3 ms·

why have desktop interfaces become flatter while graphics processors have become faster ?

• inDigiNeous 5y ago
  Well, implementing basic UI functionality even is hard enough with all the changing environments, screen sizes, rotations, touch interfaces and what have you. Making it as simple as possible makes it possible to focus in making those work in a more functional and usable manner. While it is true that CPU and GPU powers have increased, also the ways we use our machines have changed, people might have wildly different environments that the same UI needs to work on these days. Scalable UI alone can become a nightmare if you have anything more complex going on. Even the big players have a hard time figuring out proper usability, like look at Apple or Microsoft constantly making a hurdle to iterate on their designs, making mistakes along different releases. Building usable UI is freaking hard and requires a lot of user feedback, iteration and focusing on details that you don't know before starting to build the product. Changing even one thing can lead to another thing breakin, and so on..
• toyg 5y ago
  Designers will point out all sorts of usability studies. The reality is that the art world, of which industrial design is an integral part, lives and dies around fads or "movements", which negate each other every few years. We're currently at tail end of a wave that preached flatness, leveraging the move from low-res to high-res screens to entrench itself as easier to implement. Now that the migration is near completion, a correction is bound to happen. Apple have already started: they attempted to reintroduce depth and shadows in their recent iterations of icons, arguably with mixed results. More and more people will try, eventually resulting in a new wave against flatness.