User Interfaces and "Blandification" | Product Design, Responsive Web Design, UX Design, Belfast Northern Ireland | Jordan Moore

User Interfaces and "Blandification"

May 21st, 2026

Here’s a thought exercise: if you grew up in the 80s, 90s, or early 00s, put yourself back in the mind of the younger version of yourself and ask “what would the world look like 20/30/40 years from now in 2026?” I’d bet that any impressions you had of 2026 from growing up as a kid in those time periods were vastly different to the extremely ordinary reality around us.

Music is a great example of how creativity has entered a bizarre phase of blandification. If you’re asked to imagine what music from the ’90s sounds like, you’ll likely jump between genres like grunge, Britpop, electronica, jungle, drum and bass etc. The ’80s sound is defined by synths, ’70s - hard rock, folk, disco, and the ’60s has its own concrete, definitive idea of what it was. Mark Fisher captures this perfectly in his writings on the Slow Cancellation of the Future:

Imagine any record released in the past couple of years being beamed back in time to, say, 1995 and played on the radio. It’s hard to think that it will produce any jolt in the listeners. On the contrary, what would be likely to shock our 1995 audience would be the very recognisability of the sounds: would music really have changed so little in the next 17 years? Contrast this with the rapid turnover of styles between the 1960s and the 90s: play a jungle record from 1993 to someone in 1989 and it would have sounded like something so new that it would have challenged them to rethink what music was, or could be.

Mark Fisher was writing about a 17 year window at the time. That window is now over 30 years old and counting. The (present) future feels very stuck. Why does 2026 look a lot like 2016, which looks a lot like 2006? At some point after the turn of the century it's like we forgot what the future looks like.

From an aesthetic point of view, past visions of the future from the simple, everyday whimsical tech of The Jetsons from the 1960s through to the elaborate, maximalist visions of the future from games like WipeOut in the 1990s. The visual journey of the future always carried a sense of awe (just like a jungle record put in front of a 1980s audience) and decade upon decade, it elevated a sense of visual excitement along with it.

But here we are now, in a year that sounded like the far future to us children of those decades, and the world around us doesn’t look overly different. The slowing of technological progress is well documented by a lot of people a heck of a lot smarter than me, so I’ll focus on a much more manageable window where I feel this stagnation (and regression) manifests itself: user interface design.

Take a look at the original Xbox menu (2001). It’s wonderfully alien - which is a quality that used to be present throughout visions of the future - the fact that it is alien to everything we are familiar with now, but it then becomes normal and pushes things forward.

Compare that with the blandified menu as of 2026 and all of a sudden that sense of awe is gone. Sure, it’ll have been A/B tested for efficiency within an inch of its life, and it will pass any number of usability tests, but for all those measurable upsides, it leaves a felt sense of emptiness in contrast to the ambition of the original interface.

This is almost universally true across any digital interface you could come into contact with whether it be on the web, in gaming, a mobile OS, a desktop OS, the display in your car, on your fridge - they all speak the same visual language and that is: in place of alien, you have this safe, soft-edged, muted, predictable, bland interface which, as a side note, is almost hilariously easy for AI to replicate precisely because of all of the aforementioned descriptions.

Modern interfaces have a tendency to baby their users. I feel that they underestimate their user’s capability of being able to handle more information, or even their capability of handling anything radical or surprising. Compare that to how k10k presented itself to its users in 2003:

In another bizarre reverse trend, the only reason sites like k10k didn’t increase the information density and design detail further was because screen resolutions were limited at the time. So weirdly, smaller screen resolutions had more ambitious designs than today’s extremely high resolution screens that house basic, bland designs.

I’m aware that everything I’ve said so far can be easily placed into the “old man yells at cloud” bucket, but I genuinely believe it’s more than a nostalgic “I like things the way they used to be” thing. In fact, I worry that too many good, solid arguments get shot down with “that’s just nostalgia” - which is such an empty statement unless you can back it up with actual counterarguments. As I mentioned earlier, this stagnation is undeniably societal, and I believe it’s a spell that can be...