to hypothesise generational taste differences, there's hardly anything new about that.
I like Filter Off, it's a breath of fresh air in the dating app space though the last time I looked at it it was mobile only which kind of dissuades those of us on the cheap end of the camera spectrum...
by pier25 on 3/15/22, 4:37 PM
I don't know if it's related, but there seems to be a trend these past years of ugly design taking over...
The first company I remember was Dropbox but they seem to have backpedalled on that when looking at their current homepage.
Gumroad or Xolo recently updated their websites and are perfect examples of what I'm talking about:
https://gumroad.com/
https://www.xolo.io/
by mostlysimilar on 3/15/22, 4:04 PM
If we have to call it "Gen-Z" mode to get back some personality in software and interface design I'm all for it. I grew up with theme options on websites and software and desperately want it back. Windows Classic, Winamp, message boards with multiple theme options.
I'm so tired of every interface being just floating text on a white background with excessive whitespace. A border differentiating parts of an interface seems to terrify modern designers.
by cardiology-fat on 3/15/22, 4:58 PM
I don't know about the millennial angle, but minimalism does seem to be on the way out. As a university teacher, I spend a lot of time staring at the lids of laptops (as much as I'd like to ban them).
Back in the late 2000s, those laptops would be covered with various stickers -- Obama, sports, home star runner, etc. The last decade or so they have just been shiny unadorned metal or plastic.
This year amongst my 18 year-old students, the stickers have started coming back.
by egypturnash on 3/15/22, 5:19 PM
Honestly I am fifty years old and the "Gen Z" theme is much more appealing. The light one at the top of this post is incredibly boring and grey. Grey background, grey buttons, greyed-out photographs. The right screenshot is slightly better with the touch of blue but it's not very saturated. Little thumbnails. A tiny but of color from the image next to "Ready for date night?" but not much.
Hire an artist, get some kind of fun mascot drawn, make some font choices that aren't the same ten fonts that ship with iOS, get them to do some comps of really out-there ideas to make it a fun place to come look for someone to date. Right now it's just the Grey Zone. Come here to look for a grey person to have boring grey dates with. Woohoo.
Change the look now and then. For holidays. Big ones, little ones, local ones, made-up ones. A real-world meeting place would do this, why shouldn't you? Talk to the same artist about doing that.
Hell, even pick a day in the middle of winter to be Grey Dates Day and have a monochrome skin for laughs. Whatever. Get some color and whimsey in there.
(The post ends with "we're hiring a creative director" so I guess they're kinda looking for an artist now.)
by rexpop on 3/15/22, 6:38 PM
Counterpoint: The Babysitters Club [0]
> Apps like Seamless and Yelp listen in on our adult lives, then speak to us like children
> In the face of the overwhelming question — “What’s it for?” — a strain of avant-garde art responds by playing up its inutility, she argues. It magnifies its impotence until “it begins to look silly.”
> We cannot find food on our own, or choose a restaurant, or settle a tiny debt. Where that dependency feels unseemly in the context of independent adult life, it feels appropriate if the user’s position remains childlike, and the childlikeness makes sense when you consider that Yelp depends on us to write reviews, and therefore must, like a fun mom, make chores feel fun too.
> There is no better example of cuteness applied in the service of power-concealment than Pokémon Go, which is a large data-collection and surveillance network devised by the former Google Earth engineers at Niantic and then candy-coated with Nintendo IP.
0. https://reallifemag.com/the-babysitters-club/
by Arrivest on 3/15/22, 3:08 PM
I remember reading an article comparing Google maps with Waze and it criticized the UI of Google maps to be “traditional” and considered the Waze UI to be superior. I guess it was written by gen-z.
At the time I was shocked - since when did the google UI become the traditional? They really had no clue how long it took us to get things look right.
by MattPalmer1086 on 3/15/22, 3:56 PM
Is it just me, or does anyone else find this whole lumping people into arbitrary generations with silly labels completely stupid?
I don't see myself as broadly similar to other people who happen to be roughly the same age as me. Then again, I'm GenX, so I guess I'm just cynical ;)
by bitwize on 3/15/22, 4:47 PM
I've never actually heard the word "cheugy" used except by howdy-fellow-young-people journalists who think they found out how kids talk these days. I think it may be a trollword specifically intended to bait such journalists, similar to Megan Jasper's fake "grunge slang" the New York Times got suckered into publishing in the early 90s.
That app design looks like GeoCities barfed into a Unicorn Frappuccino. I don't see anyone (except maybe little kids) enduring it for long as a practical UI. As a bit of fun, like GeoCities pages were, sure, why not, but cloying UI becomes psychically fatiguing over time -- a lesson that could/should have been learned from the UI mistakes of previous generations, but alas.
by didip on 3/15/22, 3:16 PM
The prime example of this is Snapchat. I don't know why it has so many buttons and why there are so many secret menus (behind the swipe left and right) or why the buttons are placed there.
Compared that to Instagram where the buttons are obvious.
by xhrpost on 3/15/22, 6:27 PM
At first glance, "maximal" is not the conclusion I would have come to. The author using this term implies the opposite of minimal. While yes, there is more graphic "noise" I suppose, the UI itself still looks minimal to me. I can tell very easily what this page does and how to submit a new party. Minimalist design preferences were always about this. Don't make the user think in order to accomplish their mission. And this doesn't make me think. It's the antithesis of "put a thousand options in one window and then expect the user to watch a vhs training video before using it".
by mwcampbell on 3/15/22, 4:43 PM
I wish there was a platform where I could express the UI purely in terms of content, structure, and behavior, and let the design be supplied by the platform, with the ability for the user to override it. Then someone else could deal with fickle fashions while we application developers focus on what matters. I don't even want to have to provide a default design, e.g. a Bootstrap stylesheet. But of course, if I use pure browser defaults, it looks like something from the early 90s. Maybe the HTML5 doctype should have told the browsers to go with fashionable defaults in addition to turning off quirks mode.
by zzzbra on 3/15/22, 3:21 PM
I remember the first time I realized I was no longer interested in “interesting” UI when I tried out Snapchat. Later I read a Gen Z user saying that the obtuseness of the interface was a plus. I wonder how much is a factor if biology and how much is a factor of having a million responsibilities like maintaining a home, working at a non-entry level in your job, etc., and just not having any interest in needlessly expending mental bandwidth on interacting with an app for yet another few precious moments of my increasingly limited time.
by seltzered_ on 3/15/22, 4:35 PM
> but many do not like "millennial minimalism."
Reminds me a post calling prior, post GAR generation trends as the 'gigabore': https://web.archive.org/web/20170731050026/https://medium.co...
by TrevorJ on 3/15/22, 3:42 PM
An increasing problem I see with designers is that they no longer use tools that are truly capable of pushing pixels. Sure, Figma et. al. can crank out nice looking flat designs, but that's about it.
We are essentially experiencing 'vendor lock in' in the digital design space, where the tools being used are no longer easily capable of exploring different styles of design beyond the current trend.
by flohofwoe on 3/15/22, 2:37 PM
I hope that in a few more years we've gone full circle and let users install their own quirky UI themes again just like in the late 90's.
by bilekas on 3/15/22, 2:48 PM
This hits the nail on the head and I never even realized it. I am a religious minimalist when it comes to design, I have no idea why but progress from the 90's sites just seemed to keep removing things so it felt like a natural progression.
I can see why the change from minimal to 'busy' would be the inverse when starting from a minimalist POV like the younger generations. Great article.
by michaelcampbell on 3/15/22, 5:49 PM
What amuses me reading the comments here is thinking that among characteristics of how people behave, the "gen-<foo>" one may have one of the highest standard deviations among them. The bell curve of what a GenX likes is nearly flat, vs a GenY which is equally flat, but it's non-flatness just a little bit to the left (or right). Repeat for all Gen's.
by tomc1985 on 3/15/22, 3:36 PM
Stop caring about what the kids think! "The kids" have always been (even my generation), and will always be, STUPID
by WesleyHale on 3/15/22, 3:23 PM
I see how you can reach a generational correlation, but I believe it's a age issue that isn't unique to any generation.
The younger people want the pop and sparkles. The older people want what they're using to simply work because they value their time. The pop and sparkles are a distraction that doesn't add to the functionality.
by plaidfuji on 3/15/22, 5:19 PM
With product design becoming more data-driven, feedback-loop A/B testing etc, won’t the natural evolution of the field be toward UI/UX that’s tailored to each user client-side given their known profile of design and interaction preferences, learned by AI?
In other words, in the long run will this even be a problem anymore?
by jimbobimbo on 3/15/22, 4:46 PM
Can we also have a "Gen-X" mode, when I can use dark theme for UI and light theme for content?
This boggles my mind that I can't have it in any OS or browser. The fact that I want muted-looking UX doesn't mean that I want the same for content. I can't read white-on-black text for longer than a minute.
by ahoka on 3/15/22, 2:40 PM
It actually looks a lot more engaging. I didn't even realize it's a dating app from the screenshot.
by swiftcoder on 3/15/22, 4:56 PM
You know, the internet I remember looked a lot more like that "fun" app, once upon a time... Bright colours, flashing marquees, comic sans everywhere.
I don't think GenZ is the problem here. The bland corporate aesthetic that has taken over tech spaces is... bland and corporate.
by 1shooner on 3/15/22, 5:37 PM
The example of 'Gen-Z mode' is a product that acts as a party invitation. Wouldn't it be more fair to compare it to something like evite.com, which has similar attention-grabbing animations, but probably cater to previous generations?
by bovermyer on 3/15/22, 6:10 PM
I don't think it's a generation thing. Culture maybe, but not generation.
Also, it's possible to have a colorful and energetic design while still being usable and intuitive. An app doesn't have to be minimalist to be functional.
by 2143 on 3/15/22, 5:03 PM
I think this might actually have nothing to do with Millennial or GenZ or whatever.
I mean, the author has just a single data point.
The author's friend might just happened to have liked that particular design, and it might not be true for other Gen Z people.
by fleddr on 3/15/22, 3:20 PM
"How do I turn on my camera?" is an all too common email we receive."
This may be more a case of boomer mode, but I opt for everybody in software development to be put on customer/user email support for a while. It's very educational, humbling, and maddening.
You could have a giant flashing camera button permanently in the UI and you'd still get this question. People still can't find it or they can and then double-click it, shutting it down again. The amount of ways in which people can misunderstand even the simplest of interactions is a sight to behold.
This still pales compared to what for some websites/apps is 75% of their support requests: logging in. You think you've drawn out every process, sub process and exception, but people will find many new ways to screw this up.
One of the core UX lessons is that people don't read anything, so any instruction is in vain. They operate on vague patterns from other experiences, muscle memory and basically just click based on intuition, and if that wasn't what they wanted, they go back and try something else.
by thih9 on 3/15/22, 3:10 PM
Random offtopic feedback, please add speed friending mode; I'm not interested in dating but would love to meet new people and chat via video. I really like the app idea and the landing page too, nicely done!
by topaz0 on 3/15/22, 4:44 PM
I know the article doesn't really talk much about dark mode in the end, but the title in context does sort of imply that Dark mode is Millennial mode. I whole-heartedly agree. I never got the hype.
by speedcoder on 3/16/22, 6:46 PM
Don't pigeonhole users to a specific theme based on age. Sure, use age to set an intelligent default theme, and provide a way for individual users to overide that and choose the theme they want.
by vincentmarle on 3/15/22, 4:58 PM
Party Round is another recent Gen-Z design: https://partyround.com
Although their particular design aesthetic is also very common in the NFT space.
by v-yadli on 3/15/22, 4:57 PM
Looking at that partyful website vs. the author's app, an immediate analogy struck me as Discord vs. Microsoft Teams. (doge
So what is it? Colors? Animations? Gamification? Memes? "Crossing the line"?
by lbrito on 3/15/22, 5:47 PM
The Partiful screenshot in the article reminds me of mid-2000s TV-focused media player UIs (Windows Media Center, XBMC/Kodi etc). Must be really awkard to use in a web/mobile context.
by seanabrahams on 3/15/22, 2:56 PM
Neocities, Gen-Z sites that look like the early web: https://neocities.org/browse
by Melatonic on 3/15/22, 4:45 PM
I am definitely not Gen-Z but neither look especially exciting to me. Both are sorta boring in their own way. Nothing like the insane stuff we used to see on Geocities!
by nathias on 3/15/22, 8:48 PM
Designer is shocked to find out that the corpo-minimalist-copy-paste design isn't universally beloved. So it must be about age or gender or race or something ...
by tomatohs on 3/15/22, 4:39 PM
The Partiful tagline on Twitter is “Facebook events for hot people,” which shows that they’re fully aware they’re they anti-facebook. It’s the entire schtick.
by helen___keller on 3/15/22, 3:49 PM
Never heard of partiful, enjoyed looking at the design of their website. What really stuck out to me is that for the most part the design isn’t actually that noisy (some colors and informality fits well given the product), but as you scroll down there’s always one element on the screen that’s “abnormal”: a marquee ish thing, some word art looking title, etc.
I think, as a millennial, when I was growing up these elements were often design smells: only a boomer will use word art unironically, etc. our clean minimalism became the suffocating corporate vibe of the 2010s (via tech giant software).
Now, word art in the right context can be playful and imaginative without the boomer vibe. Hip startups are disrupting the suffocating millennial minimalism. Brilliant.
by AJRF on 3/15/22, 2:32 PM
I find this weird but i've always sort of resented generations (Boomer, GenX, etc) that aren't mine (Millenial) but Gen Z is the first one i've really liked. I find the general Gen Z humour to be very funny. I love their mercurial embrace of trends and tearing down of sacred cows. The way they approach work/life balance, call out stupid cultural norms. Their attitude and acceptance of people not like themselves.
By the way I know this resentment is stupid and unfounded in any reality - its just a feeling I have.
I know this is all generalisation and not everyone born between two arbitrary years are like this - but the general vibe I get from their generation is that the kids are going to be alright.
by CyanDeparture on 3/16/22, 9:09 AM
Well I have to say, the Gen-Z design at the end is full of life and I love it, it embodies fun which is exactly what I want to have on a date.
by TeeWEE on 3/15/22, 2:33 PM
I think its better to test with a bigger sample set.
by Neil44 on 3/15/22, 3:34 PM
Over the years I always thought that general UI and web design trends tend to follow whatever the latest version of MS Windows does.
by shp0ngle on 3/15/22, 5:12 PM
I mean, this is not new?
Has the OP ever been to MySpace? Before Facebook came in and swooped all, MySpace pages all looked like that.
Is blingee GenZ?
by gnarbarian on 3/15/22, 3:26 PM
I've never seen partiful.com before. I love it! This design is fun and custom. It's perfect for a party planner app.
by k12sosse on 3/15/22, 4:46 PM
Surprised this "content" didn't upset more of the "my internet shouldn't have ads on it" people.
by spanktheuser on 3/15/22, 5:00 PM
The mistake the author makes is to define the visual design around a generation. Which is like defining an visual design around gender. Both can be salient but it’s rare for either to be the dominant characteristic that centers a design.
Task is generally the correct choice. Consider two apps: One is playful, coy, energetic, private and safe. The other is efficient, prudent, clear and secure.
It’s likely you can confidently determine which is a dating app and which a banking app. If I told you one is a dating app for boomers and the other a dating app for millennials you’ll have a much harder time.
by rthomas6 on 3/15/22, 5:00 PM
Millennial here. I like whichever one loads the fastest.
Disclaimer: According to my wife I am not to be trusted with decor choices.
by toastal on 3/15/22, 4:47 PM
At least the title is showing developers that themes aren't a `isDark` binary that I keep seeing in the wild.
by jmspring on 3/15/22, 4:47 PM
The proposal reminds me of a modern version of all the bad flashy <marquee> and related flags from the 90s.
by herval on 3/15/22, 6:04 PM
I'm a Millenial but I really prefer the GenZ mode, out of these 3. Boring UX is BORING.
by rejectfinite on 3/18/22, 10:05 PM
Its just 80s and 90s UI again... they are not unique but theyy think they are kill
by hjkl0 on 3/16/22, 6:58 AM
Your design is fine. It’s your research methodology that’s holding you back.
by Double_a_92 on 3/15/22, 3:09 PM
To be fair the original design didn't look bad, but it lacked color!
by boringg on 3/15/22, 3:35 PM
What does a Gen-Z kitchen look like if that was a millennial kitchen?
by weinzierl on 3/15/22, 3:49 PM
I do not care much about "basic" and "minimalism" vs more baroque approaches. Each has its place. Kawaii, Glassmorphism, Uniyo-e, you name it, they can all work in the right context.
What I desperately need though, is Boomer-Mode. It can be Boomer Light or Boomer Dark but when it is active both are 100% consistent. When I'm in Dark Mode I want everything to be light on dark, no exceptions.
Nothing drives my aesthetic sensibilities - as well as my aging eyes - more crazy than sudden contrast changes.
by jayd16 on 3/15/22, 5:27 PM
Gen-z? Looks like a 90s zine.
by fundad on 3/15/22, 2:37 PM
It’s like the themes in iDVD
by blunte on 3/15/22, 4:33 PM
MySpace. Not dull at all.
by animalgonzales on 3/15/22, 6:36 PM
lol the partiful.com background image file is 4mb.
by TheRealNGenius on 3/16/22, 4:35 AM
it does look pretty sterile and boring