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Comment by occam65 | Hacker News Reader

The "flat" style being distributed today is a giant step backwards in usability, I can't for the life of me understand why it's so popular. On desktops, it's not clear until you hover that it's even an interactive element. On mobile? Forget it. You'll have better luck teaching your grandmother the difference between client and server side JavaScript.

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> On desktops, it's not clear until you hover that it's even an interactive element.

Have you considered that this is due to you and others being conditioned to believe that beveled/3d elements indicate interactivity whereas flat elements do not? Maybe a change is in order...

Also related to the abandonment of "fake" depth in web design is the latest A-List-Apart article, "Material Honesty" - http://alistapart.com/article/material-honesty-on-the-web

It's more likely that the problem is because there's very little perceived affordance[1] that differentiates interactive elements from inert design.

[1] http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/affordances_and.html

The fact is that your average internet user is conditioned to think the beveled elements are clickable. Whether or not that ought to be the case is an utterly useless discussion for your 905% of jQuery theme users, people who want to just build a website quickly.

I don't think that is the case at all. I think the goal of flat UI is that the very existence of an element implies that it is interactive. I do agree that there is a problem in that most of us are conditioned to look for gradients, shadows, and other affordances when looking for interactive elements. Perhaps time will solve that.

Nothing is stopping you from using this as a framework and adding your own styles over the 'flatness'. If anything this is a much nicer base to work off of than if you started with something that had poorly made gradients.

Sometimes it at least looks stylish. This just looks ugly.

I think with very slight gradients to help indicate clickable areas and such, it can work very well.

It's popular because it's more portable across devices and screen sizes, and designers are too lazy to maintain two sets of UIs, one for fingers and one for mouses.

That's mostly true although there's actually no good reason for that, it's perfectly possible to have a non-flat UI without using any images or special image effects, say the new Google UI without the very subtle gradients, it's minimalistic but not flat, right?

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