Flat design and improperly rescaled design: main threats to tablet usability | Hacker News Reader

Flat design and improperly rescaled design: main threats to tablet usability

nngroup.com

58 pointskyro23 comments

I don't care whether it's "flat" or not. I'm fucking sick of "mystery meat" UI. Undistinguished words and graphics that have associated actions -- or don't. Varied by individual designer/developer tastes -- or some committee, I suppose.

I can stumble my way through. Worse is having to support "ordinary" people, e.g. family members. (I'm increasingly done "supporting" people to whom I don't have strong ties. Time for them to instead complain to / boycott the people creating and perpetuating this mess.)

Form follows function, damnit.

Form indicates function? Or at least insinuates.

Regarding flat design, I think the criticisms raised in this article are criticisms of poorly executed flat design, not flat design in general.

With that said, I think a lot of underskilled designers are mistaking flat design for ambiguous/overminimalist design[1]. A lot of flat design is horrible, but it's not because it's flat (per se), it's because the designer took an existing visual asset and "simplified" it rather than taking the time to redesign it without skeuomorphic or 3d elements.

[1] https://www.iconfinder.com/icondetails/85100/128/apple_finde...

"Dumb" scaling and lack of flow have been painful for a while and it certainly can't hurt to hear some arguments against them. However, the skeuo-flat wars' inclusion is oversimplified and seems like it stems from a marketing decision rather than actual data points. Attack poor hierarchy, obliviousness to information architecture, lack of designers' restraint, or the absence of focus and rigor. With specific examples and counter-examples, attached to the data found in their research, these topics all seem like valuable information. Maybe this is all hidden behind the buy link. Using contrarianism in conjunction with buzzwords won't motivate me to find out.

Doesn't really surprise me seeing that in there. Nielsen is from way back in the usability community. You have to remember that it was considered revolutionary then to make buttons look 3D, like they stick out, and should be touched. Like they are real buttons. Gloss, shadows, etc.. User affordances. It's been backed up by heavy studies as well.

The modern flat movement, on the other hand, is more just graphics designers making something that looks good and doesn't work well. I've put users through user studies on converted Android apps and they have a hell of a lot harder time figuring out they are supposed to tap an understated flat icon with no label in the top corner, the new action bar pattern, instead of a big glossy shadowed button at the bottom like earlier designs.

I've brought these numbers to Googlers before at conferences, but they just shrug and say users will get used to it. So even Google admits the current flat designs are testing poorly and that they just hope numbers will improve as users learn to look for the flat hidden icons.

I don't see how it follows that they are admitting something by shrugging their shoulders. But what this is missing is that there are technical reasons for flat design, namely performance and power usage, that are critical on mobile devices.

Somehow we managed to have 3D hinting on the monochrome (1-bit) Macintosh. Affordance doesn't have to mean heavy graphics, gradients, blurred drop shadows or any other battery-vampire elements.

I thought this post was pretty funny : [Flat Design: Towards a Flatter Earth — User Experience Design - Brasil — Medium](https://medium.com/user-experience-design-1/fe8f583a4917)

Design based on function and performance removes emotions that contribute to the overall user experience. A purely engineering approach can lead to boring design, IMO.

I really don't understand the performance argument when we've been dealing with skeuo for some time. Of course, skeuo can be overdone, but in balance, it's what many users find useful.

3D is just one shortcut to affordance. It is not the only way to lead a user to action.

When you can't easily tell a label from a textarea from a button, you know the UI is crap.

Man here's me hoping that I hate the flat UI because it is new and not because it makes different behaviors so indistinguishable in the name of being flat.

In the case of Android, I just wish developers would follow the design guidelines [0]. At a glance, just following the skeleton of those docs would address several egregious design issues I've seen.

Anecdotally, I see a strong correlation between adherence to Android style and app quality.

0: http://developer.android.com/design/index.html

After reading it, the 30-second summary: Most companies -- and their users -- would be better served by a responsive web site/app.

Rather than making a native app because {it might seem cooler | our competitor does that | marketing out-shouts the CTO if any | a Dilbert-esque CEO said "app" and no one is willing or able to educate}.

I've seen UI designs lately with cancel buttons disguised as text because "that's how websites do it" (according to the UI designer). Right, that's how websites A/B test users into unintentionally progressing through a sales/signup process.

I'm in the wrong section of the industry apparently. I have been focusing my efforts on building technology when what I should have been doing is writing blog articles about user interface design. I suspect many more people will buy the $198 paper being sold here than have ever purchased software written by me. That is not to indulge in self pity but I can't help wondering if changing my name to Nielsen and sharing my observations about skeuomorphism and rescaled design would be a better investment of my time than writing code.

I don't really understand what your actually criticizing here. Are you upset that you aren't making enough at your current position? Are you upset that a group that specifically focuses on conducting user experience research is selling their results for a price that you don't want to pay for it? Do you not feel as though their work is valid enough to justify charging for it, even though they've been an established group within the field of user experience for years?

I am saying it seems much easier to write about compelling user experiences than to create them, and given the price they are charging for their product it makes me wonder if I should be writing papers about user experiences instead of programming them.

Well, try it then. It actually isn't that easy. Sure, everyone can try to write something about design. But that is not what Nielsen is selling, mere writing. Not everyone can back his writing up with self-conducted user studies, for which one needs (a lot of) time, money (the equipment alone) and people. This is what generates the value of those reports.

Then you should be creating $198 papers and hoping someone buys them.

EDIT: It's easy to be dismissive of a company, occupation or field of business. Nielsen just happened to at the right place when the web became big as a commercial medium (mid-1990s) and if they get to sell expensive papers, it's because their expertise is seen by user experience designers and marketing professionals as useful.

Perhaps you would sell more software with better marketing, which, in a way, is what the people buying those papers hope to achieve.

saying flat design is a danger to tablets is thinking wrong. They aren't thinking like a user, where all the pretty little pictures do something and you can interact in the tablet in new and exciting ways. We don't need a scrollbar to tell us the list can scroll, we should be able to figure it out by the way it runs off the page. We don't need a 3d-esque button to know that clicking on the box labeled "send" (or the little paper airplane icon) will ship off our letters. Everything is touchable and does something. If someone sits down at your app and doesn't realize that they can interact with the element, or tries to interact only to find out that they can't, flat design hasn't failed you - good Design has failed you.

FRAMES are BACK!!!

Just like tables for layout (CSS grids) came back a few years ago.

Or just plain tables. Look under the HN hood.

I don't think PG ever gave up on regular old tables for layout. He's old school that way :-)

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