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> I deal with a lot of legacy interfaces with brightly colored icons and they can be just as confusing if not more confusing than minimalist icons. But I think

> I deal with a lot of legacy interfaces with brightly colored icons and they can be just as confusing if not more confusing than minimalist icons. But I think people have a survivorship bias (we remember the good examples over the bad ones),... I don't think anyone's disputing that you can do colorful icons poorly, but that's not an argument against them as a concept. > ...as well as a familiarity bias (I like the things I grew up using!). One of the cardinal sins of modern UX is fixing things that aren't broken, often just as you were getting used to the last "fix." > I think the benefit of flat, monochrome designs is that they force you to offload meaning into the layout and flow of the application. You actually have to pick out a nice, meaningful spot to put the button, and make sure it makes sense in the context, and make sure users can discover it easily. Nothing's stopping a designer from doing that with colorful icons. I think the real reason for flat, monochrome icons is designers prioritizing the overall visual look/style of an application over its usability. It's almost like a less extreme version of designing a "computer interface" for a movie.

legitster 6y ago
I would argue that we are not "fixing things that aren't broken". Technology is being adopted by more and more people. It should make sense that we find ways to make improvements to reach more and more users. I think software people run the real risk of designing interfaces only they like. I'm currently dealing with software that uses old style icons and menus and users just thoroughly do not understand the interfaces. The problem is that when every icon is brightly colored and bold, none of them are meaningful to the user. They all look equally important even when not. We're finding with flat, simpler icons we have a lot more control about making certain icons more important than others. We can still give them color! And it will be more meaningful! We can make them pop out when we need to!
- tablespoon 6y ago
  > I would argue that we are not "fixing things that aren't broken". Technology is being adopted by more and more people. It should make sense that we find ways to make improvements to reach more and more users. I think software people run the real risk of designing interfaces only they like. What I meant by that comment is redesigning interfaces for aesthetics reasons: skeuomorphism is out, now skeuomorphism is in, now it's out again. Whitespace is out, whitespace is in. Google has a new icon set out so now our icons are "out of date," etc. Furthermore, there are real costs to obsoleting users' expertise with an existing interface, and those costs may not be outweighed by marginal improvements in a new design. Also expert users and beginning/casual users have very different needs, and I think there's often too much focus on beginners. > We're finding with flat, simpler icons we have a lot more control about making certain icons more important than others. We can still give them color! And it will be more meaningful! We can make them pop out when we need to! And that totally makes sense and I agree with it. What I disagree is rejecting color and depth in an interface for reasons of aesthetics, ideology, or fashion.

legitster 6y ago

I would argue that we are not "fixing things that aren't broken". Technology is being adopted by more and more people. It should make sense that we find ways to make improvements to reach more and more users. I think software people run the real risk of designing interfaces only they like. I'm currently dealing with software that uses old style icons and menus and users just thoroughly do not understand the interfaces. The problem is that when every icon is brightly colored and bold, none of them are meaningful to the user. They all look equally important even when not. We're finding with flat, simpler icons we have a lot more control about making certain icons more important than others. We can still give them color! And it will be more meaningful! We can make them pop out when we need to!

tablespoon 6y ago
> I would argue that we are not "fixing things that aren't broken". Technology is being adopted by more and more people. It should make sense that we find ways to make improvements to reach more and more users. I think software people run the real risk of designing interfaces only they like. What I meant by that comment is redesigning interfaces for aesthetics reasons: skeuomorphism is out, now skeuomorphism is in, now it's out again. Whitespace is out, whitespace is in. Google has a new icon set out so now our icons are "out of date," etc. Furthermore, there are real costs to obsoleting users' expertise with an existing interface, and those costs may not be outweighed by marginal improvements in a new design. Also expert users and beginning/casual users have very different needs, and I think there's often too much focus on beginners. > We're finding with flat, simpler icons we have a lot more control about making certain icons more important than others. We can still give them color! And it will be more meaningful! We can make them pop out when we need to! And that totally makes sense and I agree with it. What I disagree is rejecting color and depth in an interface for reasons of aesthetics, ideology, or fashion.