4 ms·

There's nothing wrong with a hand-stitching look. Making an app look interesting is not the problem. The issues with skeuomorphism occur when the attempt at m

There's nothing wrong with a hand-stitching look. Making an app look interesting is not the problem. The issues with skeuomorphism occur when the attempt at making a "real life" object imposes restrictions on functionality that would not have existed otherwise. For example: - Making something look like a "book" causes designers to try too hard to shove things into a two-page view when computers are outstanding at being far more flexible than a book (e.g. multiple resizable columns, scrolling, and so on). - Making something look like a "dial" just makes it unnecessarily hard to interact with when using a mouse or even a touch screen. Interface elements designed for use on computers are superior.

Silhouette 11y ago
Thank you. I wish people wouldn't just equate skeuomorphic design and bad design to be trendy (particularly when they don't know what "skeuomorphic" actually means, as often seems to be the case). As you say, there is nothing wrong with having details or styling in a UI, particularly if they are cosmetically attractive, as long as form still follows function. I think a lot of people on the flat design bandwagon try to create a false dichotomy with skeuomorphism and try to use this as an excuse. All too often, I suspect they really prefer flat design for other reasons, such as not being any good at more sophisticated styling but also not wanting to hire a digital artist onto a project team, or wanting to avoid anything where the implementation requires real graphics instead of whatever severely limited tools are available using nothing but CSS and the icon font from their favourite UI toolkit. I'm not saying no flat design has ever been done well, but all too often I think it's just lazy and/or unskilled design and the anti-skeuomorphism dogma gets wheeled out to try to justify it in some more flattering way.
- makecheck 11y ago
  I suspect the main driver for a "flat" appearance is that basic shapes are easy to implement across screen sizes (e.g. a colored rectangle scales pretty trivially; something like a fancy gradient may require a lot more effort to look reasonable on 14 different device sizes, especially if icon artwork is involved for all the corner and side pieces). Also, clear icons are easier to construct with simple shapes than with detailed pictures, and symbolic icons may localize better. For example, a highly detailed picture of a mailbox varies between a lot of countries; a symbol of an envelope may not, and it's probably more obvious anyway. Personally, I think a nice middle ground was the original iOS, where you could do cool things like define simple shapes for tab-view icons but have the OS stylize them for you (i.e. a plain white shape would end up with a cool blue gradient and look perfect in the black gradient tab bar, even though the original icon had no gradients or colors or rounded corners). And the UI elements, while sometimes a bit complex, managed to scale just fine between the screen sizes of the time.
quanticle 11y ago
>The issues with skeuomorphism occur when the attempt at making a "real life" object imposes restrictions on functionality that would not have existed otherwise. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. Before relaxing the restrictions on functionality and making everything resizable and customizable, you need to think about the cognitive load that is going to impose on your users. Books are actually a good example of this. I'm not sure I've ever actually wanted to resize or reflow the text in a book. Most books work rather well with the default settings. I can just pick it up and start reading. I don't need to mess with the column layout or scroll settings before I can start doing what I intended to do. The other advantage that skeuomorphism gives you is that you can piggyback on pre-existing user expectations. A dial may be a bit awkward to use with a mouse, but at least I can look at it and figure out what it does at a glance. The same applies to other skeuomorphic UI elements, like 3-d buttons, notebook-like pages, tabs, etc. I can, at a glance, look at all of those things and know what the expected behavior and interactions are. Compare this to Apple's flat design or Google's material design. Sure, it looks great. But I don't know how to interact with it. Is this text a button, or is it just a label? Does this panel move when I swipe on it? Does swiping in from the edge do something? How about pinching to zoom? The fact that so many apps have a modal overlay tutorial on first run should tell us that our "flat" designs are unusable. Yes, having some kind of help that explains what each control does may be appropriate, but we shouldn't have to explain how to use the controls themselves.

Silhouette 11y ago

Thank you. I wish people wouldn't just equate skeuomorphic design and bad design to be trendy (particularly when they don't know what "skeuomorphic" actually means, as often seems to be the case). As you say, there is nothing wrong with having details or styling in a UI, particularly if they are cosmetically attractive, as long as form still follows function. I think a lot of people on the flat design bandwagon try to create a false dichotomy with skeuomorphism and try to use this as an excuse. All too often, I suspect they really prefer flat design for other reasons, such as not being any good at more sophisticated styling but also not wanting to hire a digital artist onto a project team, or wanting to avoid anything where the implementation requires real graphics instead of whatever severely limited tools are available using nothing but CSS and the icon font from their favourite UI toolkit. I'm not saying no flat design has ever been done well, but all too often I think it's just lazy and/or unskilled design and the anti-skeuomorphism dogma gets wheeled out to try to justify it in some more flattering way.

makecheck 11y ago
I suspect the main driver for a "flat" appearance is that basic shapes are easy to implement across screen sizes (e.g. a colored rectangle scales pretty trivially; something like a fancy gradient may require a lot more effort to look reasonable on 14 different device sizes, especially if icon artwork is involved for all the corner and side pieces). Also, clear icons are easier to construct with simple shapes than with detailed pictures, and symbolic icons may localize better. For example, a highly detailed picture of a mailbox varies between a lot of countries; a symbol of an envelope may not, and it's probably more obvious anyway. Personally, I think a nice middle ground was the original iOS, where you could do cool things like define simple shapes for tab-view icons but have the OS stylize them for you (i.e. a plain white shape would end up with a cool blue gradient and look perfect in the black gradient tab bar, even though the original icon had no gradients or colors or rounded corners). And the UI elements, while sometimes a bit complex, managed to scale just fine between the screen sizes of the time.

quanticle 11y ago

>The issues with skeuomorphism occur when the attempt at making a "real life" object imposes restrictions on functionality that would not have existed otherwise. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. Before relaxing the restrictions on functionality and making everything resizable and customizable, you need to think about the cognitive load that is going to impose on your users. Books are actually a good example of this. I'm not sure I've ever actually wanted to resize or reflow the text in a book. Most books work rather well with the default settings. I can just pick it up and start reading. I don't need to mess with the column layout or scroll settings before I can start doing what I intended to do. The other advantage that skeuomorphism gives you is that you can piggyback on pre-existing user expectations. A dial may be a bit awkward to use with a mouse, but at least I can look at it and figure out what it does at a glance. The same applies to other skeuomorphic UI elements, like 3-d buttons, notebook-like pages, tabs, etc. I can, at a glance, look at all of those things and know what the expected behavior and interactions are. Compare this to Apple's flat design or Google's material design. Sure, it looks great. But I don't know how to interact with it. Is this text a button, or is it just a label? Does this panel move when I swipe on it? Does swiping in from the edge do something? How about pinching to zoom? The fact that so many apps have a modal overlay tutorial on first run should tell us that our "flat" designs are unusable. Yes, having some kind of help that explains what each control does may be appropriate, but we shouldn't have to explain how to use the controls themselves.