Bringing Back Skeuomorphic Design
blog.prototypr.io
blog.prototypr.io
Apple had a good balance between skeuomorphism and minimalism a few years ago, but as Jony Ive & Co. strip out decoration for flatness, iOS 11 almost looks unfinished. Case in point: the PIN screen and the calculator app.
Lock screen: https://file.mockplus.com/image/2017/10/5627bfee-8dbf-44b4-9...
Calculator: http://cdn.iphonehacks.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/iOS-10...
I live in an old Victorian house, and there's something very "human" and comforting about the tiny details that designers embark on a crusade to erase every other decade. Sometimes I wonder if flat UI and "brutalist design" [0] came about simply because folks got lazy and need to show something quickly Monday morning.
I was a reluctant convert to the cult of flatness - the OS changed beneath me (if OSX still allowed theming I would have instantly regressed). Then they took it so far that you no longer have enough visual cues.
I'd love to see something nearer iOS 7, or Mountain Lion. We don't need to return to pads with margins and torn paper though.
https://www.designweek.co.uk/issues/26-february-4-march-2018...
Where’s the minimalism in the amount of touch input needed? Replying to emails in Mail is a chore of taps.
Minimalism these days imitates half-finished.
Also, it’s only two taps to reply to an email in the Mail app. What a chore!
Mail is similar, there are more taps than there used to be in favour of minimalism. So yes it is a chore when it used to be effortless and now it’s two swipes across useless empty screen filling space in different directions that iOS sometimes misinterpretes.
[0] http://www.idownloadblog.com/2016/06/17/ios-10-tidbit-spotli...
The article also mentions the other area where skeumorphic design is missed, and that's in the playful details. Flawed as the app was in many ways, and as much as many people hated it, I loved the reel-to-reel tape animation in the iOS Podcasts app ( https://www.geeksofdoom.com/GoD/img/2012/12/2012-12-17-iOS_P... )
If I see an image from iOS 6 to 7 period I'm struck by how much better most 6 icons are than what's come since. Depth is actually really useful. I don't miss gimmicks like the wood effects, or star burst backgrounds on some icons etc. Android was much less coherent back in Android 4, so the whole sense of consistency came along with the flattening through Jelly Bean and Kitkat until you arrive at the children's Pogs interface of Nougat. Jelly Bean or Kitkat were the high point. We can thank Material Design for the coherency and some good, and needed, guidelines for colour.
Your image gives Forbidden btw.
But just out of interest, I think you'd really like the skeumorphic design of the Waves J37 tape machine and Abbey Road Vinyl plugins.
For me, having the subtle details like having a thin gradient border for the PIN input gives those "buttons" a more refined look compared to just flat discs.
There's no such thing as skeuomorphism for a chat app or a social media site - there's no analog comparison to take design cues from, they're inherently a digital thing. So what you end up doing is wrapping digital things in leather and wood texture as if it was some kind of physical device. It's tacky and cheap, and frankly, I think only a small subset of users get a kick out of it.
I don't like these designs at all. Sure, they are well put together. But the screen feels crowded and the buttons look hard to hit. It just looks incredibly delicate, if i flipped on large text mode, the whole design would break.
On the other hand... Skeuomorphism is fantastic for video games, where utility is not the primary motivator of design. If I'm playing a WW2 game of some kind, yeah, I'm cool with menus looking like war-torn clipboards and whatnot.
I'd rather not want my phone apps try to be immersive rather than get the job done.
The article give iOS 7 the credit for ushering in the 'flat' design trends ... But I remember the Windows Phone 7-8 'Metro' (later renamed to Modern) design language as the key influence. It blew away people with the attention to typography and proportional grid-based layouts.
I actually mostly like that trend and only think it goes overboard when you don't know what you can or cannot interact with anymore.
There are situations where this makes perfect sense, but it was hardly a sensible approach to UI design on the whole. Metro was widely criticized for making it more difficult for users to be productive, which I would argue is the primary concern of any desktop operating system. And indeed, Microsoft quickly moved beyond Metro in favor of Fluent, a design language that is much more in keeping with Apple’s current design language than it is with Metro.
Metro, despite being relatively popular with UI designers and developers, totally flopped with users, who did not find joy in using it at all. With Metro, Microsoft attempted to cut out UI chrome in favor of content. The idea being that removing chrome would make room for content. Instead, they ended up treating content as chrome, leaving substantially less room for actual content. Microsoft failed to meet their own design goals for Metro. And what’s worst, they seemingly failed to recognize that they had failed for quite some time.
Apple’s human interface design guidelines for iOS, while far from perfect, are a much truer realization of the design principles that Microsoft set out to implement with Metro. Rather than treating content as chrome, chrome is reduced to its most basic elements, retaining its ability to inform the user as to its function, while minimally detracting from content.
I'm glad to see the flat-ui/material-design over-application of minimalism is coming to an end and designers are getting back to more complex visual treatments. My hope is that, rather than casting back and forth between the various schools of thought, designers start thinking in context-sensitive terms: not "Should I use flat design or skeumorphic design for this app?" but rather "Where in this UI are flat design AND skeumorphic designs best utilized?"
There should be a "Shadow + Fill if it's tappable/clickable. F please!" rule though in every design school. Every time I see it not followed I get a fit of rage, that unfortunately I need to swallow and not fire the designer because I know he's otherwise good at UX too.
It's should something like a "don't f drive when you're drunk rule" rule... common sense to every-f-body!
There, I said it.
I figured everything would go flat and then designers would bring back skeuomorphic designs and they would pop extra hard in contrast.
Now I bet we'll go really loud and retro ("Stranger Things") for a while until we get worn out and need to take a break and go flat again for a while.
It seems like UI designers are just as fashion concious as clothes fashion designers, and also have less concern for the comfort/usability of their product.
[1]
And yeah, I hate the look of Windows XP through 7 with the fire of a thousand suns. Just look at the Windows 7 start button. Or the scarlet and light blue window buttons on Vista. There I wonder what they did to their designers to make them produce such garbage.
"The reaction, as all reactionary trends, was to throw out everything that came before and fully embrace this new direction of minimalist ui, white space layouts and magazine typesetting. Some argue that it was a timely change to meet the demands of the increasing complexities of the interface. That we had grown out of the need to include real world cues in our digital analogies. Evolved the interface."
No, a bunch of kingmakers got on stage and we foolishly listened to them.
This is a remarkably limited perspective on a set of devices that people spend almost every waking hour using.
This cracked me up... You do realize that even things like programming language selection are 90% fashion-driven, right?
For some, sure.
Given the anti-creative monotony that "fashion" produces in tech, I'd take the DIY geocities aesthetic and skeumorphism any day of the week
UI designers in general would be fashion designers if they could; they mostly went to the same school, had the same interests, are influenced by the same ideas etc.
The main difference is that one group needed real jobs and the other found a way to get by without them.
What I am worried though is that "flat" already caused too much damage and we will never see a beautiful complex yet holistic UI again. Something like what happened to IndyCars; they had arguably the most beautiful cars on the planet in 00s, then switched to unbelievably ugly decade and half, and this year will have something that while prettier than what they had before, still can't match their golden age in looks when many people were watching them because they just looked so cool.
You do not have to model real items to have them look good and be recognisable and the functionality being relatively obvious.
I'll be the first to admit that "you don't want me doing your UX design"[0], but I found the whole violent shift from skeuomorphic to flat to be too much. Almost over night we went from nearly cartoonish to IRS forms "with color". As a non-designer, I was happy -- finally, I could hit up a web site for a reasonable color palette, grab a popular font from Google and have a design that almost passed as typical. As a user, I found the look ... boring and uninspired.
Here's the thing, though, skeuomorphic design did serve a purpose. It was to equate, for non-tech-savvy folks, concepts from the "real world" to concepts in an app. A few simple design elements can differentiate my calendar from my task list from my playlist and can be highly effective in circumstances where providing a UI more than a very brief glance can be dangerous[1]. And outside of those scenarios, it's nice reducing the cognitive load required to recognize the context of what I'm doing. Unfortunately, it was taken way too far. But it went too far the other way, too. There's a happy medium here, and I rather like the UI presented here as that happy place.
[0] I'm not completely miserable at it, but I'm a developer. I want a knob/switch/setting for everything and the ability to customize everything (I joke that I never quit Firefox because I love "about:config"). My mom doesn't. For most of my projects, which are either personal or targeted at engineers, a lot of time isn't spent thinking about design.
[1] For instance, waking my phone while driving to change the song -- It's nice to see something that indicates "that's a playlist" which is obvious and instant.
(Using PowerAmp, not affiliated.)
I love how Google is updating material design to have more aggressive shadows and bring in elements that make the UI feel more like the real world, while also pushing the boundaries of app design with newer interaction models that most haven't seen, but immediately feel used to.
Mobile app design is such a new field, let's not jump back into our time machine because we feel nostalgic for Steve Job's Apple. Let's keep pushing the field forward.
I could live in a sterile utilitarian whiteness, where the only things that exist have a purpose. Some people do. I prefer plants, and colours, and textures, and art on the wall.
I like knobs on my virtual synthesiser. I like pages in my e-book. If I had an app where I could clip together a series of documents, I'd rather it displayed this with a binder clip than a message or an abstract icon.
Extreme minimalism is, and has always been, soulless imho. Even the Farnsworth House used woodgrain and leather, curtains act as fabric wallhangings, textured concrete is prominently featured. Falling Water is practically a skeuomorphic paradise.
Nor the pages as I have to tap in addition to scrolling. There is a reason to have scroll bars, but not a good reason to have pages especially when they don't fit the screen size.
There is minimalism and then there is skeuomorphism. And the entirely different thing is functionality. Looks are only tangentially related...
My thought is that, if the goal is more creativity, then we have to move away from trying to homogenize user experiences by funneling them into the same identical visual theme (read: "Material design")
I didn't mean my previous comment to rip on what you were saying; this just comes from someone who is working on a project that has been shorehorned into Material design and I sincerely think the user interface has worsened as a result.
That button? Does not really depress and definitely does not act immediately.
Knob you're turning? It is not analogue nor you can really use a true turning gesture.
And why do you have to use one when you have a touch screen to draw the result on?
Computer desktop is not a desk top, items do not obstruct each other.
A file folder has no pages.
Ebook only has them because someone thought it needs to. I'd welcome infinite scrolling in these.
Non-flat is not the same as skeuomorphic. Hopefully.
Thing with skeumorphic design is that people really don't know where to stop when they start doing it... so it will be a cycles thing: at some point all cargo-cult designers overdo it, everyone gets sick of it, and we're back to Metro. To be hones though, I like the "improved flat" phase of Material Design and I hope we stay on it as much as possible, so we can focus on things like UX more instead. Back in the days of full-skeumorphic fever, "good UX" was seen as worthless ammateurish crap unless dressed in tons of graphic desinger makeup...
Flat design the latest example of a utopianistic drive that started in the 20th century by some intellectuals to make a world that fits robots, not human beings. Other examples are modern classical music and modern architecture. Modern classical music never caught on because it simply doesn't fit the human auditory system. Ditto modern architecture,though it has persisted partly for business reasons, and has been greatly modified to make it more humane.
> make UI fun again
Hell no. I'm not using an app to have fun with the UI, I'm using an app to complete some sort of task [1]. Sure, the UI designer wants to have some fun (same for the developer), but in the end, the user's experience matters the most.
When designers embrace this back-to-skeuomorphism trend, I'd like to remind them of Dieter Rams' Good Design Principles:
> 5. Good design is unobstrusive.
> 6. Good design is honest.
> 7. Good design is long-lasting.
> 10. Good design is as little design as possible.
[1] Implying that it's some sort of productivity app, rather than some game or entertainment content.
Notice there are no textures. Maybe textures was the corny side of skeuo and what people didn’t like.
It has a leather case and metal binder rings. It absolutely has textures.
One of the benefits of a platform design language is that users learn the language, they know what the buttons are, how to navigate around without putting too much thought into it. If you deviate from that you really need to be sure the user will benefit from it and it's not just pretty for pretty's sake.
Some people have taken it too far, and refuse to use tables even for representing actual tables of data.
Today, websites are mostly designed in a fixed layout (well, two - desktop and mobile), so the argument against tables makes no sense anymore.
Lets take something that most on here probably remember, the floppy disk. It is still a common sight as a save icon, but my youngest children have never USED a floppy.
I don't mind the concept, as long as the concept isn't sacrificing functionality, and astethics for the sake of nostalgia.
The trouble with flat design is it had design without any aesthetics, so a return to some depth and skeuomorphism isn't likely to lose aesthetics.
And then you also get the folder icons with arrows on Windows, not floppies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishmen...
http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch01s06.html#id2...