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Comment by petilon | Hacker News Reader

Why are designers not understanding this these days?

I think one reason is that flat UI is super easy. Skeuomorphic is extremely hard to get right, and if you don't get it right it looks super tacky. Most people who have the word "designer" in their job title don't have the artistic skills needed to pull it off. This is why most designers are opposed to skeuomorphic.

Somewhere in between is the right approach. The NeXTSTEP UI from the late 1980s is what we need to return to. It still looks beautiful today: https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/openstep42

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> flat UI is super easy. Skeuomorphic is extremely hard to get right

What I don't understand is why those are treated as the only two choices?

Just adding some shadows, dividers, 3D buttons and real scroll bars again would go a long way to making things more usable without going full on into skeuomorphism to represent elements of the physical world.

A good example of the wrong direction was macOS in the switch to Tahoe. Buttons in modal dialog boxes became flat instead of 3D. They no longer look like buttons, they just look like a web-UI card with a gray background. There is no visual indicator at all that it is a clickable button.

Why? Legitimately, I want to hear from the designer(s) that made that decision and what their reasoning was.

I've been saying for many years that it seems most UI "designers" are just art school dropouts. Art school graduates would have a better sense of style, even if they weren't HCI experts.

Windows 2000 was peak Windows UI. Yeah, it wasn't visually exciting, but it was the peak of functional and discoverable UI. Of course, the Windows 10/11 UI isn't visually exciting either, and in many cases it's more boring looking, and definitely less functional. I would pay money to go back to the Windows 2000 UI, but I guess Microsoft isn't sophisticated enough to do that any more. The current Windows UI is less customizable than Windows 2. Yes, you heard me right. Windows 2.1 was more customizable than Windows 11.

> The current Windows UI is less customizable than Windows 2.

I'm guessing that's just Microsoft conditioning people to accept that Microsoft owns their computer. Same with their "we'll reboot your computer/make changes/revert your preferences whenever we feel like it" philosophy. Personalization leads to a sense of ownership and control that could undermine the feeling of learned helplessness they're hoping we'll fall into.

Flat UI is also really difficult, as it can easily look cheap, boring, and unfinished.

Even Apple’s initial move to a flat UI in iOS 7 suffered from this. It took a long time to get refined to the point of not feeling like a major step backward. I still preferred the look of iOS 6 to anything that came afterwards. The skeuomorphic designs were warm, inviting, and fun. They served as a nice juxtaposition to the rather austere hardware.

What’s the meaning of skeuomorphic design for a generation that has never worked with the original physical artifacts they’re based on, though?

Consistency. Even if you've never held a telephone receiver, if it means 'call' in one place, it's very likely to mean the same thing in another.

We could be using random hieroglyphs to the same ends, but people seem to always make their own (barring a few exceptions, like the hamburger menu). It's probably a better idea to use something with some grounding in reality rather than make your own from nothing, since doing that is hard, even for actual designers.

It also takes a long time for those purely digital ideas to filter out into the mainstream and get a shared name. For many years I would hear people same, “click the thing in the upper left corner”, “click those 3 lines up there”, or something similar. The term hamburger menu is starting to filter out there to the point where I feel comfortable using it. Even the term, hamburger menu, is a skeuomorphic name for a digital control. No one knows what to call those 3 lines, but everyone knows what a hamburger is. I’ve even seen some sites use a literal hamburger icon.

It also took a long time to standardize on the hamburger menu. Many also tried to use an ellipsis for a long time. Some still do. Sometimes those dots are vertical… is that a thin hamburger or a vertical ellipsis? I heard one person trying to make the term “tots” happen for this style of menu… tatter tots to go with the hamburger.

Contrast that to a “gear” menu for settings. They see a cog or a gear and everyone knows what that is without training, even if they aren’t a mechanic.

I resorted to telling people "Click/touch the funny little group of three horizontal lines.", and if they still hesitated, "…Looks like an air vent.".

On occasions where I told them it's really called a hamburger menu, they all either looked like they thought the idea was nonsesical, or said as much.

…Don't get me started on apps that have multiple air vent (or elipsis) menus visible simultaneously.

Or apps that abuse the symbol further by changing the meaning from "menu" to "toggle a sidebar that may or may not have portions that act like a menu."

./table-flip

It doesn't really matter if they haven't used the original physical artifacts. If it looks physical you can figure out how to use it based on your knowledge of other physical objects you have used in your life.

Of course if you display for example, a spin dial like old telephones that has a particularly quirky way to use, them this doesn't apply.

They create a consistent design language.

Do you need to know the meaning of the latin words manus (hand) and facere (to make) to understand the English words manual (by hand), factory (place which makes things) and manufacture (to assemble)? Do we need new words now that Latin comprehension is dwindling? Not really.

Language works by metaphor, even if the thing you're alluding to doesn't exist anymore.

All that dark, dismal grey, though… (-:

For reasons I don't fully understand, it makes me thing of repressive environs along the lines of "This is not for you. Serious business only.".

Although I do find some of the borders much too thick, it would be bit of relief from the modern trend of having enormous padding/margins everywhere.

That does look surprisingly good. And dated. For some reason my first thought was "why the hell is this reminding me of Carmen San Diego?!"

Following the standard is easy, deviating from it is hard.

Every designer nowadays insists on deviating.

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