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Your weekly reminder that flat ui (and its derivatives, like material UI) are big steps backwards in usability:

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flat-design/

Granting the validity of many aesthetic criticisms of over the top skeuomorphism, it will be a good day for users when the fashion-chasing flat ui era is over.

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Material is slowly moving more in the "flat 2.0" direction that the article points out as fixing flat UI's usability problems. It's not fully there yet, but you can see aspects of it in say Google's floating add buttons in Calendar, Inbox, YouTube's search box, etc.

It is worth meditating on the fact that such a terrible idea was and is able to dominate the visual design community for so long without any significant push back. It has caused real pain for end users, and people who objected were shouted down or ignored.

All the more outrageous in an industry that likes to wear the mantle of empiricism.

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