Amen. I'll be the first to admit that "you don't want me doing your UX design"[0], but I found the whole violent shift from skeuomorphic to flat to be too much

Amen. I'll be the first to admit that "you don't want me doing your UX design"[0], but I found the whole violent shift from skeuomorphic to flat to be too much. Almost over night we went from nearly cartoonish to IRS forms "with color". As a non-designer, I was happy -- finally, I could hit up a web site for a reasonable color palette, grab a popular font from Google and have a design that almost passed as typical. As a user, I found the look ... boring and uninspired. Here's the thing, though, skeuomorphic design did serve a purpose. It was to equate, for non-tech-savvy folks, concepts from the "real world" to concepts in an app. A few simple design elements can differentiate my calendar from my task list from my playlist and can be highly effective in circumstances where providing a UI more than a very brief glance can be dangerous[1]. And outside of those scenarios, it's nice reducing the cognitive load required to recognize the context of what I'm doing. Unfortunately, it was taken way too far. But it went too far the other way, too. There's a happy medium here, and I rather like the UI presented here as that happy place. [0] I'm not completely miserable at it, but I'm a developer. I want a knob/switch/setting for everything and the ability to customize everything (I joke that I never quit Firefox because I love "about:config"). My mom doesn't. For most of my projects, which are either personal or targeted at engineers, a lot of time isn't spent thinking about design. [1] For instance, waking my phone while driving to change the song -- It's nice to see something that indicates "that's a playlist" which is obvious and instant.