Retro design is crippling innovation | Hacker News Reader

Retro design is crippling innovation

wired.co.uk

67 pointsPixelRobot40 comments

Comparing the headline to the contents, I feel there's room for a follow-up article: "hyperbole is killing criticism".

I mean, it's OK to hate skeuomorphs, a valid critical position, but nobody is going to die.

And the whole thing feels like Louis CK's riff about airplanes. You are riffling through entire bookstores and museums on an affordable 150dpi Star Trek pad in the bathroom while complaining that innovation has stopped because the graphics look too familiar.

Two limited defenses of skeuomorphs. One: In a world where all of tech turns over on a timescale of months, orientation is important. It may be more important that people can glance at your calendar app and tell that it's supposed to be a calendar than that the calendar app perform optimally in the hands of a trained expert.

The other is: Skeuomorphs generally mimic designs that are at least decades old, sometimes centuries old. Be cautious about casually discarding the work of tens of generations of designers in the name of neophilia.

(Book page-flipping animations are less defensible with the latter argument, but the former still applies.)

I don't think it's okay to hate on skeuomorphs in shipping products, as the author does here. It's a designer-centric rather than user-centric way of looking at things, and it's bad news for users when value judgments that aren't derived from the user experience are allowed to affect real products. Going by his definition of skeuomorphs, a drop-down menu is not a skeuomorph. A spinner (like the ones used in the iPhone to set a timer or an alarm) is a skeuomorph. That distinction has nothing whatsoever to do with which one is more usable in a given context.

Design space is dizzyingly unconstrained, and finding an optimal design is an intractable problem. A skeuomorph (sticking to the definition in play here) has taken its initial design from a particular source, a physical object. Odds are that the optimal design does not resemble that physical object. So what? Physical objects are a legitimate source of design ideas. Starting with a highly optimized solution to a similar, more tightly constrained problem is a common and effective pattern for generating good solutions to an intractable problem.

Another way of saying "hating on skeuomorphs" is "stigmatizing skeuomorphs," and the likely outcome of that is that designers, mindful of their professional image, will tend to eschew skeuomorphs in favor of inferior non-skeuomorphic designs until the winds shift back. (Isn't that the point of hating on skeuomorphs? To influence which designs are perceived as good or bad?) All that means to users is that they will be forced to use inferior designs because of a point of fashion they aren't even aware of. Another way of saying it is that analyzing whether a design is a skeuomorph or not is like analyzing a musician's influences: it might give you a clue to whether the creator keeps up with current trends, but it won't tell you anything about whether the product is good or not.

Sure, it's legitimate to say that other sources of inspiration should be mined as well. Constraining a problem to non-skeuomorphic solutions is a legitimate creative exercise, just like constraining the problem in any other way. It's a creative exercise, though. It isn't a legitimate rule of thumb for designing products any more than "use skeuomorphs!" is a good rule of thumb. Blindly changing features to make them less skeuomorphic is likely to make the product worse, not better. How to implement features in a shipping product such as Google Calendar should be based on usability, not whether you think the designer's thought process reflects a certain heuristic, overdependence on which has historically inhibited the emergence of new and better designs. Research efforts should be criticized on that basis, not shipping products.

Ease of learning is often decoupled from ease of efficient use, sometimes even inversely related. 'Usable' is not one thing for everybody.

So: a skeuomorph is obviously not a problem if it does not cause gratuitous errors or slowdowns, and it obviously is if it does.

And in any case design also concerns matters of taste, on which opinions will naturally differ.

Page flipping animations are still valid: a user immediately knows how to turn the page, and, even if they need to be shown how to turn a page initially then they will intuitively know how to turn back a page.

There's a nice tip in the comments for that article:

"In Google Calendar, pick the "4 Weeks" option at the top, instead of "Month" and it functions exactly as you describe, with the current week at the top. -benjymous"

I didn't have a 4 Weeks view - turns out there's a setting which controls what the button between Month and Agenda does, in Settings -> General -> Custom View. There's also a setting above that for which view is your default when you reload the calendar.

I've set 4 weeks as default in Google Calendar, so reading this article was baffling at first. Curious that 4 weeks doesn't show up for everyone. It is infinitely more useful than the month view.

I don't understand his criticism of the calendar. I WANT to see past dates. It gives me a context to what day of the week it is in relation to dates before and after today. Nothing irks me more when a calendar does not show days from last month on this month's calendar.

Example: Wednesday is April 2... Was Monday March 30 or 31? It forces me to switch my entire calendar to get this info. I want to see days in March and May on my April calendar.

For me personally, the agenda view is hard to view because my brain works on a week/month scale, not day scale. In day view, I also like to see all my events in blocks throughout the day with gaps, instead of a linear list of events without gaps. It helps me visualise free time.

I learned this rhyme from my parents: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_days_hath_September

It works pretty well (I just remember the first two lines). I hope it saves you some time!

> I don't understand his criticism of the calendar.

He's criticizing the case where the current date is April 30 and the calendar is still showing March 26, but not May 7, because you are on the April "page" still.

I like the Agenda view. It gives the current or next event at the top and all upcoming stuff below in chronological order.

I don't get it.

He spends most of the article telling us that skeuomorphs are bad giving the example of calendar app that looks like a desk calendar and then finishes by praising an app with a screen that skeuomorphically flips up just like a wall-calendar.

The difference (at least as I understood it) is that that app isn't a wall calendar and chose that approach because they believed it was the best design, not because they wanted to mimic a wall calendar. Most designers of calendar and calculator software set out to design something as close to a paper calendar or desktop calculator as possible without necessarily asking if it was the best possible design.

Or in summary Mimicking because it is good design that fits what you're trying to do is good, mimicking simply for the sake mimicking is bad.

Yeah, there's a lot of cached thoughts in UI design.

Someone should start an open source lab that sets out to explore and test new design patterns in that space, without any preconceived notions of what should and should not work.

Mimicking another object's behaviour on a known object loses the advantage that a skeuomorph gives you, namely muscle memory. Skeuomorphs are used for very good reasons: they are immediately familiar so a user doesn't have to think before using them. For every person who finds them too cute and annoying there are an order more who find them helpful (and in a world of scary technology) comforting.

I really hate criticism that doesn't suggest improvements. You can point out deficiencies all day, but until you have proposed or implied an improvement, you have not even proved that what you are criticizing is suboptimal, much less provided any helpful pointer towards improvement.

Unfortunately, the "old-fashioned, physical object" this design is based on is the human brain, or more precisely, the useful cultural artifacts that happen to be engrained in pretty much all the human brains on the planet. The monthly and weekly calendar reflects how we think about time. You think you can stop me from thinking in weeks and months by changing one calendar application? You'd have to work a little harder than that. Here's what you need to do:

1. Stop my company from scheduling my paychecks to coincide with the beginning and middle of each month. Stop them from organizing my work days into groups of five days in the middle of groups of seven, and stop people where I work from informally scheduling things with respect to month boundaries.

2. Do the same to the companies that employ all the people I occasionally synchronize my social schedule with.

3. Stop all the businesses I use from scheduling lessons and classes on a monthly basis and varying their hours on a weekly basis. Persuade the state government that it should be as easy to buy liquor on Sunday as on any other day. (That should be easy once you've abolished the days of the week; see 5.)

4. Detach holidays from dates. It would be so much nicer if Thanksgiving was the 329th day of the year instead of the fourth Thursday in November. That way I could forget about months and weeks, and my online calendar could make better use of screen space. (Again, this will follow easily once you've accomplished number 5.)

5. Abolish the days of the week and the months of the year. Prevent anyone from referring to Monday, Tuesday, January, etc., or to weeks and months at all, so I never have to think, "We're shipping on the first Monday of next month. How many days until then?"

After all that, I'll no longer want a calendar app that orients me with respect to weeks and months. You can get rid of your "skeuomorph," and I won't mind that my calendar app gives me no visual, non-verbal cues about what day of the week or week of the month it is.

So, sarcasm aside, you DO need to show month boundaries. It is not helpful to propose doing away with the one convention for that without proposing any replacement for it.

Also, it is not helpful to propose doing away with the past entirely. People are oriented by the past as well as by the future. Oh, dear, it's been a week since I told Doug that information would be available soon. I had better drop him a line and explain that it's delayed. My tooth has been hurting ever since I went to the dentist; how long has that been? When's the last time I worked out?

Showing the past is a valuable function! If you don't recognize that showing the past is part of the function of the calendar, then criticizing a calendar for showing too much of the past rings a little hollow, because you aren't balancing the valuable functions of the interface. You're just picking one and throwing out another.

A better statement of the problem is that the visual clues for month boundaries are the top and bottom of the displayed grid of days on the screen, and therefore the past to present ratio varies dramatically through the month. During some parts of the month, you see very little of the past, and during other parts of the month, you see very little of the future.

A useful suggestion would be to detach month boundaries from the edges of the displayed grid and show them in some other way, perhaps by using color or shading. That way you can keep the balance of past to present close to an optimum value. Perhaps the current week can be the second or third from the top. I'm not a UI designer, but I think that is a more useful analysis of the problem, even if I didn't show off a new word I learned a few weeks ago from a magazine article.

Not quite there, but at least it was a start:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar

Finally! Somebody who understands me!

Now I certainly don't think retro design is "crippling" the basic OS experience. I personally find the whole desktop metaphor to be silly and outdated and not so useful for a generation that has grown up with computers and don't need a clock to look like a wall clock in order to understand that it's telling us the time. OSX widgets may be immature and tasteless, but they're not a hindrance.

If retro design is crippling anything, IMO, it digital audio workstations (DAW). Whenever I launch Cubase I have to deal with virtual mixer boards and virtual synthesizers that mimic the interfaces of 40 year old hardware to the point that you have to turn virtual knobs with my mouse. It's ridiculous and more often than not it's frustrating. Now I understand how this choice of design eases the learning curve, but I'd much rather jump over a few hurdles than run straightaway into a wall.

This is why programs like vim and emacs are still relevant decades after their invention. They don't insult the users intelligence, they don't pretend to be something they're not, and they take full advantage of the platform they're designed for.

If somebody could create a DAW that adhere's to this kind of philosophy, I don't care if it uses ncurses as an interface, I'd adopt it in a heartbeat.

"Let paper work like paper and screens like screens."

I liked that quote. Having said that, I take the point that skeuomorphs are not exactly destroying people's minds.

Another quote I found extremely intresting was this one, from a professional designer's blog

"It shows the care and attention paid to the printing of a photographic image, but also shows how the analogue process of printing a photograph shares a lot with the the digital process of adjusting an image in Photoshop." [ my italics ]

See the quote in context at the link below

http://www.wemadethis.co.uk/blog/2012/01/shaped-by-war/

Basically, are we reaching the point where metaphors that originally made software more accessible (Photoshop like a wet darkroom) actually lose their meaning. My colleagues who teach photography often illustrate aspects of the photographic printing process using Photoshop (reverse metaphor).

Does anyone have any academic references on the anthropology of interfaces?

If his argument is valid, there's no logical reason to stop where he does. You see a continuous progression of weeks instead of discrete months; fine. But what about days? What's so special about the end of one day and the beginning of the next? Nothing - it's just an artifact of paper calendars, daily planners, and so on.

What a calendar should be, if we're going to truly abolish the tragedy of skeuomorphism, is a smoothly flowing timeline, with you at the front, diminishing logarithmically into the future. This way, you can clearly see your appointments. Should make the author happy.

The point is, sometimes we need to artificially break things up into manageable pieces. We think in milestones - the beginning of a season, midnight as a landmark showing how late you're staying up. Some skeuomorphic designs are only "incidentally" skeuomorphic, in that they solve a problem the right way, and just happen to resemble how people used to solve that problem.

Isn't iOS filled with skeumorphism, too? I know Matias Duarte said he wanted to make Android 4.0's design completely digital and without any skeumorphism.

First thing I saw "Retro design is crippling innovation" followed by the left hand column "Subscribe to Wired Magazine for..."

Magazine, how retro

No, I don't think that magazines count as retro design. The problem isn't that print magazines still exist; the problem would be if the online subscription was designed to look like a print magazine (static pages sizes, separate pages that had to be turned, no links, etc).

I keep wondering when we'll move away from the "pages" paradigm in e-books. We should be returning to the scroll paradigm (which is already a familiar motif in software), not forcing content to fit a physical format which the e-reader is precisely an attempt to get away from.

Worst case is when trying to highlight, as a single mark (with note attached), a section of text which spans more than 2 pages (esp. when a "page" is a large-font phone-screen size): I can't tap-and-drag from one end of the section to then next because the "page" paradigm intervenes. Web page? word processing? no problem, we're used to highlighting via scrolling. E-book? scroll? nope, gotta match that page-flipping animation.

Scrolls do have one disadvantage over pages. It's hard to communicate where you are in one without some indexing aid. Any scrolling technology seems to be devoid of that.

I think that's why the page paradigm has persisted. It's all about familiarity.

No. Paging for reading long form is much better. See Instapaper or Flipboard. Text selection is a problem, but you don't solve it but throwing away the rest (Instapaper has a solution, for example).

I thought this was going to be about gaming before I read it. Retro designs have become de rigeur in gaming over the last couple of years and it's boosting innovation by making it possible for indie developers to compete on a more level playing field against the big studios (e.g. MineCraft).

This article demonstrates how it's almost the opposite for non-game interfaces. Instead, it's the plucky upstarts that can take the risk on novel interfaces since they don't have large numbers of users to annoy (and I bet if Google tried to get radical with Calendar now, there'd be a real storm of hate over it).

If nothing else, this article made me consider all of the 'retro' ideas I live with everyday. It is amazing how much things advance while staying the same.

What other 'retro' tech hasn't changed much? The automobile?

Often, I'm just as frustrated about the opposite problem... technology that is less functional than what it is replacing because it doesn't replicate important features in a natural way. For example, I feel like I can organize my physical music collection on shelves in my house more quickly, naturally, and helpfully than I can my digital music collection in any media player/music manager I've tried. Shouldn't our technology be at least as good as its counterpart?

So how do you search or sort by track name in your physical music collection?

You're right, I can't, and that's a useful feature. However, I don't find that I need to very often. In the interest and excitement of offering new (useful) features such as track name searching, I feel that these programs overlook many more useful features. (This is besides the point, but... for example, I can organize albums together on a shelf in my house. That's how I like to decide what to listen to. Why do digital music libraries fail to offer such a tool?)

The author is off-target.

Apple went over the top with the new iCal GUI, but it wasn't an interaction problem. Users have mental models from cultural experience that dictate how they want to use things. In other words, "that software feels intuitive."

The issue I suspect the author actually has with the new iCal is that it goes over the top visually. Software doesn't have to mimic the gaudy ornamentation of a real world object to resemble it.

Can't agree more that skeuomorphs are awful. Probably my fav example of this is "sticky notes" apps. So f'in useless! What are your favs?

iBooks. It shows a bunch of pages on each side, regardless of whether or not you're on the first page, actually in the middle, or on the last page.

I wish that there was an OS with the core of iOS and the appearance of WP7[1].

1. except Helvetica.

One nice thing that came about with the KIN (yes as in Microsoft) was the KIN studio. It had sort of a timeline thing going with all of the pictures and video you uploaded grouped by days. A lot of people complained it had no calendar but I thought it would have been kind of cool to put the calendar functionality with the studio.

Regarding Google Calendar, there's a "7 days" view that shows today+6 days.

Personally I prefer the regular week view.

Speaking of a good calendar UI widget, I really like how ITA Software OnTheFly iOS app does it... Instead of showing you one month at a time it shows you the current week - 2 weeks, current week + 2 weeks. Makes it really utilitarian. I wish more apps would adopt that format making scheduling much easier.

HEAVILY inspired by http://www.marco.org/2010/03/28/more-ideas-than-time-logarit...

So...this article about how a design philosophy is wrong contains exactly how many direct comparasons between flawed designs and their alternatives?

This is article's premise is weird on so many accounts..

It's "crippling innovation"...what!? Retro design isn't an institution, or a person, or even a "thing". It's a concept that designers take in order to progress towards a more usable interface.

You know what "cripples" innovation - massive design changes that happen in extended batch schedules. Technically this doesn't cripple innovation, it simply decreases innovative adoption and user acceptance.

What's wrong with skeuomorphs?

That needs to be answered first before assuming crippling of innovation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com