A good integration would:
- consider how heavily to use the effect to not overload the ui
- query for feature support to avoid adding all additional decorations if blur isn't available
- query for display & video features to avoid rendering the effect on devices that likely don't have a capable gpu
- query for user preferences and serve solid colors with good contrasts to users who might struggle with the busier background
- limit the extent of the effects and shadows depending on available space
- tweak the blurring and opacities to ensure good readability in the specific UI, regarding how complex or contrasted the background under blurred areas will be
- ensure blurs and shadows scale adaptively with the typography to ensure consistent visuals
UX is by definition the design of how a user experiences the complete app and interaction, it's not made or broken by individual stylistic choices
That being said, it has more of a place in games. Especially in HUD where you don’t want to occlude the background since that’s the main area a user is interacting.
In the bigger picture, people use products to perform a function that often includes how they feel in and about themselves while using it. People buy cars to tell a story about who they are. People buy coffee and sit at a cafe in order to get a moment of peace or some internet access. People wear shoes that are a little less comfortable in order to get compliments on them. This is not bad UX. This is literally the meaning of good UX - paying attention to what people actually want versus the minutia of objective functionality.
Things happening in the background being distracting and disorienting is also very subjective. You can lower the translucency of the glass just as you would lower the opacity of a solid color.
My point is that your criticism is far from being objectively true. There are ways of integrating this design element without running into those issues. The screenshot from the Forza game looks fine, for example, and having seen it in action, the background is not distracting. And what you gain is a more interesting and visually pleasing UI than if you were using a solid background. This may be more important in a video game, but it can also be done tastefully in OS and web design.
If you need lots of context, blur is a poor choice. If you need no context, it is a poor choice.
Sometimes it is a great choice.
Thousands of years of adaptation has honed the brain and the eye to be optimized for this type of view much moreso then the simple UX you see here on HN.
Not only does the blurred/frosted glass background look better but it should be clearer because that's what we've been designed to do.
Every single article I've read on the matter says higher contrast is more readable. The debate is over how high is 'good enough'.
UX poses as a scientific field when really there is little evidence based research and it’s all just technical procedure and big words. Technical procedures are illusory they make you think it’s legit with a bunch of rules but to be scientific you need evidence. As technical as the rules are, a lot of it is made up bs.
UX design is one of those bs concepts that litter the world and poses as legitimate. It’s like the food pyramid from the USDA that says refined carbs are the most important part of every meal.
If the debate is on how much contrast then run some science. Instead UX just debates and as a result the entire field is made up conjecture.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01698...
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0144929041000166...
https://jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2121593
Though this lacks citations and evidence, it's by a generally accepted expert and authority in the field:
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/low-contrast/
I'm really struggling to understand the connections you're drawing to food.
The food pyramid is based off of cherry picked data and biased experiments influenced the food industry. This is similar to your cherry picked data.
Your data measures low contrast vs high contrast but really you need to measure high contrast vs. blurred background.
Again we need evidence based measurements which the entire UX field lacks. It’s just a bunch of made up concepts strung together with little scientific research.
And there’s a lot of research regarding UX, under the term Human-Computer Interaction. The thing is that it easily converge to something like Win 2000, macOS Leopard.
But this also gets into another gray area where looking at a design for a UI != using said design to perform important tasks. Hence why prototyping and user tests often run counter to “pretty” interfaces.
I can simply say you’re wrong and I disagree and you got nothing to move your argument forward.
The human body is designed to desire and consume the maximum amount of feel good tasty food for maximum energy but we are finding that the evolution of the human body is not designed to actually accept such massive consumption despite our desire for such food. Our bodies do not handle the highest capacity consumption instead they have narrowly evolved to fill a strangely specific niche.
Same with our eyes. It may seem easier to like high contrast designs but our eyes through millions of years of evolution are not optimized for high contrast signs since those things never existed in nature.