Basically irrelevant on platforms other than the web—no iOS user will think you app is dated because it looks like the apps Apple makes, ditto Windows, Android,

Basically irrelevant on platforms other than the web—no iOS user will think you app is dated because it looks like the apps Apple makes, ditto Windows, Android, and so on—and even there I’ve seen this repeated as folk-wisdom but have never seen anyone back it up with data, nor go a step farther and find out exactly how trendy and how expensive a GUI needs to be for a given audience not to bounce (it seems, surely, this would not be constant) Meanwhile lots of successful sites don’t follow design trends the way every designer and startup seem to want to, and others do spend a lot of money fucking up their UI but not in a trendy or attractive way, particularly, and are successful nonetheless. I suspect “minimum viable design” is much cheaper and more straightforward than a lot of what’s being treated as necessary to attract users, and has less to do with following trends or cute animations or whatever than simply appearing to have been updated some time later than 2005.