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Thank you, Lord! My prayers have been heard. I'm just happy that I am not the only one who got rants about the flat UI. It really should go away. The flat desig

Thank you, Lord! My prayers have been heard. I'm just happy that I am not the only one who got rants about the flat UI. It really should go away. The flat design was born from Microsoft Windows phone Metro UI, if I recall correctly, then other designers quickly jumped on the wagon and claiming it's the next greatest and neatest "UI revolution". What a joke! It totally sacrifices usability. The outcome? A horrible user experience, and job security for the designers. Link to Flat design: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_design It was indeed first introduced by Microsoft with the name Metro Design. Microsoft is moving away from the notorious Flat UI to Fluent Design: http://www.firstpost.com/tech/news-analysis/build-2017-microsoft-evolves-beyond-flat-ui-with-its-fluent-design-language-3702669.html http://www.firstpost.com/tech/news-analysis/build-2017-micro...

azeirah 9y ago
Every type of design has its up- and downsides. You propose to do away with flat design, what's the alternative? You're just reinitiating the cycle. Where are we going, if anywhere?
- peterlk 9y ago
  I'm not really in the design universe that much any more, but the successor to flat design seemed to be material design. It lives somewhere between skeuomorphism and flat design. Any designers care to comment what the new/next hot thing is?
  - King-Aaron 9y ago
    Brutalism > cough
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - JoshMnem 9y ago
    I think that some kind of minimalism will come next, after the novelty of the current trend wears off. There are accessibility problems with Material Design (and maybe Fluent Design) due to animation overkill and over-saturated colors. I'm waiting for the study on how many types of animation can cause nausea in some people. https://www.webaccessibility.com/best_practices.php?technology_platform_id=11 https://www.webaccessibility.com/best_practices.php?technolo...
  - jansho 9y ago
    There does seem to be a few brutalist articles knocking around lately but I think it'll stay a niche. Most designers are actually pretty lazy (or just prone to following trends, like other professions?) and would be happy to follow any good design docs (Material Design etc) then apply their own interpretation. But with brutalist UI, since it's usually accompanied by a sort of shock factor, it requires a bit more ingenuity than just choosing a unique colour palette. It also tends to be hit-or-miss, and that's risky. There's some noise about creating the next interface for flat screens and VR/AR (Microsoft again) which as long as VR isn't mainstream, I think it'll be more of a play (and fad.) I also think that the ideal UI doc (may not be the next trend) combine skeuomorphism and flat while leaving plenty of space for designers to express their own ingenuity through content. At this moment, you can feel UI dictating how the content should be created and organised; all those one-scroll container webpages and humble-braggy profiles bore me to death. But the best UI takes a back seat while content is the main performer, OR, at the very least there is a variable organic component - Google's doodly homepage fits the latter actually. This sounds so stupidly obvious to point out, but I feel that too much effort is being spent on innovating UI than the content itself. Content is far more exciting and challenging! Storytelling is often done in one medium, but what if you use several, one for each small part of the experience? What if you focus on creating multiple micro experiences? (Not necessarily animated micro-interactions.) That for me is the real task of UX designers - not just organise flow but how best to present content as a memorable story.
    - michaelt 9y ago
      Most designers are actually pretty lazy (or just prone to following trends, like other professions?) If it means more people's buttons and checkboxes look the same, I'd say that's a good thing.
      - jansho 9y ago
        Very true but it's just boring. I'm shooting myself in the foot! Reading back my older post, I haven't been very thoughtful about expressing it properly; I simply think that the current trends such as one-scroll webpages also dictate (unintentionally maybe) about what kind of content should be put on and how they should be presented, resulting in many websites that look the same and feel the same. This is a shame because the great differentiator should be content.
- jackmott 9y ago
  don't go anywhere, ui design is a random walk.
  - chenster 9y ago
    Agreed. So much for a 15 years random experiment.
- coldtea 9y ago
  >Every type of design has its up- and downsides. You propose to do away with flat design, what's the alternative? You're just reinitiating the cycle. Or, you know, just went back to where we were, which was better.
  - lmm 9y ago
    That's what flat was though. A return to the good old days of plain, simple UI that looked like what it was. I sure as hell hope we don't go back to rounded corners everywhere.
    - oneeyedpigeon 9y ago
      It didn't "look like it was", though, that's the problem. Buttons that are flat look exactly the same as any bordered element, e.g. text inputs. Or, at the very least, they look a lot more like them than they otherwise would. Flat design was just a trend, partly as an overreaction to skeuomorphism. It was a case of 'looks' design overtaking 'usable' design, for no very clear reason; at least, no reason I can see. Buttons were 'best' when they were 3d and button-shaped. That still leaves a huge amount of customisation for designers to work with, but those two very simple factors should be maintained when producing buttons, IMO. There was a very common understanding that buttons looked that way.
      - lmm 9y ago
        Skeuomorphism ceases to be useful once people don't remember the physical thing you're trying to use. 3D buttons aren't actually that helpful to my generation: a lot of the buttons I've used in real life (e.g. those on my microwave) aren't 3D. On a computer the most common button-like thing is a web link and those don't (generally) use the 3D-effect. 3D is one way to hint that a particular element is clickable/tappable, but not the only one. Of course if you want a really scream-in-your-face button it should probably be 3D and a contrasting colour and larger and underlined and ... - but my feeling is that good UI doesn't mean making the call-to-action as attention-grabbing as possible, it's better to have a sense of proportion. (thinking about it more, the most important thing - and the thing that's backed up by solid science - is to use text rather than icons for button labels. I really hope that stays, even if we go back to 3D and rounding)
imron 9y ago
Now to eradicate my other pet peeve - colourless icons (usually black on grey) that make it more difficult to distinguish icons from each other.
- King-Aaron 9y ago
  Just the ever-increasing abandonment of contrast in general. There's so many off-white on white, or light-grey on slightly-lighter-grey designs out there that might look nice in a certain lighting condition indoors with perfect eyeballs viewing it - but for 90% of other times the content is just totally invisible.
- yoz-y 9y ago
  Colorless icons do have some merit though. You should always design your icons in a way that an outline is a good indicator and that a greyscale version works too. Relying on color to convey meaning is hostile towards the colorblind. I have had several users complain because we have used red and green lines to indicate correct and incorrect connections.
  - stevedonovan 9y ago
    Good point, but then perhaps the solution is some minimal theming? Good use of a menu item ;)
    - yoz-y 9y ago
      One reason I don't like to use alternative icon themes most of the time is that they rot easily. If the theme developer does not keep up with the application updates it will lack elements. Since themes are usually free or for a single low fee, this will happen probably as soon as the theme developer stops using the application.
  - rocqua 9y ago
    It doesn't need to be greyscale, colored monotone also works to help things stand-out without becoming too intricate.
chickenfries 9y ago
It hardly says that flat UIs are bad and should always go away. It's nuanced.
- chenster 9y ago
  Because there's nothing wrong with the traditional UI design with pop up and shadow. Why introduce another ultimately flawed design that is subpar than the previous one? It's been over 15 years since it's initially introduced by Microsoft, and I still see the usability problem here and there today. 15 years seems like utterly long time to finally prove that it doesn't really work, does it? The same argument goes to the LCD monitor aspect ratio 16x9 vs. 4x3. The former isn't any better than the latter. In fact, it has 19% LESS of screen real estate of the same screen. The only reason we all now use the 16x9 is because the mfg needed another standard in desperate to push sale because a good LCD monitor can last a very long time than the traditional CRT.
  - colejohnson66 9y ago
    Isn’t the reason 16:9 became popular cinematic more so than manufacturerers?
    - AstralStorm 9y ago
      For movies you need even more extreme ratios, 16:9 is a compromise that suits nobody. A4 or Letter with some extra on sides is better for most productivity.
      - gsich 9y ago
        A compromise would be 16:10.
        noir_lord 9y ago
        16:10 rotated is good, I have 2412's at home (1920x1200) and 16:9 at work (2560x1440). The higher res screens win on pixels per inch but are a bit narrow in portrait, what I'd like is 2560x1600 at 24" that would be perfect.
rdtsc 9y ago
> It really should go away. It will. Designers will come up with a new thing pretty quickly. In that respect I guess they are probably no different than developers. Nobody likes to end the year with "yeah I just maintained this piece of code last year", instead it has to be "yeah the code the last team wrote was crap, so we tore it all out, replaced with a fancier later framework, added some features on top, etc". Presumably people in charge of design at these big companies get paid decently, so there is some internal pressure to deliver something. So no matter how good, fast, clean the current interface, is there will be an unveiling of a "cooler / newer / fresher" interface. But I think the fundamental reason reason is most likely because of a need to create work to justify salaries. This happens in software, in design, and probably many other fields. Managers, department heads, directors, CEOs they all play this game. Sometimes everyone in the game realizes what's happening but they just go along because it works out for them (well sometimes it doesn't work out, but then they blame the customers ;-) )
- stephengillie 9y ago
  The Interface itself is a type of artwork. Like all art, it must grow and change to stay relevant, or stagnate and be left behind on the Island of Irrelevant Toys. Like many things, it's a conversation between designers, and sometimes happy accidents do get made and dark avenues are explored. Architecture[0] is one example of a design (basically a cave) growing and changing to stay relevant and reflect current use and needs. Recent trends have been moving away from the "monolithic" styles of the Cold War Era and specifically including blocks that stick out and have a very different color. Also, some fire codes allow the upper few floors of an apartment structure to be made from wood[1], so long as all the floors below the first few are concrete. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_architectural_styles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_architectural_styl... [1] http://marks-thomas.com/2015/03/exploring-a-shift-to-five-story-wood-frame-construction/ http://marks-thomas.com/2015/03/exploring-a-shift-to-five-st...
  - DougWebb 9y ago
    A user interface is a tool to connect the computer and a human user in order to allow a task to be performed. Unless these three components change, the only reason for the interface to change is to make it do its job more efficiently. It's no different from the many other tools used by people to do their jobs. Once they reach an optimal form, they stop changing unless some drastic technological change occurs. Hand-tools for woodworking hadn't changed for centuries, until electricity was introduced. Electric hand-tools have only had small gradual improvements since then.
copx 9y ago
I have always hated this fashion with passion too. For me it makes UIs less aesthetically pleasing and harder to use. One of the reasons why I still use Windows 7 is that I like its 3D transparent glass-like look and utterly hate the flat design of later versions which I would call soulless and ugly. And the UI elements are harder to distinguish for me. That being said, many people do like it, and I am not aware of any studies about how many people like it / don't like / don't care in general. Fortunately for us flat UI haters, that horrible design trend will go away the same way it came - as a fashion. Fashion by definition does not last. Sooner or later flat design will inevitability be considered old and unhip too.
- andrepd 9y ago
  Absolutely. I still stick with Windows 7 as well. I just can't stand the flatness, and the obnoxious amounts of space-wasting whitespace.
  - ktRolster 9y ago
    The whitespace is there because people design first for mobile, then port to desktop browsers as an afterthought. That's not going to change any time soon.
    - akie 9y ago
      The introduction of copious amounts of whitespace is a very common design tool that is not limited to just websites. Have a look at an average art gallery or museum and you will know what I mean. And there's a reason why using whitespace is a good thing, as outlined in this article[1] for example. [1] https://boagworld.com/design/why-whitespace-matters/ https://boagworld.com/design/why-whitespace-matters/
    - gsich 9y ago
      It's still bad.
    - Pica_soO 9y ago
      I remember a admin at a company giving me a before and after on some tool- where the fat-finger-friendly UI reduced the presented information and thus the usefulness off the tool to basically zero.
EGreg 9y ago
I've been saying this ever since Jony Ive has bastardized my beloved iPhone starting with iOS 7. Apple went from being a leader to a follower - of Microsoft! Sad to say that, today, Google's UIs are far more usable than Apple's. Less hidden tiny icons too. http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=234 http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=234 Steve Jobs and Scott Forstall would have never allowed this travesty.
- chenster 9y ago
  I thought about the same. Apple should be the forefront of the UI game considering the design and UI always have been their strong suit. With that said, Apple has improved upon the "too flat" UI with subtle 3D and shade that actually made the UI generally more usable. The trick is to find the right balance.
- exodust 9y ago
  When iOS7 first booted up I honestly thought it hadn't installed properly, that I was missing button graphics and background textures. The app store design was a joke, with no defining separation between elements, everything plain white, it became a chore to intuitively recognise different areas. From that point I have wanted a customisable iOS interface, where we are "allowed" to apply our own skins and themes. If people like flat design, that's fine, but it's unreasonable that the same uniform interface is forced on everyone.
- yoz-y 9y ago
  Steve Jobs and Scott Forstall had a huge advantage, they only had to care about a 320x240 (and later @2x) canvas. Crafting backgrounds and textures is easy if you know the pixel resolution, however now with multiple sizes and high dpi screens, what you want is a flexible and adaptable UI. Flat design makes UI development easier. This does not excuse using simple labels instead of buttons but iOS 10 has backpedaled quite a lot on that.
  - gurkendoktor 9y ago
    I've been working on several third-party apps from iOS 4 to 10. Flat design (as implemented in iOS 7) hasn't really made development easier. Most iOS 6 apps weren't even crazy about textured backgrounds [1] [2] [3]. Mostly it boiled down to designers giving us a PSD that we would slice into handful of resizable textures for UI controls (like Android nine-patches). It was a bit like table-based HTML design, but in a good way, as the framework completely supported it. Then iOS 7 killed textures, but introduced translucency to make up for its overall blandness. And that really ruined the simplistic beauty of UIKit programming, since everything now has to deal with all the band-aid that is needed to make views extend below translucent bars (layout guides, edgesForExtendedLayout, automaticallyAdjustsScrollViewInsets, ...). Here's a random example of how translucent vs. opaque bars can cause trouble. [4] We've traded a few minutes in Photoshop for hours of wrestling with UIKit's undocumented heuristics when it comes to layout code/transitions. [1] http://www.iclarified.com/images/news/24614/92620/92620.jpg http://www.iclarified.com/images/news/24614/92620/92620.jpg [2] http://photos2.insidercdn.com/javascript-121220.jpg http://photos2.insidercdn.com/javascript-121220.jpg [3] https://cdn.cultofmac.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Screen-Shot-2012-09-25-at-5.22.10-PM.jpg https://cdn.cultofmac.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Screen-... [4] https://stackoverflow.com/a/33537188 https://stackoverflow.com/a/33537188
2_listerine_pls 9y ago
> I am not the only one who got rants about the flat UI. It really should go away. The article is poorly titled. The issue is not about Flat vs Non-Flat. It's about emphasis of elements in a flat context. The article highlights "flat 2.0" as a better choice given that it uses 3D shadows.
Illniyar 9y ago
I really dislike that flat-design has destroyed the use of gradients, I think buttons are much nicer when they look 3d. But flat design did spread the importance of contrast, simplicity and subtlety, not to mention using animations to convey meaning, which do wonders to make apps and the web look much better. I think as we move forward elements of flat design and traditional UI design will merge into a new set of popular guidelines - hopefully they'll contain 3d looking buttons :)
- bauerd 9y ago
  >[…] not to mention using animations to convey meaning, which do wonders to make apps and the web look much better I'd argue most animations today degrade the user experience because they're not done right. Typically, animations have too long durations, transform annoying properties, catch my attention when they should not, and too often just make common interactions more time-consuming, laggy and hence painful. If I could selectively disable CSS animation/transform properties in Chrome, I'd do it in a heartbeat.
- rocqua 9y ago
  Many gradients look gaudy to me these days. You don't need phong shading on your buttons, a slight bevel using a darker and lighter shade are enough to draw my attention. That is not to say I like flat design, I dislike 'faux curvy 3d' design. Clean lines can be combined with depth perception. For this, very small gradients (i.e. to soften edges) make sense, but these are gradients that ought to be very small. On this 14" laptop I'd say at most 1mm.
  - Illniyar 9y ago
    I like the purple button in the cosmopolitan hotel example, and that is a full gradient as far as I can tell. I agree that gradients can be use tactlessly but I find when the colors are chosen correctly they look really well. Of course bevel is also a great looking option
seanp2k2 9y ago
Read the headline and thought the same first sentence. It's about dang time. Flat UI was an 80s thing because that's all we had. Put shadows and highlights on your frickin' buttons! Just because everyone went a little (or a lot) overboard with skeuomorphism doesn't mean that it's cool to just put a grey-on-darker-grey " " by a thing and expect everyone to know where the tap target area for that is. It's almost as bad as apps where you have to "pull out" from one side to get at other functionality with no indicators that this is a thing.
- sp332 9y ago
  Even DOS interfaces and old Mac OS had drop shadows. Apple even did UI research. Everyone knew back then that flatness is bad.
amelius 9y ago
One problem with the 3D design is: it looks really silly when viewed from upside down. This is not a problem on desktops, but on tablets and phones it can be.
- barrkel 9y ago
  Having a fixed "light position" at top / top-left isn't the only way of getting a mild sunk / popped effect. Using internal and external shadows can get much of the same effect in a way that doesn't have a fixed direction.
  - amelius 9y ago
    Good point. But external shadows pose a problem: pixels outside the original bounding box of the element need to be painted, and may overlap with other elements.
- wowtip 9y ago
  Wonder if it would be plausible having light sensors on a tablet and base shadows on the room's available light? Having a table flat on a surface and have UI "shadows" move around with light changes would likely be a pretty immersive effect.
  - gbl08ma 9y ago
    Immersive but also very battery draining...
  - intoverflow2 9y ago
    Definitely believe Apple had been exploring sensor driven UI effects if you follow the signs like this patent [0]. Wouldn't have been shocked if they'd had a prototype with the whole UI doing it around iOS 4/5. But only the Music.app volume knob part shipped (iOS 4 IIRC the brushed metal on the knob had a tilt based lighting effect). [0] http://www.google.com.pg/patents/US8130237 http://www.google.com.pg/patents/US8130237
hashmal 9y ago
There's a distinction to be made between the intrinsic properties of flat design, and how designers interpret it. I think the vast majority of apps/websites using "flat design" are an insult to what it is really about. Removing elements, simplifying shapes... should be done to increase comprehension and efficiency (i.e. removing noise), not to make something look "clean" or cool.
Pxtl 9y ago
Not only that, but WinPhone had an extremely consistent design language. There was almost zero wiggle room for designers to style their apps individually. This was necessary to make sure that a button looks like a button even without bevels. The modern mishmash of anything-goes design with flat styling makes modern uis inscrutable.
ponyous 9y ago
To be honest what they did with early versions of Windows Phones was pure genius. If I miss anything now that I use iOS, is the UX that Metro design provided. What made the UX shitty was when they decided to follow Android and iOS path, with hamburger buttons, buttons at the top, lower contrast... They stopped following their core UX ideas to comfort the users of other OSes. Regarding PC market. I assume Windows 8/10 could be good, but we were too used to existing workflow, so it felt really weird when it came out. They should gradually introduce what Windows 10 offers today. I agree Flat UI can be terrible if not done right, but so can be every other design.
- bitL 9y ago
  Maybe genius, though definitely eccentric and appealing to a small minority. For me, WP became bearable, even elegant in some sense, when they introduced fully transparent tiles so that I could put some nice picture underneath and not look at those single-colored squares everywhere.
flushandforget 9y ago
Not knowing what is text and what is a link just kills me. We went through lots of this in the webs early days. We had icons for navigation and experimental flash navigation. But it made for mystery meat navigation - and in the end we returned to text. Now it's all gone full circle.
- sogen 9y ago
  Yup, I remember a band website (Morcheeba) in the 90s had no underline in the links, thought "what the hell?!", was the first time I saw something like that, and I hated it.

azeirah 9y ago

Every type of design has its up- and downsides. You propose to do away with flat design, what's the alternative? You're just reinitiating the cycle. Where are we going, if anywhere?

peterlk 9y ago
I'm not really in the design universe that much any more, but the successor to flat design seemed to be material design. It lives somewhere between skeuomorphism and flat design. Any designers care to comment what the new/next hot thing is?
- King-Aaron 9y ago
  Brutalism > cough
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- JoshMnem 9y ago
  I think that some kind of minimalism will come next, after the novelty of the current trend wears off. There are accessibility problems with Material Design (and maybe Fluent Design) due to animation overkill and over-saturated colors. I'm waiting for the study on how many types of animation can cause nausea in some people. https://www.webaccessibility.com/best_practices.php?technology_platform_id=11 https://www.webaccessibility.com/best_practices.php?technolo...
- jansho 9y ago
  There does seem to be a few brutalist articles knocking around lately but I think it'll stay a niche. Most designers are actually pretty lazy (or just prone to following trends, like other professions?) and would be happy to follow any good design docs (Material Design etc) then apply their own interpretation. But with brutalist UI, since it's usually accompanied by a sort of shock factor, it requires a bit more ingenuity than just choosing a unique colour palette. It also tends to be hit-or-miss, and that's risky. There's some noise about creating the next interface for flat screens and VR/AR (Microsoft again) which as long as VR isn't mainstream, I think it'll be more of a play (and fad.) I also think that the ideal UI doc (may not be the next trend) combine skeuomorphism and flat while leaving plenty of space for designers to express their own ingenuity through content. At this moment, you can feel UI dictating how the content should be created and organised; all those one-scroll container webpages and humble-braggy profiles bore me to death. But the best UI takes a back seat while content is the main performer, OR, at the very least there is a variable organic component - Google's doodly homepage fits the latter actually. This sounds so stupidly obvious to point out, but I feel that too much effort is being spent on innovating UI than the content itself. Content is far more exciting and challenging! Storytelling is often done in one medium, but what if you use several, one for each small part of the experience? What if you focus on creating multiple micro experiences? (Not necessarily animated micro-interactions.) That for me is the real task of UX designers - not just organise flow but how best to present content as a memorable story.
  - michaelt 9y ago
    Most designers are actually pretty lazy (or just prone to following trends, like other professions?) If it means more people's buttons and checkboxes look the same, I'd say that's a good thing.
    - jansho 9y ago
      Very true but it's just boring. I'm shooting myself in the foot! Reading back my older post, I haven't been very thoughtful about expressing it properly; I simply think that the current trends such as one-scroll webpages also dictate (unintentionally maybe) about what kind of content should be put on and how they should be presented, resulting in many websites that look the same and feel the same. This is a shame because the great differentiator should be content.
jackmott 9y ago
don't go anywhere, ui design is a random walk.
- chenster 9y ago
  Agreed. So much for a 15 years random experiment.
coldtea 9y ago
>Every type of design has its up- and downsides. You propose to do away with flat design, what's the alternative? You're just reinitiating the cycle. Or, you know, just went back to where we were, which was better.
- lmm 9y ago
  That's what flat was though. A return to the good old days of plain, simple UI that looked like what it was. I sure as hell hope we don't go back to rounded corners everywhere.
  - oneeyedpigeon 9y ago
    It didn't "look like it was", though, that's the problem. Buttons that are flat look exactly the same as any bordered element, e.g. text inputs. Or, at the very least, they look a lot more like them than they otherwise would. Flat design was just a trend, partly as an overreaction to skeuomorphism. It was a case of 'looks' design overtaking 'usable' design, for no very clear reason; at least, no reason I can see. Buttons were 'best' when they were 3d and button-shaped. That still leaves a huge amount of customisation for designers to work with, but those two very simple factors should be maintained when producing buttons, IMO. There was a very common understanding that buttons looked that way.
    - lmm 9y ago
      Skeuomorphism ceases to be useful once people don't remember the physical thing you're trying to use. 3D buttons aren't actually that helpful to my generation: a lot of the buttons I've used in real life (e.g. those on my microwave) aren't 3D. On a computer the most common button-like thing is a web link and those don't (generally) use the 3D-effect. 3D is one way to hint that a particular element is clickable/tappable, but not the only one. Of course if you want a really scream-in-your-face button it should probably be 3D and a contrasting colour and larger and underlined and ... - but my feeling is that good UI doesn't mean making the call-to-action as attention-grabbing as possible, it's better to have a sense of proportion. (thinking about it more, the most important thing - and the thing that's backed up by solid science - is to use text rather than icons for button labels. I really hope that stays, even if we go back to 3D and rounding)

imron 9y ago

Now to eradicate my other pet peeve - colourless icons (usually black on grey) that make it more difficult to distinguish icons from each other.

King-Aaron 9y ago
Just the ever-increasing abandonment of contrast in general. There's so many off-white on white, or light-grey on slightly-lighter-grey designs out there that might look nice in a certain lighting condition indoors with perfect eyeballs viewing it - but for 90% of other times the content is just totally invisible.
yoz-y 9y ago
Colorless icons do have some merit though. You should always design your icons in a way that an outline is a good indicator and that a greyscale version works too. Relying on color to convey meaning is hostile towards the colorblind. I have had several users complain because we have used red and green lines to indicate correct and incorrect connections.
- stevedonovan 9y ago
  Good point, but then perhaps the solution is some minimal theming? Good use of a menu item ;)
  - yoz-y 9y ago
    One reason I don't like to use alternative icon themes most of the time is that they rot easily. If the theme developer does not keep up with the application updates it will lack elements. Since themes are usually free or for a single low fee, this will happen probably as soon as the theme developer stops using the application.
- rocqua 9y ago
  It doesn't need to be greyscale, colored monotone also works to help things stand-out without becoming too intricate.

chickenfries 9y ago

It hardly says that flat UIs are bad and should always go away. It's nuanced.

chenster 9y ago
Because there's nothing wrong with the traditional UI design with pop up and shadow. Why introduce another ultimately flawed design that is subpar than the previous one? It's been over 15 years since it's initially introduced by Microsoft, and I still see the usability problem here and there today. 15 years seems like utterly long time to finally prove that it doesn't really work, does it? The same argument goes to the LCD monitor aspect ratio 16x9 vs. 4x3. The former isn't any better than the latter. In fact, it has 19% LESS of screen real estate of the same screen. The only reason we all now use the 16x9 is because the mfg needed another standard in desperate to push sale because a good LCD monitor can last a very long time than the traditional CRT.
- colejohnson66 9y ago
  Isn’t the reason 16:9 became popular cinematic more so than manufacturerers?
  - AstralStorm 9y ago
    For movies you need even more extreme ratios, 16:9 is a compromise that suits nobody. A4 or Letter with some extra on sides is better for most productivity.
    - gsich 9y ago
      A compromise would be 16:10.
      - noir_lord 9y ago
        16:10 rotated is good, I have 2412's at home (1920x1200) and 16:9 at work (2560x1440). The higher res screens win on pixels per inch but are a bit narrow in portrait, what I'd like is 2560x1600 at 24" that would be perfect.

rdtsc 9y ago

> It really should go away. It will. Designers will come up with a new thing pretty quickly. In that respect I guess they are probably no different than developers. Nobody likes to end the year with "yeah I just maintained this piece of code last year", instead it has to be "yeah the code the last team wrote was crap, so we tore it all out, replaced with a fancier later framework, added some features on top, etc". Presumably people in charge of design at these big companies get paid decently, so there is some internal pressure to deliver something. So no matter how good, fast, clean the current interface, is there will be an unveiling of a "cooler / newer / fresher" interface. But I think the fundamental reason reason is most likely because of a need to create work to justify salaries. This happens in software, in design, and probably many other fields. Managers, department heads, directors, CEOs they all play this game. Sometimes everyone in the game realizes what's happening but they just go along because it works out for them (well sometimes it doesn't work out, but then they blame the customers ;-) )

stephengillie 9y ago
The Interface itself is a type of artwork. Like all art, it must grow and change to stay relevant, or stagnate and be left behind on the Island of Irrelevant Toys. Like many things, it's a conversation between designers, and sometimes happy accidents do get made and dark avenues are explored. Architecture[0] is one example of a design (basically a cave) growing and changing to stay relevant and reflect current use and needs. Recent trends have been moving away from the "monolithic" styles of the Cold War Era and specifically including blocks that stick out and have a very different color. Also, some fire codes allow the upper few floors of an apartment structure to be made from wood[1], so long as all the floors below the first few are concrete. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_architectural_styles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_architectural_styl... [1] http://marks-thomas.com/2015/03/exploring-a-shift-to-five-story-wood-frame-construction/ http://marks-thomas.com/2015/03/exploring-a-shift-to-five-st...
- DougWebb 9y ago
  A user interface is a tool to connect the computer and a human user in order to allow a task to be performed. Unless these three components change, the only reason for the interface to change is to make it do its job more efficiently. It's no different from the many other tools used by people to do their jobs. Once they reach an optimal form, they stop changing unless some drastic technological change occurs. Hand-tools for woodworking hadn't changed for centuries, until electricity was introduced. Electric hand-tools have only had small gradual improvements since then.

copx 9y ago

I have always hated this fashion with passion too. For me it makes UIs less aesthetically pleasing and harder to use. One of the reasons why I still use Windows 7 is that I like its 3D transparent glass-like look and utterly hate the flat design of later versions which I would call soulless and ugly. And the UI elements are harder to distinguish for me. That being said, many people do like it, and I am not aware of any studies about how many people like it / don't like / don't care in general. Fortunately for us flat UI haters, that horrible design trend will go away the same way it came - as a fashion. Fashion by definition does not last. Sooner or later flat design will inevitability be considered old and unhip too.

andrepd 9y ago
Absolutely. I still stick with Windows 7 as well. I just can't stand the flatness, and the obnoxious amounts of space-wasting whitespace.
- ktRolster 9y ago
  The whitespace is there because people design first for mobile, then port to desktop browsers as an afterthought. That's not going to change any time soon.
  - akie 9y ago
    The introduction of copious amounts of whitespace is a very common design tool that is not limited to just websites. Have a look at an average art gallery or museum and you will know what I mean. And there's a reason why using whitespace is a good thing, as outlined in this article[1] for example. [1] https://boagworld.com/design/why-whitespace-matters/ https://boagworld.com/design/why-whitespace-matters/
  - gsich 9y ago
    It's still bad.
  - Pica_soO 9y ago
    I remember a admin at a company giving me a before and after on some tool- where the fat-finger-friendly UI reduced the presented information and thus the usefulness off the tool to basically zero.

EGreg 9y ago

I've been saying this ever since Jony Ive has bastardized my beloved iPhone starting with iOS 7. Apple went from being a leader to a follower - of Microsoft! Sad to say that, today, Google's UIs are far more usable than Apple's. Less hidden tiny icons too. http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=234 http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=234 Steve Jobs and Scott Forstall would have never allowed this travesty.

chenster 9y ago
I thought about the same. Apple should be the forefront of the UI game considering the design and UI always have been their strong suit. With that said, Apple has improved upon the "too flat" UI with subtle 3D and shade that actually made the UI generally more usable. The trick is to find the right balance.
exodust 9y ago
When iOS7 first booted up I honestly thought it hadn't installed properly, that I was missing button graphics and background textures. The app store design was a joke, with no defining separation between elements, everything plain white, it became a chore to intuitively recognise different areas. From that point I have wanted a customisable iOS interface, where we are "allowed" to apply our own skins and themes. If people like flat design, that's fine, but it's unreasonable that the same uniform interface is forced on everyone.
yoz-y 9y ago
Steve Jobs and Scott Forstall had a huge advantage, they only had to care about a 320x240 (and later @2x) canvas. Crafting backgrounds and textures is easy if you know the pixel resolution, however now with multiple sizes and high dpi screens, what you want is a flexible and adaptable UI. Flat design makes UI development easier. This does not excuse using simple labels instead of buttons but iOS 10 has backpedaled quite a lot on that.
- gurkendoktor 9y ago
  I've been working on several third-party apps from iOS 4 to 10. Flat design (as implemented in iOS 7) hasn't really made development easier. Most iOS 6 apps weren't even crazy about textured backgrounds [1] [2] [3]. Mostly it boiled down to designers giving us a PSD that we would slice into handful of resizable textures for UI controls (like Android nine-patches). It was a bit like table-based HTML design, but in a good way, as the framework completely supported it. Then iOS 7 killed textures, but introduced translucency to make up for its overall blandness. And that really ruined the simplistic beauty of UIKit programming, since everything now has to deal with all the band-aid that is needed to make views extend below translucent bars (layout guides, edgesForExtendedLayout, automaticallyAdjustsScrollViewInsets, ...). Here's a random example of how translucent vs. opaque bars can cause trouble. [4] We've traded a few minutes in Photoshop for hours of wrestling with UIKit's undocumented heuristics when it comes to layout code/transitions. [1] http://www.iclarified.com/images/news/24614/92620/92620.jpg http://www.iclarified.com/images/news/24614/92620/92620.jpg [2] http://photos2.insidercdn.com/javascript-121220.jpg http://photos2.insidercdn.com/javascript-121220.jpg [3] https://cdn.cultofmac.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Screen-Shot-2012-09-25-at-5.22.10-PM.jpg https://cdn.cultofmac.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Screen-... [4] https://stackoverflow.com/a/33537188 https://stackoverflow.com/a/33537188

2_listerine_pls 9y ago

> I am not the only one who got rants about the flat UI. It really should go away. The article is poorly titled. The issue is not about Flat vs Non-Flat. It's about emphasis of elements in a flat context. The article highlights "flat 2.0" as a better choice given that it uses 3D shadows.

Illniyar 9y ago

I really dislike that flat-design has destroyed the use of gradients, I think buttons are much nicer when they look 3d. But flat design did spread the importance of contrast, simplicity and subtlety, not to mention using animations to convey meaning, which do wonders to make apps and the web look much better. I think as we move forward elements of flat design and traditional UI design will merge into a new set of popular guidelines - hopefully they'll contain 3d looking buttons :)

bauerd 9y ago
>[…] not to mention using animations to convey meaning, which do wonders to make apps and the web look much better I'd argue most animations today degrade the user experience because they're not done right. Typically, animations have too long durations, transform annoying properties, catch my attention when they should not, and too often just make common interactions more time-consuming, laggy and hence painful. If I could selectively disable CSS animation/transform properties in Chrome, I'd do it in a heartbeat.
rocqua 9y ago
Many gradients look gaudy to me these days. You don't need phong shading on your buttons, a slight bevel using a darker and lighter shade are enough to draw my attention. That is not to say I like flat design, I dislike 'faux curvy 3d' design. Clean lines can be combined with depth perception. For this, very small gradients (i.e. to soften edges) make sense, but these are gradients that ought to be very small. On this 14" laptop I'd say at most 1mm.
- Illniyar 9y ago
  I like the purple button in the cosmopolitan hotel example, and that is a full gradient as far as I can tell. I agree that gradients can be use tactlessly but I find when the colors are chosen correctly they look really well. Of course bevel is also a great looking option

seanp2k2 9y ago

Read the headline and thought the same first sentence. It's about dang time. Flat UI was an 80s thing because that's all we had. Put shadows and highlights on your frickin' buttons! Just because everyone went a little (or a lot) overboard with skeuomorphism doesn't mean that it's cool to just put a grey-on-darker-grey " " by a thing and expect everyone to know where the tap target area for that is. It's almost as bad as apps where you have to "pull out" from one side to get at other functionality with no indicators that this is a thing.

sp332 9y ago
Even DOS interfaces and old Mac OS had drop shadows. Apple even did UI research. Everyone knew back then that flatness is bad.

amelius 9y ago

One problem with the 3D design is: it looks really silly when viewed from upside down. This is not a problem on desktops, but on tablets and phones it can be.

barrkel 9y ago
Having a fixed "light position" at top / top-left isn't the only way of getting a mild sunk / popped effect. Using internal and external shadows can get much of the same effect in a way that doesn't have a fixed direction.
- amelius 9y ago
  Good point. But external shadows pose a problem: pixels outside the original bounding box of the element need to be painted, and may overlap with other elements.
wowtip 9y ago
Wonder if it would be plausible having light sensors on a tablet and base shadows on the room's available light? Having a table flat on a surface and have UI "shadows" move around with light changes would likely be a pretty immersive effect.
- gbl08ma 9y ago
  Immersive but also very battery draining...
- intoverflow2 9y ago
  Definitely believe Apple had been exploring sensor driven UI effects if you follow the signs like this patent [0]. Wouldn't have been shocked if they'd had a prototype with the whole UI doing it around iOS 4/5. But only the Music.app volume knob part shipped (iOS 4 IIRC the brushed metal on the knob had a tilt based lighting effect). [0] http://www.google.com.pg/patents/US8130237 http://www.google.com.pg/patents/US8130237

hashmal 9y ago

There's a distinction to be made between the intrinsic properties of flat design, and how designers interpret it. I think the vast majority of apps/websites using "flat design" are an insult to what it is really about. Removing elements, simplifying shapes... should be done to increase comprehension and efficiency (i.e. removing noise), not to make something look "clean" or cool.

Pxtl 9y ago

Not only that, but WinPhone had an extremely consistent design language. There was almost zero wiggle room for designers to style their apps individually. This was necessary to make sure that a button looks like a button even without bevels. The modern mishmash of anything-goes design with flat styling makes modern uis inscrutable.

ponyous 9y ago

To be honest what they did with early versions of Windows Phones was pure genius. If I miss anything now that I use iOS, is the UX that Metro design provided. What made the UX shitty was when they decided to follow Android and iOS path, with hamburger buttons, buttons at the top, lower contrast... They stopped following their core UX ideas to comfort the users of other OSes. Regarding PC market. I assume Windows 8/10 could be good, but we were too used to existing workflow, so it felt really weird when it came out. They should gradually introduce what Windows 10 offers today. I agree Flat UI can be terrible if not done right, but so can be every other design.

bitL 9y ago
Maybe genius, though definitely eccentric and appealing to a small minority. For me, WP became bearable, even elegant in some sense, when they introduced fully transparent tiles so that I could put some nice picture underneath and not look at those single-colored squares everywhere.

flushandforget 9y ago

Not knowing what is text and what is a link just kills me. We went through lots of this in the webs early days. We had icons for navigation and experimental flash navigation. But it made for mystery meat navigation - and in the end we returned to text. Now it's all gone full circle.

sogen 9y ago
Yup, I remember a band website (Morcheeba) in the 90s had no underline in the links, thought "what the hell?!", was the first time I saw something like that, and I hated it.