On Infantilization in Digital Environments (2015)
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Does this apply to cars as well? Does adding design elements and any sort of color for reasons other than making it more aerodynamic or road safe equate to infantilization? Does using an automatic over a manual? Does using an auto-starting engine over a wind up engine? Does using a car over your own two legs?
I also find the argument that flat design is childish bizarre. I hate flat design, but it's not any more or less childish than what preceded it. Things can actually be more abstract with heavy reliance on text-only elements and icons without immediately apparent meaning, but the author seems to think that's infantilization, and what preceded was also meant for children, and absolutely anything other than what the status quo was in some undefined point in time is too infantilized.
It seems more that the author has a resistance to change, and framed it as everything new being too immature.
1) you are not a child
2) yet, you're suddenly start being addressed as a child
3) you get used to it (even if you protest at first; or maybe the silent majority doesn't mind?)
4) because of 2&3, with time, you became infantile (which, certainly, could be an exaggeration)
5) apparently, this technique works quite well for "customer retention"--you feel "safe", for everything that is presented to you is cosy, cartoonish, kid-oriented staff
It has the opposite effect on me. I feel like I'm being patronised. Maybe it's generational (I'm old).
Infantilisation in design is specifically signified by cute animal mascots, large flat areas of primary and/or pastel colours, plain undemanding letter forms, use or implication of smiles and other emotional signifiers of friendliness or cuteness, use of relatable cartoons as primary graphics, and generally by aggressive simplification and removal of anything that requires some thought or effort to parse.
The Twitter and Amazon logos are infantile. The General Electric and IBM logos aren't. The Facebook "f" is more or less neutral, but the font chosen for the full "facebook" logotype wouldn't be out of place on the cover of an early reading book.
The point of infantilisation is that it signifies an experience of creativity without actually being creative. Instead of priming the imagination it just slides off it. It's all about locking you into a comfort zone instead of inspiring you to explore outside of it.
This seems very culture-specific. Hard, blocky typefaces like in the IBM logo don't scream mature to me--they just are what the main design preference of a bygone era was. The GE logo has squiggles that make it almost cartoonish, but it also clearly looks like something designed a hundred years ago. GE's ads 70 years ago were packed with color and cartoon characters[1], yet today they're held as an example of "mature" while flat design with solid text is immature.
I'm still unconvinced that this is anything more than "Old is good and mature. New design decisions are immature and bad for society." The same arguments were used against people reading books, people watching movies, rock and roll music, and so on. Within those realms, some things are steps back, but it's hard to say that they were regressive for humanity as a whole. Saying choosing a popular font is infantilizing is kind of stretching it. In 40 years, Amazon's current logo will make people think of grandpa's house and the good ol' days. 250 years ago, I'm sure someone was complaining about cursive replacing gothic blackletters being a sign of societal decline.
[1] https://i.pinimg.com/originals/98/05/91/9805918dd46921330298...
For example "bright colors" are infantile. Is a subway map infantile because it uses simplification and bright colors to communicate complex information clearly? Is a red/yellow/green traffic light infantile, while a grown up traffic light would use say beige/gray/eggshell?
The attitude is a throwback to when GUI's where considered for kids while real men used a green-on-black command line. But now skeuomorphic and "drop shadows" are grown up, while "lighter, brighter and simpler" is infantile? Isn't is just that "new" is infantile?
The article builds a whole societal analysis on these unexamined premises.
In any case, using earth-tones or beige or whatever would not convey any more complexity. The author is just associating bright colors with childishness, but does not examine this deeper. Yeah kids like bright colors, so does people making air traffic control systems.
Why should the communication of a corporate brand identity or the consumer interface to its products be using the same tactics as visual display of complex information?
The principles of visual display of complex information also derive from goals about clarity, preventing influence of outliers, neutral colors, etc.
What are those goals for a corporate communication strategy? If you think they are anything other than scary misinformation tactics to maximize profit and brand perception while minimizing the company’s bad externalities, you’re just fooling yourself.
When the principles of visual display of information are repurposed to optimize profit, minimize negative externalities and control a brand image, infantilization is one of the results.
Your earlier comment states that the bright color usage is to present complex information clearly. Ok. So you have introduced the idea that in this situation people are using principles of visual display of information.
Now that we have said that, we must ask why would a company think its branding or consumer interfaces need to use principles that are intended for other goals like sharing scientific results or data.
We know company goals are about maximizing profits and hiding negative externalities, so it’s reasonable to believe a corporation would only adopt principles of quantitative display of information for branding and consumer awareness if it serves these purposes.
These purposes are served by oversimplifying the purpose or ethos of the company, so that the brand identity is not associated with negative externalities the company creates. This is textbook infantilization. Present childlike logos, whimsical interfaces with flat colorful designs, simple clean interfaces.
This hides complexity. In the visual display of quantitative information, that’s good. In the pushing of a brand identity that’s disingenuous and manipulative exactly in the way of inviting the audience to believe a childlike sense of wonder and trustworthiness should be applied.
I think it’s really disingenuous that you would require it to be spelled out like this.
The word "bright" appears exactly 4 times. In each case bright is property of something that has many different properties and in no mentioned case is bright used for visual differentiation in complex or smart interface.
The article associates "flat design" with childlike, but does not provide any reasonable argument for this association. It is simply an emotional reaction to a new design trend.
There are some good points about gamification and cartoon mascots, but its hard to separate from these unbased ideas about style.
The subway map is completely off-topic when it comes to content of article. Literally none of it is about visualizing complex structures.
Frankly, one needs to willfully misrepresent the article if one things that subway map is contraexample to any statement in the article. It is not, it is just shifting the topic so that you can claim article is wrong while arguing about something else.
This just jumbles so many different things together. Animated animals might be associated with children, but colorful design or breaking down complexity has nothing to do with childishness. The subway map is an obvious counterexample.
She (?) appears to consider shadows, 3d and other features of skeuomorphic design to be grown up, while more graphic, iconic flat design is childish.
That is a fairly unique interpretation...
"Already before the change, the graphic designer Peter Saville had described Google’s logo as infantile: ‘Everything about it is childlike: the colors [sic], the typeface, even the name’ (Rawsthorn 2010). The redesign had intensified this. Chris Moran, at that time The Guardian’s search engine editorial optimizer, described the new look and feel as a turn towards ‘My First Search Engine’ (Moran 2010). "
This is hardly a surprising characterization, too. Simple, shadowless shapes that emphasize colours is exactly what children draw.
She cites a single person, Chris Moran, from personal communcation. Chris Moran is not a designer, but an editor.
Peter Saville is quoted in an article from before they removed the drop shadow and deemphasized the shading in the logo. It is the author who suggests that reducing the 3-dimensional style of the logo "intensified" its childlike qualities, and not Peter Saville, who had not seen the redesign when he made his comment.
Edit: FWIW, it's not designs that are just flat that the author considers child-like. It's a design vocabulary that uses flat designs, cartoonish characters (e.g. Octocat), addressing users in a child-like manner that's seen as childish. Flatness is just one element of this vocabulary.
It is also what children like to look at. They dont appreciate elaborate realism or shadows. They prefer simple shape, uniform color and no shade.
Children draw basic forms and use basic colours because they don't yet understand how to interpret the world in a complex way. They abstract, and draw their abstraction - tables are square, therefore the image on the page needs to be square to be a table. Untrained adults do the same.
But mostly, it is not just about primary colors. It is more of preference for bright (primary does not matter) and simple - single color with no shading is better then realistic shading. Two color shading is acceptable, but does not seem to add to experience.
I've noticed though, that some people like this, when they use some serious software, they will complain that the software didn't do X for them, or didn't remind them of Y, and I've often thought "gee? I'd get fairly offended if it did! I'm a grown up, I want to do that myself. Why do you want to be treated like a child?"
The design elements the author observes are only a symptom of the theme of centralization. The unwashed masses will be given information technology, but only as much as they need.
Where there are walls, there are gates and gatekeepers. It isn't enough to have an infantile design. Condescending 'fact checks' from trusted sources and manually ranked search results are there to keep the children from going astray. After all, you can't be trusted to examine and digest information without some parental guidance.
For severe offenders who peddle wrong-think, deplatforming is an option. Of course those who have been banished from the grace of the walled garden can always set up their own website. Users need only enter the URL.
Again, we've seen the minimization of the address bar as unfriendly and overly complex by Chrome. Better to turn everything into a Google search. Google will help you arrive at the safest destination.
I’m the beginning we had text only terminals. Font designs were about it.
Business machines stayed that way for quite a while.
8 bit machines came along and allowed a rudimentary windowing environment. The “desktop” metaphor with its “files” was extremely popular and arguably very successful.
Roll on 16 and 32 bit machines and the windows and Mac “desktop” windowing systems added some colour but no whimsy.
Macs got some smiles. Good god - it’s the end of grown ups.
iPhones (not iPads as the article asserts) introduced a heavily skeumorphic interface for two reasons: it was technologically possible on that platform and it was a design that someone with enough influence had chosen.
No surprises there: a wildly successful product that introduced a new design idea sparked a new fashion in UI design.
But skeumorphism in web design turned out to be less than great for reasons presented in the article.
So we retreat from skeumorphism and end up with: flat and colourful. UX (not just UI) experts discover that fast-loading and simple to comprehend websites convert to more sales and more profit.
Simple and easy is king on the web for obvious reasons.
If simple and easy looks like infantile there’s an excellent reason: it’s because they share many things. But not all.
Online gambling and share trading platforms my look infantile because they want to be appealing but they are fundamentally not infantile.
It’s easy enough to make a point if one only presents facts that support it. So much is skipped in this article that I feel like it might well be possible to cherry-pick enough opposing examples to argue exactly the opposite.
https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/tweets/curate-a-collection/api-reference/get-collections-entries
why did they choose a happy/sad face, instead of, I don't know, regular buttons?
who's the indented audience of that page? kids? I think not. It's probably a 30-something year old grumpy, bearded guy, yet...
* The desktop metaphor with its files was not popular, and not successful on 8-bit machines. It was technically possible to get something with a desktop metaphor running on these machines, with enough clever trickery -- e.g. GEOS ran on the C64 and the Apple II. But it wasn't very useful, because they also lacked the storage to make it useful. Things like GEOS or GS/OS had their users but these things weren't too successful in the realm of 8-bit machines. In fact, many of them didn't even show up on 8-bit machines until way into the "16-bit era", when 8-bit computer users began to covet windows, buttons and icons.
* By the time the iPhone showed up, in 2007, skeumomorphism had been the way to design interfaces for at least 8-10 years. See e.g. Kai's Power Tools, which in the mid-90s looked like this: https://alchetron.com/cdn/kais-power-tools-5461d370-1529-47a... . KPT was, admittedly, an outlier, in that it was more whimsical than average -- but Aqua/OS X interfaces and, later, the iPhone's interface was not fundamentally different from the status quo, they just looked better. In fact, the iPhone came up late enough that, when it did, its interface was seen as a "final word" on the matter because the field was already extremely mature -- the time for experiments was long gone. The iPhone didn't spark a new fashion in UI design, it adopted what was already the fashion in UI design, everywhere.
* Fast-loading and flat are completely orthogonal. Today's websites load way slower than the websites of the Geocities age.
* Early Windows version were very much colourful and whimsical because of the VGA palette. By the time Microsoft could bet on enough users having 256-color screens (in the 3.1 age), two major Windows version had passed. The default background in Windows 2.0 was a retina-piercing cyan.
* Early Macs models were certainly not whimsical in terms of colours, but that had nothing to do with fashion -- it was because they were monochrome.
* Most 8-bit machines certainly used very vivid colours. Most of them could (and most users did) use a TV for a monitor, and the palette choice was deliberately picked with this in mind. The first Amiga Workbench version had an eye-stabbing palette, chosen so that things could be read even on poor quality, black-and-white TVs.
In the early Aqua UI things like buttons and selected menu elements were colored and composited on top of their backgrounds. It was obvious that "Save" was the default action because the button was colored blue in the dialog. Document modal dialogs were attached to and animated out of the document's own window and composited over the contents. Icons bounced in the dock to get attention for dialogs. The dock itself animated to make icons under the cursor larger (Fitt's law improvement) and minimized windows got sucked into the Dock with the genie animation.
While Aqua still used the WIMP paradigm it had a lot of UX differences from older UIs. It used a lot more animation to convey information to the user. Animations told the user their action was registered and was caused something to happen. This was in contrast to Windows where sometimes you might see a hourglass cursor if you clicked something but you usually had to look at your drive activity light to be confident Windows registered you clicking an icon.
With the iPhone, it was up against a bunch of phones whose UIs were designed to be use with a stylus and were doing their damnest to look like a desktop's UI. The iPhone's design language was all about making elements large enough to be used with a fingertip and convey the idea that you were even supposed to touch the screen. When the iPhone was released most people had never owned or used a smartphone or PDA. The most popular phones were non-touch feature phones.
After the iPhone skeuomorphic design was everywhere. Android aped a lot of iPhone UX elements as did webOS, they wanted to convey that elements should be touched and interacted with directly. Android's pre-iPhone UI looked a lot more like Windows Mobile and Blackberry. Apple certainly didn't invent skeuomorphic UIs but the iPhone was the first smartphone to make such it the default design language.
We must have lived in very different 1990s then. Everything was "files" and "folders" with icons that looked like files and folders. One of the big features of Windows 95 was the Microsoft Briefcase, and it sparked a big debate back in the day about whether or not we should stop using these real-life metaphors everywhere, because it was a really confusing program -- sort of, but also not sort of like a briefcase. E-mail/PIM programs had task pads that looked like paper pads and contact lists with initials sticking out of a pack like in a rolodex. Media players looked like real-life players. Word processors were full of elements straight of electric typewriters -- not just the icons on the buttons, but the page layout, the rulers...
A lot of these things didn't look as good as they were going to look on Aqua because they were introduced back when you'd be drawing with GDI on -- if you were lucky -- 133 MHz machines. There was no compositing and few consumer machines could do proper OpenGL anyway.
Aqua used colour and animation more plentifully, but other than the degree to which it used them, few things were new. It made it obvious that "Save" was the default action by colouring the button blue just like Windows made it obvious that "Yes" is the default choice using the dashed lines. (Edit: by the way -- that was definitely not the first time someone used colour like that. Since few other styling options were available, virtually all TUI interfaces for DOS indicated the current choice of button using by colouring it in a particular way). Icons bounced in the dock to get attention for dialogs just like taskbar buttons blinked. Aqua certainly did these things way better, but most of them were familiar to us, they just looked so damn good!
Also, FWIW, making icons under the cursor larger had very little to do with Fitts' law -- since the icons were already under the cursor, there was no benefit to making them bigger. Maybe it helped make the current choice more obvious. I don't recall the "official" reasoning -- what I do recall is that most users turned that thing off because it wasn't just distracting, it was pretty hard to get at the icon you wanted. Making icons bigger shifted nearby icons a bit, and the zooming effect wasn't applied uniformly, which led to having to "chase" the right icon. I think Apple turned it off by default after a few years, too (around OS X Tiger or Leopard, I think?). Many people thought that OS X had done a great job at updating the Nextstep interface except for the damn dock, which it kindda ruined.
> I'm sorry but Kai's Power Tools was not some sort of UI design trendsetter.
I certainly never said that. KPT was a trend follower -- it was just a very representative example of one, just like Aqua and the iPhone.
The whole desktop paradigm was also completely replaced the moment an application was run. No Windows or MacOS UI widget really mimicked some physical item. Few applications tried to look like a physical item of similar functionality. Word processors weren't themed to look like a typewriter, spreadsheets didn't try to look like graph paper, databases didn't act like card catalogs or filing cabinets.
In early iOS the skeuomorphic elements did try to take on a look of the physical things they represented. The calculator looked like an actual physical calculator. The address book looked like a paper address book. The notes app looked like a pad of lined papers and when you deleted a note it left a small ragged edge at the top of the view to look like ripped paper. The voice recorder looked like an old microphone and had an analog looking VU meter.
The classic MacOS and Windows UIs didn't do that sort of stuff. Neither did Windows Mobile or PalmOS. You didn't see that with CDE, GNOME, or KDE. In fact the few skeuomorphic desktop apps I can even think of are your KPT example and some audio software that let you wire together effects units as if they were physical boxes connected with quarter in audio cables.
Really? I very distinctly remember note/task pads that looked like spiral-bound pads of lined papers, CD players that looked like a real CD player, and calculators looking like an actual physical calculator. Many computers didn't have the power to do fully-realistic stuff just yet, but those that did went to great lengths to be as close to the real deal as possible. See e.g. IRIX's IVcalc ( https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/applications/office/ca... ), or the NeXTStep CD player that even had the damn volume wheel.
Granted, on Windows & friends many applications that shipped with operating systems didn't take it that far until the very late 90s (e.g. Windows Media Player 7, the one launched in late 99/early 00). But that's because they had to account for the low capabilities of entry-level hardware. And even then, there were exceptions (e.g. QuickTime on MacOS 9). But outside the realm of applications that shipped with Windows, as much photorealism as the hardware could give you was generally thought to be a good idea. Many applications, like that whole generation of "super CD player" and "scientific calculator" apps, didn't do anything that the OS equivalent didn't do, they just looked super futuristic and fancy.
It didn't float that well with most professional tools, like Office or Photoshop (or, heh, Paint Shop Pro). But that was true everywhere. Pages for OS X wasn't all lined papers and calligraphy, either. But outside that particular zone things weren't as somber.
And let's not exaggerate the extent to which skeumorphism was generally applied in early iOS, either. Lined paper pads and book readers that showed shelves of books, most applications just stuck to photorealistic icons everywhere and relief buttons.
> A skeuomorph (/ˈskjuːəˌmɔːrf, ˈskjuːoʊ-/) is a derivative object that retains nonfunctional ornamental design cues (attributes) from structures that were inherent to the original. Examples include pottery embellished with imitation rivets reminiscent of similar pots made of metal and a software calendar that imitates the appearance of binding on a paper desk calendar.
A digital skeuomorph GUI emulates real-world objects and attributes to provide a recognizable and sensible frame of reference to an end-user. For instance, a digital calculator app visually resembles a real-life calculator, the use of the "play" and "rewind" buttons in a media player, the "folder" or "document" icons in a file manager, the use of an envelope to represent an e-mail,...
Now, literally none of that has to do with the style used to represent those symbols. You could draw a "flat" envelope icon using only black and white colors in the famous Ligne Clair style and it would still be skeuomorphic design. (2)
Apple didn't invent skeuomorphic design when it developed and released the iPhone. That's a misconception. Skeuomorphic design dates back to the 60's and 70's when companies such as Xerox built the first GUI's. Douglas Engelbart's "Mother of All Demos" given in 1968 arguably laid the foundations which would be incorporated by Apple and Microsoft in their products (3)
... and then there's the Web. Which is literally a connected mesh of distinct pages implementing the ideas of hypertext. At one point, people started to treat static Web pages as indepedent functional user interfaces. Because there are particular business benefits to doing that over building native applications (i.e. the whole SaaS thing, cutting out distribution of code, etc.).
And so, here we are in this hot mess where you have people re-inventing the wheel building web applications, SPA's, using all kinds of nuts 'n bolts frontend frameworks while browser vendors and organizations like the W3 are trying to catch up with API's. Meanwhile, static websites are still very much a thing and designers and (frontend) developers are doing that too. There are as many visual languages as there are people building things to put on the Web.
And so, everything ends up bleeding into one another, influencing one another,... Some things coalesce and you see visual elements being picked up and repeated all over the place. Like, that time when Bootstrap was all the rage and it was like half the Web consisted of hero images and jumbotrons. Or that regrettable, yet luckily short-lived trend of using a background video in your header image. At this point, it seems like bright colors and "flat-drawn" "Kurzgesagt" style are in vogue. To be sure, this will pass too in due time.
To me, it seems strange to lament that the colors or the loss of skeuomorphs are turning an interface "infantile". It's not. That's just barking up the wrong tree.
What makes an interface infantile is designing and implementing a language without considering the end user. It's one thing to consider the individual affordances of an interface - colors, fonts, skeuomorph elements - it's another thing to consider the interface as a whole and concluding that it's just badly implemented. Much like a joke you have to explain before your audience gets it.
Many designers lose themselves in the former, arguing the merits and downsides of "flat design" without giving the latter enough thought.
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeuomorph (2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ligne_claire (3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos
The British Legion example they give is odd, they have an interactive story that explains what the British Legion is about on their website. Seems fair enough to me, but the author has a problem with it? I don't get it.
People like consuming information in story form, should stories be reserved for kids?
The web is an interactive medium should we not make things interactive unless they are for kids?
I don't get it.
I see a lot of people with this narrow view point, people who get upset at south park because it's a cartoon or GTA because it's a video game.
I quit the company not long after.
It seems to neglect the implications that UI infantilization has for trust between the user and what is being used. If the UI is presented as toy-like, and the user goes into play mode, how does this shape their willingness to trust the thing being used (and so, the company providing it).
I suspect that engendering trust in the user is a big motivator here these days.