I'm not sure* that the "just put everything the footer and link to the footer" is a solution I'd present seriously to the business stakeholders.
The thing I really want to kill with fire is the "junk drawer" method of UI design. This has infested almost all apps, with a three-dot (••• or vertical ⋮ ) scattered literally everywhere in every UI. It says "We couldn't be bothered to build a thoughtful UI, or even to classify the types of actions you might want to perform into a few categories. Even with a full-screen window on a 5K monitor, we'd rather have a sea of whitespace everywhere than to just put the actions where they are visible, discoverable, and can develop muscle memory.
I used to think about 15 years ago that a big problem was that developers and designers all used expensive high-res, large monitors and forgot that most users were on 1280x800 or (eek) 1280x720 laptop screens. Today it's the opposite direction with everything being optimized for tiny screens and minimal information visibility.
I know "mobile-first" is important but (A) phone users want things to be visible just as much as desktop users do, and (B) the right design for a phone is almost never the right choice on a massive screen.
*for an "application" - sure, it works great for a 8-page blog like the article. By all means. I just don't think it'll work for Expedia, Facebook, etc.
The thing I really want to kill with fire is the "junk drawer" method of UI design. This has infested almost all apps, with a three-dot (••• or vertical ⋮ ) scattered literally everywhere in every UI. It says "We couldn't be bothered to build a thoughtful UI, or even to classify the types of actions you might want to perform into a few categories. Even with a full-screen window on a 5K monitor, we'd rather have a sea of whitespace everywhere than to just put the actions where they are visible, discoverable, and can develop muscle memory.
I used to think about 15 years ago that a big problem was that developers and designers all used expensive high-res, large monitors and forgot that most users were on 1280x800 or (eek) 1280x720 laptop screens. Today it's the opposite direction with everything being optimized for tiny screens and minimal information visibility.
I know "mobile-first" is important but (A) phone users want things to be visible just as much as desktop users do, and (B) the right design for a phone is almost never the right choice on a massive screen.
*for an "application" - sure, it works great for a 8-page blog like the article. By all means. I just don't think it'll work for Expedia, Facebook, etc.