That’s because designers stopped caring about following each platform’s guidelines because they want to spread “brand recognition” or some shit like that.
This is kind of a revisionist view of software. I think most of the consistency we remember from software past is because skipping the OS tollboxes and doing your own custom UI was hard rather than because most software developers cared about consistency. Yes the OS vendors did, but one doesn't need to go far to find applications that very much did their own thing. "Bubbly" and "goopy" UIs of the sort "Kai's Power Tools" exemplified were all over in the 90's. Everyone's favorite Winamp was famously not using the standard UI toolkits and had a heavily customizable UI. To say nothing of the many software packages that used the standard toolkits only far enough to give you a window that was then filled with some sort of Macromedia or similar UI that was then completely proprietary to the application itself (think encyclopedia and other educational software of the day). Even the OS vendors couldn't help themselves sometimes (looking at you QuickTime 7)
If older software was more consistent, it's only because the OS didn't provide nearly the same degree of customization options that HTML and CSS provide developers today. Not because of some pride in consistency.
This exudes everywhere. I've had cases of where some weirdo company changes their packaging on, say, soap... and now I literally can't find what I used to use. The logic is that some other company is cloning their look, so they want to "stand out" again, and thus change theirs.
Sometimes, I'll manage to find the brand with the new colours and logo. But often even then, I can't find the specific product from that brand. They've changed it so much I can't tell which version I picked before. Which makes me look for something more like what I used to have.
Good job "standing out" guys. I'd say literally maybe 1/3 of the time, I've just literally lost products. I don't know the name, just how it looks.
Distinctive hammers and other tools get brand recognition and free marketing out in the field, ostensibly increasing sales - that's why all the tool companies have their distinct colors and you can see the type of tool someone uses from a distance. Matching chargers/batteries incompatible with other brands perpetuate this even further.
Someone IS designing all this, they just aren't optimizing for what you wish they were.
Design is too broad a word for what is being discussed here and often in the world at large.
Still, to me, good design is intuitive. I look at the thing, and I know how to use it. If it looks great and distinctive, even better. But most outlandishly distinctive design I've (consciously?) found is terrible.
Obviously, these short sentences hide a lot:
- To know how to use things, I must have prior experience. But different users have different prior experiences and acquired design patterns (i.e. interaction patterns)
- My knowledge of the domain is also different from that of other users.
- The way I interact with the system is affected by many factors (e.g. accessibility related concerns, zoom, etc.)
- Intuition is not magic. It comes after training as well. Good design is discoverable. Extraordinary design reinforces its own patterns seamlessly, so that I learn it without even knowing I'm learning (see: hidden tutorials in game design). I also include here the incredible attributes of good design that far predate computer-related design (e.g. how an icon should be recognizable just by its silhouette, or how apps "invisibly" teach us what each color or even section of the screen means).
- My incentive to learn (sometimes "tolerate") the design depends on many variables. Some of these include the design's "taste", yes. Others depend on how much my boss/client is paying me to "use this shit".
I wouldn't say I want a world where everything looks the same, but I certainly want one where everything works the same, and some geniuses once in a while add something new to my list of known (and loved) design patterns. I am not anti-design-experiments, but I will take a predictable UI that looks like windows 98 everyday over some "distinctive" shit that breaks all manner of expected behaviors (from keyboard shortcuts, to colors, to button placement, to relative sizing, to........)
I would take every news site delivering straight text, and letting me pick the page layout template to apply to all of them. Some kind of markup language that could be transmitted and then respect the users preferences as far as rendering.
I think its good that HN and reddit are basically the same, or that all old forums were basically the same but with different color schemes. Homogeneity is a blessing for UX.
Honestly, HN and Reddit are almost as different as threaded discussion forums are possible to be, especially New Reddit with it's "click hundreds of times to unhide most of the text on this page" approach to threading. Reddit's overall design aesthetic is all about pictures and headings and sidebars, and even minor details like the up/down arrows look different and are placed in a different relative position. The only design element they've got in common is Verdana, and that simply because when the websites were launched you only had two widely-installed sans-serif fonts to choose from...
We used to have everything having personality but being consistent as far as UX goes.
Now everything looks like tax forms and the UX is all over the place.