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Comment by tomelders | Hacker News Reader

I had a talk with myself at the weekend about making a concerted effort to cut out the snark when I comment on the web.... And I'm about to fall at the first hurdle.

Being "on trend" isn't good UI design. But I can see how we got here. Through OS X and iOS, Apple's UI ethos became the gold standard in UI design. It was so well designed that it was easy to imitate and by simply adopting the core elements of Apples UI language, stuff became intuitive and usable without the designer needing to understand "why" something looked the way it looked.

And then came a new trend, the current trend, that appears to me to be rooted in nothing more substantial than a desire to replace the old with something new at all costs. And when the likes of Apple and Google fall for the same trap, it's nigh on impossible for fundamental UI design knowledge to make itself heard above the noise of a million designers advocating the new and pointing to Apple for credibility.

You can see that I don't like Material. I also don't like iOs's new UI language. It doesn't work. Ive seen no evidence that it's any more useable and I struggle everyday to make sense of software and tools that have adopted these new trends so anecdotally, I have to say to myself that we're going the wrong way.

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The current trend is rooted in the fact that computer displays approach the visual fidelity of paper prints by now (> 300dpi). Consequently a more print like design language is adopted, which often features a small selection of colours and simple geometric shapes.

The large variety in print design demonstrates that this is not an unreasonable restriction. In my eyes the translucency of windows in Yosemite is a much nicer choice than "brushed aluminium" or "black with fake highlights", it does not pretend to be something it is not. Eventually I would prefer if the "Desktop" metaphor, including "Folders", was given up and replaced with something different. The faster the design language becomes more abstract to facilitate that change, the better. We are stuck with an overall UI design initially conceived in the 70s, alternative versions of personal computing like the Lisp Machine died unfortunately.

Unlike print, computer user interfaces are interactive. When you adopt a print-like design language you remove cues that indicate how to interact with the interface.

For examples of how Apple's new UI is less usable than their old UI see: http://uxcritique.tumblr.com

I wish I could up-vote this a thousand times.

I often tap things that are just rectangles and fail to realize that other rectangles are buttons.

I can't wait for "everything is flat, two-tone, and rectangular" to be replaced by whatever the next trend is. Hopefully something more useful.

Ironic note: the flat trend was really made mainstream by Microsoft when it released Windows Phone 7.

With flat design, sometimes it's really hard to know what you are suppose to click on. I enjoy its simplicity, but it does have some usability problems that come with it.

I think we went way overboard with it and the pendulum swung to far to the side of flat design. Hopefully we start moving away from super trendy flat design, much like we moved away from those crazy web 2.0 design styles.

flat design is trending because we have so many "designers" who can't design.

What do you think separates a "designer" from a designer?

I would say Consideration. I am a designer, and I work with lots of designers. Design is harder than it looks and even brilliant designers don't get it right 100% of the time, but I can see a clear difference between the types of designers whose work "looks right" and designers who have approached a brief with the aim of figuring out what "works right".

It's easier to be the former than the latter both in terms of skill and the politics of the client relationship, and that's why there are so many "designers" and so few designers.

Yes. A real designer isn't just a UI artist. Art is one skill among others. A real designer should also understand: UX, human behaviour and interaction, logic, visual language (architecture, shape, color, animation) and other skills...

Most designers don't get it right because they don't have these skills, they are only artists. And because of that they don't understand why a particular design is better than another or even what their own design expresses.

To do a real design, it asks you to do a ton of research and going back and forth between art and UX. Doing brain storming to implement old and new logic elements in a fashion way.

It's like the iOS 6 it was a big step forward because it was a design: simple, expressive, and functional. The guys who created it understood all of that. Then again, Apple followed the fashion trend more than the logic and did the iOS 7 design criticized even before it was out. The problem, among its specific fashion, was that the design was so flat it was destroying UI information. Plus visual problems: sometimes the color seems to mean something but you find one red button that isn't one, sometimes the shape, sometimes the animation...

Here is an example of what a designer should do to design a UI. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2013/06/27/desi...

In Material design, you are still intended to make use of proper cues for useable components. Interactive components are supposed to exist as another logical layer on top of static content. This is the change from Holo, do not use flat things so often for interactive widgets.

I have to echo this sentiment. Comparisons to print design do not hold up to event he most casual scrutiny.

Simplifying the design ethos of Material down to 'print design' without understanding how it works is unhelpful, IMHO.

I think we were talking about the print paradigm in general. I agree that it would be a false dichotomy where material is concerned.

When Windows 7 did translucency, it was considred ugly. Now when Apple does it, it's good design.

I don't agree. I think apple is fielding a lot of criticism for its current design.

My opinion on Apple's use is mixed. In cases like the OS X lock screen, the use is great. It signifies an inability to continue until the device is unlocked while hinting at the content underneath.

Other uses are gratuitous and often the blurring and blending of colors creates weird sensations where what is underneath a window seems more important. I can see something is there, but can't make out the details, make me anxious that I'm missing something happening in the window.

>The current trend is rooted in the fact that computer displays approach the visual fidelity of paper prints by now (> 300dpi)

My impression (I'm not expert) is that the trend is rooted in the opposite - the crappy displays of cheap phones. The old fancy graphics of say Windows 7 could not render quickly or at all on cheap phones so with the advent of responsive design companies used flat design so the same graphics could be used on all devices including cheap phones.

I get the technical issue but I still find it a bit ugly.

Computer displays on average don't. Phone displays largely do, but there are millions of computers sold every quarter that aren't anywhere close to retina displays. Also, there are hundreds of millions of existing devices with non-retina screens.

Probably not wise to abandon those because of the new shiny thing.

The "Folder" metaphor is something I've been considering a lot lately. It seems so ingrained in modern computing.

Apple has started to move away from it tags and "All my Files."

I struggle to think of a better way to solve organizing and collecting items than into nested groups.

Well the fundamental flaw is that the view presented to the user is rooted in the representation the filesystem implementor chose, the user should effortlessly be able to switch between different views and add additional ones, Apples' "All My Files" together with the ability to filter and save those filters is brilliant and very much in the right direction, although it should support some form of join operation.

One idea would be, that in addition it should be possible to execute computations on the current view of the filesystem and the possible computational primitives are selected by the "type" of the files (essentially find a way to lift a typed version of the unix shell with pipes to the GUI level).

Another idea would be to emphasise versioning and time based information more. For example with the current storage capability it makes little sense for the default save operation when working on a document to be "destructively replace the old one". Obviously as a programming one is aware of that and uses version control systems, but so far I had multiple occasions when working on a collaborative project not involving code, where the versioning was done by appending suffixes to folder names.

I find the Apple OSX finder's half hearted attempts to hide the file system a pain in the arse.

What does work quite well for me is the default approach of Gmail where your emails are in basically one folder with a good and fast search facility (and tagging)

We launch next month. Just wait :)

Why the down votes?

> Why the downvotes?

Who are 'we'? What do you do? Why should I care?

Your post contains no useful information, and thus contributes nothing to the discussion. Ergo, downvotes. The only way to work out what you're talking about is to go through your comments (which I did) and synthesise based on founder bios and a job posting. Even then there is little to no concrete information about empiric.al that I could find in the few minutes I spared for this.

Here's a post that might have worked better, and maybe even could have got you some marketing/interest. I didn't downvote you the first time, but I would be far less likely to downvote this:

--- I agree completely. File management is still an unsolved problem and existing solutions are not optimal by any stretch of the imagination. It's really only getting worse as more and more user data moves to various independent and unconnected online services. Even if you manage your local files in a satisfactory manner you can't use the same system everywhere.

I'm actually actually working on a product that should help alleviate that problem. It does $ACTUAL_DETAILS and works by $IMPLEMENTATION. Our site is barebones for now (empiric.al if you want to read more about founders or sign up for information), but we're really excited about what we've built so far and aim to launch next month. Hit me up on $EMAIL if you'd like to discuss it!

Your comment had zero content and no value for anyone other than you.

I'm happy you're excited about your launch, but, unless you're linking a technical, or at least informative, blog post or similar that describes ways you're solving the problem the person you replied talked about, Hacker News isn't the right place to brag.

Fair enough. The user mentioned that no one seems to be rethinking the file system so I just wanted to say that we were, but obviously we don't have the materials ready to link to pre-launch.

Yet-another-software-as-a-service-dont-own-your-own-data-startup.

Great.

Not sure where you got that assumption from. We don't own your data anymore than Dropbox does.

So what you're saying is, you own it entirely.

Dropbox has:

- Access to everyone's data.

- Control over everyone's data.

- Control over the clients used to access that data.

What is actually private? Nothing.

What do users "own"? None of their tools.

SaaS makes the world a worse place, one rent-seeking product at a time.

I see no snark on display. I also see no arguments or reasons on display to support your position.

That is to say:

1) I can see that you don't like Material but _why_ do you not like it? Because it's new is not a reason because it can be both new _and_ adhere to tried and tested design principles, put forward new ideas for consideration, and be aesthetically pleasing

2) Why don't you like iOS's new UI language?

This is the second time in the thread that I've been asked this, so here's my non answer.

I feel that there's plenty of literature out there that details the faults and flaws in all the new UI languages from different vendors, and unless I write my magnum opus on UI design, I'm only going to be able to offer broad strokes commentary that would be child's play to pick apart on the surface and just drag us all into a meandering argument.

And I feel I factored this into my original comment. For example, I specifically avoided the word 'flat'. There's nothing inherently wrong with something being 'flat', and there are plenty of scenarios where one could quite easily argue in favour of a flat design over a 'lickable' drop-shadowy visual feast. So to mention it in passing wouldn't be worthwhile.

But 'flat' is only one adjective you can use to describe the current UI trend. Many have been referred to in this thread. Animation, depth, ui-as-content and so on. The topic is greater than the sum of it's parts. I also feel that there are also no absolute right or wrongs and I didn't want to kick off one of those sorts of debates stroke arguments. I suppose I'm not scrutinising the implementations but rather questioning the motives.

In addition, my comment was as much about 'how we got here' rather than the problems with 'where we're at', which I believe totally undermines the current state of UI design. For that, I don't think there is much out there to support my view other than the history we've lived through, and we can each interpret that as we see fit. So that part you can take or leave. I offer it as an opinion. I believe the opinion will hold up to scrutiny, but at this moment in time, it's anecdotal.

In summary; I was deliberately vague.

Flat UI has fewer affordances (or "signifiers" as Donald Norman now refers to the concept.) For examples of issues caused by this see http://uxcritique.tumblr.com

Consistency / familiarity is a very important part of developing UIs/UXs that are intuitive.

What you have with material design is a very well documented approach to promoting this. The wrong direction? As a developer I lack the expertise/talent to have an opinion one way or the other on the direction presented by material design. But if the designer community is unhappy with the approach, then they should probably get together to create competing principles that can be adopted by the rest of the dev/design community.

You are still free to design you applications however you see fit, but you risk missing out on users quickly feeling comfortable in your applications.

>Consistency / familiarity is a very important part of developing UIs/UXs that are intuitive.

This. My understanding is that Google's adoption of Material Design is in large part intended to make apps more intuitive so they'll be used more frequently and by more people. I've found out when testing Recent (http://recent.io/) that average, non-tech users would prefer something intuitive that uses standard UI toolkit features -- even if they're not that exciting -- over highly designed custom interfaces.

The interesting question to me is to what extent iOS apps beyond Google's own will adopt material design...

The primary principle at least from the point of Apple is to turn the actual content into the UI by allowing for a different kind of visual depth.

What you see right now is first steps towards a UI that will use animation to create a sense of depth and perspective rather than using static visual design to imitate the world around us.

So think about Googles Material Design and Apples iOS design paradigm as a return to content using time (animation) as the skeumorphic replacement.

Whether this is the right or wrong direction is hard to say for now given the trends away from UX and interaction design we will see over the next 10 years.

Relying on animation to provide depth and perspective may not be a great idea. Subtle static cues remain a constant reminder on the display even if you aren't focused entirely on the application. Animation is much more heavy handed and isn't always there. If the user misses the transition animation, how do they know how to interact with the resulting static page? Animation also has the potential to slow down users as they become accustomed enough to the interface to know which elements they want to interact with before the animation completes.

> Subtle static cues

Such as... shadows? which help in feeling depth statically, which is what Material Design is about. What I feel is that MD is young and has rough edges but rests on solid principles.

> Animation also has the potential to slow down users as they become accustomed enough to the interface to know which elements they want to interact with before the animation completes.

Interestingly consistent animation time can have a bonus effect, as a "slow" loading element and a "fast" loading element are paced, creating a temporal rhythm in interface action for those accustomed to the UI, instead of a randomised, off-beat staccato. You don't just know "where" this button will land, you also know "when" and you can get there without visually polling and parsing the screen for availability.

This is all a game of balancing opposites. I totally loathe brutal reflows and interface pop-in (to the point I disabled Chrome's new tab page[0]) because it just triggers an interrupt->parse->interact cycle whether or not I know where to go.

[0]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/empty-new-tab-page...

You have to take a longer perspective on this think about where information is going, think about vectors rather than bitmap, think about non-interaction rather than interaction, think about the complexity of the apps of the future and you will realize that animation might not be such a bad idea. With skeumorphic design you only have the illusion of access to the elements with a flatter design you can programmatically access them and change them which will open up for interesting new visualization opportunities.

With regards to be being heavy handed both apple and google are well aware of that which explains their support for this new way of approach GUI design.

> Animation also has the potential to slow down users as they become accustomed enough to the interface to know which elements they want to interact with before the animation completes.

Happens to me so often. When turning off all animations in Windows, the system feels so much more responsive and doesn't hold me back in well-trained workflows.

With Android 4, the default state is really bad. Fortunately, you can turn off most animations in the dev settings, but still, it feels like the OS wasn't optimized for low latency (especially when switching apps). I hope that Android 5 will still allow for animations to be turned off. I can't say that I'm very eager to try Android 5.

Worst thing is, even with the reasonably powerful Nexus 4 (and I hear the same is true even about the Nexus 9), under a little bit of load, animations tend to become even more sluggish; inaccurate animations let the user make mistakes. I have noticed that it is nearly impossible for me to quickly check something using the Nexus 4 while waiting at the lights, especially if it involves switching apps (go from navigation to messaging etc. and back), the phone just isn't responsive enough. This isn't entirely the fault of animations, but it's one more symptom of a lack of focus on low latency.

This is a well known design flaw in Windows. Apple on the other hand goes to great length to keep the illusion alive. They would rather de-priortize non-visual tasks if it means providing more power to finish ex. some animation.

Animation is a science in it's own and even small unobtrusive cues can mean a world of difference.

I don't like everything in Material Design, but there are undeniably a lot of really really good ideas in there. So borrow the patterns that work, and ignore the rest.

I don't find this post snarky, but from a usability point of view I'd love to hear specifics about where you think these designs fail?

> I'd love to hear specifics about where you think these designs fail?

I actually like the 'flat' look, but one thing I hate is the drop-down menu in Chrome for Android. Here's what I'm talking about: http://goo.gl/41iRZk

When the menu is displayed it takes about half a second to display. Every menu item is...slowly...faded...in...one...after..the...other. Give me Windows 3.1 where you click and the menu displays instantly!!

And while they are at it, put the dang refresh button back in the url bar. I have never used the speech input button to enter a url into the field. One tap becomes two taps to do something as common as refreshing the page.

I know it is very difficult for professional users to understand this, but from a design perspective this is actually very well done. These animations are really helpful for people who aren't spending their whole day in front of a computer and rely on cues to help their orientation.

I've done usability tests where these "issues" came up, whenever a dropdown or any other form of interaction suddenly popped up and the user had to spend valuable time to re-focus to find out what exactly happened and if this was indeed the right control. Additionally animations are also very useful for transition purposes. Guiding the user from one screen to another can be quite stressful when it's done in an instant and the user has to understand what's happened. This is why Apple's guidelines to transition the screens in a horizontal motion were so damn good, because they allowed users to spatially recognize their "position" in the UI. And I'm glad that the MD guidelines now also state that transitions have to be spatially correct and a screen transition isn't just a window jumping out from the center of the screen. [0]

Of course these animations are only temporary and can only help you so much, but they're very good for consumers when they are noticed. And that's all they really are: helpers, not the sole messenger of the meaning of the UI.

But of course I understand the plight of delayed interactions. UI lag that is caused by hardware aside, they're really annoying. But I see that more of a problem of customization. The OS should allow to switch off any animation.

[0] http://www.google.com/design/spec/animation/meaningful-trans...

"Best practices - Support spatial relationships through consistent motions for incoming and outgoing elements."

Couldn't agree more. And I've started to think that one of the reasons open JS grid and tree controls are so lackluster is that there is too much effort being spent on animations in general. The 'flip and fade in' display options are never useful, but being able to work effectively with high-dimensional, hierarchial data would be. Sencha is closest, but I still have to do a lot of low-level customization to work with dynamically defined columns.

I'd love if my iOS 8 worked buttery smooth. No animations. Just click -> open. I hate even a small delay. Every delay is time wasted. I wonder how much time I've cumulatively wasted on UI animations in my life.

Office 2007(?) had that fade-in menu gimmick.

Amusing and sad to watch mobile evolution recapitulate desktop design, not skipping over the dumb ideas.

Have you read Pogue's review of the new Android?

Here's an excerpt from the review:

"Unfortunately, there’s so little ornamentation that there are no cues left to tell you when something is tappable. What’s a button, what’s a label, what’s a heading? You won’t know till you try tapping."

Full review: https://www.yahoo.com/tech/android-5-0-lollipop-lighter-simp...

The example he uses is a bit contrived, since everything but the toolbar title is tappable. Does it need raised and colored affordances to signify such? Would this be more or less confusing than what was shipped?

And this gem: "In Android of old, you could swipe down from the top of the screen to open a panel of quick settings buttons (brightness, Airplane mode, and so on)." Which tells me the reviewer either has a poor memory or has confused Android with Samsung (which is an honest mistake to make).

That quick panel is indeed in stock android. On tablets, swiping down on the right side of the notification bar opens the quick settings. On phones, swiping left from the notification pulldown switches to the quick settings.

Additionally, IIRC swiping down on the right side for the quick settings is default in a number of ROMs.

Awkwardly, the "design design" is past that -- the guidelines say to use shadows to create buttons. But the deployed design is using the older design design that didn't realize that.

The guideline has 3 types of buttons one of which is "flat", just text with no decoration.

http://www.google.com/design/spec/components/buttons.html

I don't know if he was talking about flatter designs, but (IMO) they might fail because the elements are less affordant. We know that affordances are important so, again IMO, the removal of graphical cues that afford action should be approached with care (and empirically validated).

That's one of the success marks of MD I think; it retracts a bit from total flatness and says, ok, even though this is on a screen and will appear flat, how can we give subtle cues that it's actually a thing (material) and you can do stuff with it?

And they decided to do it with shadow, animation, and contrast.

Maybe there are better ways as well, but the end goal is sound.

I feel like the same as OP. Change for the sake of change without any real benefits. But with plenty of draw-backs. For example the new Gmail App on Android now uses an almost unreadable font in the overview. It is "designy" but not good for usability - and I still have 100% eye sight.

In general I feel like surrounded by the Microsoft paper clip. There is constantly something animating, popping up or popping with strong colors into your eyes.

Try to find in all the talk about material design the underlying reasons for usability. There aren't any. To me it feels like the emperor's new cloths.

I was about to buy a Nexus 6 but the new Gmail app is a no go for me and I will avoid it as long as possible.

I mean this in the most respectful way possible, but, your concrete flaws are that you believe it's just designed for the sake of change, it animates too much, and that a font is too small in one place?

For what it's worth, the underlying usability really is very well explained and pretty sound in the material (no pun intended) from Google on MD. Eg: http://www.google.com/design/ in the top 2 items.

I fully agree. I also don't find the new "flat" designs an improvement at all, and that applies both to Google's new designs and to Apple's work.

What's wrong with them, you ask? Well, in brief:

* very little indication as to what I can interact with, * you have to know the interface before you can use it, discoverability is abysmal, * touch-interface-specific: lots of actions require swipes, which you have to learn in advance and remember, * actual tappable areas became smaller (an example: "<" instead of a "Back" button).

They are hard to use for me, and even harder for my Mom.

I think this case is similar to what often happens in architecture: form over function. You get beautiful buildings that are dysfunctional. Architects hold conferences and assign awards for the beauty (light, form, straight lines, whatever), while people crowd in passageways and make their way to work next to the garbage dump, because that way is more convenient than the main entrance.

I really hope the pendulum will soon swing in the other direction and we will go back to more "meaty", discoverable interfaces with more visual hints as to how to use them.

> You can see that I don't like Material. I also don't like iOs's new UI language.

Could you elaborate? I think Apple's flatter UX approach is very well done.

I totally agree, to me it looks like the main goal of Google's UI design is for "being different from others",but not for improving the UX from the user's perspective!

Apple's new UI language has a lot more to do with corporate politics (read: Scott Forstall) than any particular sound principle of design.

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