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Comment by alexfringes | Hacker News Reader

"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.

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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.

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