What skeuomorphism is (and isn't)
sachagreif.com
sachagreif.com
It makes the apps more approachable (“Hmm, this looks just like my real-world address book, it can’t be much harder to use”)."
Honest question: are these two things really issues? I've just never encountered the level of non-technical user that would be lost but for those particular touches. And I know there's a huge amount of selection bias in there, but I think usability/distinctiveness can be achieved without kitschy textures or creating your own set of UI elements.
If anyone has more links on it actually helping new users, I'd love to see them. The reasons just sound like post-hoc rationalizations to me. Especially because realistic/skeuomorphic/what-have-you skins have gone in and out of fashion over the years and I don't recall complaints that, say, iTunes looked less "just like" a CD player than the old System 7.5 CD player app.
(And honestly, in the few minutes I played with the Lion Address Book out of curiosity, I felt like I was missing something big about how it worked. That one in particular seems like a case of things getting more confusing because it presents a physical metaphor that doesn't really fit the digital version.)
They say that economics happens at the margins. In other words, changing the price of a sandwich from $3.40 to $3.25 isn't going to make you buy 10% more of them. But in the population of consumers, there is a chunk that are on the margin that will be totally converted, and that results in a 10% volume increase in aggregate.
Something similar may be going on here. Make a design tradeoff (using leather) in order to get a 10% user benefit, even if 50% of your users get no benefit.
Of course. Real people don't say "Calendar app? Oh, right, the one with the calendar sheet," or "Address book? Oh, right, the one with the people's contact info in it!". This is why we need on-screen leather.
That was the argument behind Microsoft's acclaimed skeuomorphic Post-PC platform, Bob:
http://www.bentuser.com/article.aspx?ID=327&page=3 http://www.bentuser.com/article.aspx?ID=327&page=4
iOS hasn't quite gone as far as introduce Clippy, but of course Siri could be taken to that direction...
"Can I turn the page?"
"Sure, tap the margin"
taps the margin, and the kindle app does its slide animation to go to the next page
"That's not what I want! I want to see the page turning like on my ipad!"
Yes - every app is light grey on grey on dark grey in OS X (Mountain) Lion. The theming of some apps makes it easier to spot them in Mission Control.
Though I'd rather have 10.6 back where windows weren't all gray to begin with.
When it comes to Apple's design decisions, they absolutely have no idea what they are doing with all of these disgusting flourishes. see this article: http://www.fastcodesign.com/1670760/will-apples-tacky-softwa...
But I guess I'm giving Apple the benefit of the doubt: although I personally agree that some of their designs are tacky and over the top, I trust them enough to assume they have their reasons.
"Skeuomorphism is a catch-all term for when objects retain ornamental elements of past, derivative iterations--elements that are no longer necessary to the current objects’ functions."
Then Sacha Grief, might be wrong. The example he given, used blue leather and white buttons and he derided the example as not skeuomorphism. But in that example only a part of it was the ornament (i.e. blue leather). I could be wrong but what does ornamental take into account? Whole thing or just a part?
I mean rest of his story does make sense, but it's still an invalid example.
EDIT: It might be a nitpick, but I like to know what is and isn't skeuomorphic.
Glass thermometer iPhone app: skeuomorphic.
Wooden thermometer iPhone app: not skeuomorphic, because real thermometers do not use wood.
If I translate a physical object into a digital version and replicate ornaments that add no function in the digital version (ie. a leather texture), that's considered skeumorphic. On the other hand, if I apply a leather texture to my UI for random app X, that's not skeumorphic.
But genuine question: is there another word we can use which means semi-photorealistic leather, stitching, physically textured, etc. interface? Usually with all that being largely gratuitous?
In other words, if we're not bashing skeuomorphism, what is the name of the thing we're meaning to bash instead? :)
I think most people are agreed that the issue with Calendar is more about it being bad rather than a specific design rationale or style.
A notebook application that looks like a notebook is "nostalgic". Weather applications that look like my pants are not.
There was a short-lived trend in design a few years back that used the term ”maximalism” to mean something similar - covering every surface, layering metaphors on top of metaphors, mixing traditions from all over.
They did, once upon a time. Look at the aesthetics of recent iterations of iCal though, and you can see that they really, really don't anymore.
Meanwhile as the post points out, these textures and animations are important comforts, cues and guides for many users, especially newer users.
Obviously most people don't think it is, but that's a personal preference rather than a statement of fact.
I think the linen backgrounds that are appearing in OS X and iOS are a case in point - they don't add anything practical (in theory I think they were meant to represent the bottom layer though that's been inconsistently used so it's questionable whether any real benefit is being gained) but broadly speaking I think people agree that the texture is nice and as a result people seem to be more positive about them.
It's mostly faux-design sense (everybody is a snobish designer these days and everybody is for "minimalism") than anything really problematic with an app that has some faux-leather as its background.
It's design decisions like this, which really ramped up in Lion, that I think are fueling the present-day reaction against skeumorphism.
The calendar app is a work of supreme laziness on the part of its designers, and the excuse seems to be that it is pandering to a class of user both looked down upon and considered unlikely to actually use the app.
And while graphic designers love it, UX designers often find the expectations raised by the metaphor conflict with the actual implementation. A great example of this is book apps, in which the notion of "pages" and "bookmarking" is presented in a familiar visual style, but the actual experience is radically different.
What people are actually objecting to is apps that have gratuitous visual borrowings that do nothing but consume screen real estate and occupy storage space. In most cases, Apple's "skeumorphic" apps don't even waste screen real estate (if you rip all the textures out, they look like normal Cocoa/Touch apps) so it's just a question of "do you the texture looks nice" (in my case: no) and "is it worth the megabytes of junk you now have on your hard disk" (definitely no if you answered "no" to the previous question).
Frankly, if Apple stripped the visuals to the bone in Mac OS X in the interest of making the best use of the limited space on SSDs, I'd be very happy.
I would agree, variation is very important in this respect - however, this skeuo-leather-morphic design is but one small niche in the set of all possible variations. Have Apple exhausted their own potential? Is the only way for them to further refine their software really for them to turn away from minimalism and add more and more revolting kitsch?
If this is true, why does it have to be this particular style of kitsch?
On the other hand, Lion's iCal is absolutely hideous. No beauty there.
http://blog.apptopia.com/discussing-mobile-design-pt-1-apple...
Thoughts?