Every type of design has its up- and downsides. You propose to do away with flat design, what's the alternative? You're just reinitiating the cycle.
Where are we going, if anywhere?
Where are we going, if anywhere?
> cough
I'm waiting for the study on how many types of animation can cause nausea in some people.
https://www.webaccessibility.com/best_practices.php?technolo...
There's some noise about creating the next interface for flat screens and VR/AR (Microsoft again) which as long as VR isn't mainstream, I think it'll be more of a play (and fad.)
I also think that the ideal UI doc (may not be the next trend) combine skeuomorphism and flat while leaving plenty of space for designers to express their own ingenuity through content. At this moment, you can feel UI dictating how the content should be created and organised; all those one-scroll container webpages and humble-braggy profiles bore me to death.
But the best UI takes a back seat while content is the main performer, OR, at the very least there is a variable organic component - Google's doodly homepage fits the latter actually. This sounds so stupidly obvious to point out, but I feel that too much effort is being spent on innovating UI than the content itself. Content is far more exciting and challenging! Storytelling is often done in one medium, but what if you use several, one for each small part of the experience? What if you focus on creating multiple micro experiences? (Not necessarily animated micro-interactions.) That for me is the real task of UX designers - not just organise flow but how best to present content as a memorable story.
Most designers are actually pretty lazy (or just prone
to following trends, like other professions?)
Or, you know, just went back to where we were, which was better.
Flat design was just a trend, partly as an overreaction to skeuomorphism. It was a case of 'looks' design overtaking 'usable' design, for no very clear reason; at least, no reason I can see.
Buttons were 'best' when they were 3d and button-shaped. That still leaves a huge amount of customisation for designers to work with, but those two very simple factors should be maintained when producing buttons, IMO. There was a very common understanding that buttons looked that way.
(thinking about it more, the most important thing - and the thing that's backed up by solid science - is to use text rather than icons for button labels. I really hope that stays, even if we go back to 3D and rounding)
That's probably a bad design on the part of the microwave maker. We still use tons of 3d buttons everywhere, and everybody is familiar with them.
>On a computer the most common button-like thing is a web link and those don't (generally) use the 3D-effect.
Links are links, not buttons.
I suspect that most people would have trouble coming up with a definition for a UI button that couldn't just as easily describe web links.
Buttons perform actions (that might also present a new panel).
The problem is bad UIs muddling the waters between the two (having a plain text "label" looking like a link that does "Delete everything in my account" for example).
Those are good examples, and got me thinking about the first hypertext system I used when growing up: AmigaGuide. That did use "3D buttons" for links: http://reality.cm/aguide.htm
The idea is interesting but it's disconnected from reality.
Change in the physical world is very slow, bet young people will still know what a watch or any everyday life item is in ten years (way more than the average software life). I understand that some people would find an UI for a music player with some photorealistic speaker or a fully wooden bookshelf library ugly but don't tell me people (old and young) don't know what it is. Or more far fetched I could still understand medieval fort icon on a firewall. I admit some are already forgotten like the floppy disk but they are an exception.
And that was what the majority of the world was familiar with since the mass explosion of desktop UI users with Windows 3.1. (And even the old mid-80s Mac OS had 3D-ish buttons and such).