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Comment by gherkinnn | Hacker News Reader

I don’t think flat design is inherently hostile. The same way I don’t think heavy skeuomorphism is inherently patronising. We went from a violent explosion of visuals to ambiguous interactive elements. Both shite, both a pain to use, both bad design. Both can be avoided within their respective philosophy.

As OP shows, iOS hinting at more content by partially showing the next item is a good example. You can very well create depth and hierarchy with minimal visual cues.

However, what has increased since flat design became the hottest shit ever (2013/2014) are downright malicious interaction patterns, no understanding of the platform (e.g button vs link), and an ever increasing lust for engagement. The design flavour is merely coincidental.

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I think it takes a lot of work to ensure that removing depth and shading doesn't remove information, too. I think flat design inherently "wants" to be, if not user hostile, at least less user-friendly than what preceded it.

It's a win if the depth and shading was just noise, before. If it was signal, well, now you've got to find something to replace that with, or you're harming UX. And you've got less "bandwidth", if you will, to work with.

Exactly. Flat design removes signals in order to let the UI appear simpler. But the removal of meaningful signals makes the UI more more ambiguous and harder to use. Flat design is an obfuscation, trying to cover up the actual complexity behind a visual semblance of simplicity.

Flat design is the definition of art because it creates something without the intention of usability. Functionality that is hidden isn't usable by definition. It always annoyed me in early Mac UX that there wasn't a specific affordance for additional interactive behavior.

Option this, Ctrl that. Yes, they can be discovered socially and informationally, but that goes against intuitiveness.

The original Mac or Lisa was good in some ways, but it also problems with faux minimalism. In particular, Jobs insisted on a single-button mouse for 'simplicity', but that required inventing the entirely undiscoverable double click, which had to be taught, and still causes confusion today.

Yes. I agree. Also, the insistence on a "single task at a time" notion when real work required context switching.

Simplicity goes too far on the balance of, and in search for, advancement of design. Form + Function. Not an industrial beige box bucket of parts and not a confusing 2001 monolith, but something in the middle.

But going back to the comment above, I don’t think that flat design is inherently to blame here. Flat design doesn’t require the removal of shadows etc. in order to favor aesthetics over usability. That removal of signal is just bad design. If the designers of flat systems did better at replacing the lost affordances and visual cues, flat design has the potential to be incredibly powerful at making clear, accessible user experiences.

Now that I’ve said that, I do want to make it clear that I haven’t seen an excellent exemplar of flat design. I remain optimistic though.

Just to add, Android's material design is full of shadows and 3D encoding, while still being flat. It's not a great design by any means, but it's proof that flat design does not imply on a 2D UI (despite its name).

The single largest problem is that when we took 3D buttons away, we got no icon for the idea that you some object is clickable. An icon does not need to be skeuomorphic, just unambiguous and easy to recognize, besides, it needs to exist to be useful. Flat design uses a high-contrast background to encode that, what is extremely ambiguous, but there's nothing prohibiting people from creating a better icon.

Windows 3.1 in EGA mode was fine — it had no depth (can't afford that when you had 16 colours for the whole screen) but it was fine, because it had consistent button borders and things along those lines.

Consistency is key, I think. Part of the problem now is that every app tries to redesign the entire interface from scratch, meaning there are no general interaction principles that a user can rely on anymore. I hate it.

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