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I'm going to take a risk here and say that I'm a designer who generally likes flat design. I see a lot of hate here against flat design, and it makes sense. A

I'm going to take a risk here and say that I'm a designer who generally likes flat design. I see a lot of hate here against flat design, and it makes sense. A lot of designers abuse it, making their UIs ambiguous. It's probably true that if flat design was never conceived, UIs would be less confusing on average. But it's clearly possible to do flat design well. iOS is mostly flat, but it's quite beautiful and user friendly. You usually know when something is a button because the context makes it obvious. If it's not obvious, it's probably not a critical feature, just a nicety for those who discover it. There will always be people who hate everything Apple designs, but I think they're usually channeling a hatred of something else, like monopolies or proprietary things. Moreover, I think flat design is not a fad but an inevitability. As a rule, designs become more abstract over time, because as users get more used to UIs, they need fewer clues. It used to be that UIs needed to be skeuomorphic to be familiar and recognizable, but now simple outlines can do the job. Why do we need to remove unneeded clues, you ask? To make room for more important things. If Instagram was littered with gradient buttons and blue underlined links, they'd draw attention away from the real content, the pictures. If Figma had too much personality, it'd influence users' designs. You could argue that we've gone too far too fast. I don't have a dog in that fight. But I would bet my big toe that we're not going to reverse time and end up with skeuomorphism again. Instead, we're going to take advantage of faster GPUs to visualize abstractions in ways we couldn't before. We're seeing that with blurred background effects becoming more common. I for one am excited to see what's next.

matsemann 5y ago
I disagree on iOS. Give an iPhone to someone never having used one before, and I'm sure they won't even be able to unlock it. I almost cringe when I see UX people with iPhones. Yes, it's esthetically pleasing, but please don't take too much inspiration from the way things work.
- odonnellryan 5y ago
  Yeah from someone who supports users sometimes they have no idea how to use their iPhones.
- pmontra 5y ago
  The first time somebody handed me an unlocked iPhone asking me to send a SMS (she was driving) I wasn't able to do it. I had to ask her where to touch. She was really surprised. I had a few years of experience on Android and 10+ with feature phones. On the other side, I asked another friend of mine to take a picture with my Android phone a couple of weeks ago and she (an iPhone user) wasn't able to find the camera app. I had to open it for her. It was on the home screen, maybe it's different on the iPhone.
  - toqy 5y ago
    On iPhone you can swipe left on the Lock Screen, or press the icon on the Lock Screen, or you can pick it from a menu you pull down from the top of the screen, or find the app via icon, search, full app list. Maybe other ways I don’t use or know. I would assume that it’s similar on android, access the camera from lock screen or app. I’d probably try the iPhone style swipe the lock screen if I didn’t see a shutter or camera looking icon, otherwise I’d use search (if I could find that) to find the app.
    - pmontra 5y ago
      Maybe that's what happened. I removed everything from the lock screen and she could have inadvertently locked the screen.
- toqy 5y ago
  If they can’t read “swipe up to open” then they’re going to have a rough time in life in general
  - matsemann 5y ago
    But that text is a lie! You can't swipe up to open. You have to swipe up from the bottom to open. So not just a general upwards swipe.
    - michaelsalim 5y ago
      Precisely. And the text isn't even guaranteed to be there (I don't use iOS).
- PennRobotics 5y ago
  I had to Google how to turn on an iMac.
- michaelsalim 5y ago
  Seconded. Wasn't able to unlock one the last time I touched an iPhone. And I even owned one - iPhone 5. Some people I talk to share similar experience.
- Spivak 5y ago
  Yes but on the flip side I don't give two shits about discoverability, I already know how to use my phone. Snapchat is actively terrible for discoverability but it's really efficient once you know. The best design for someone who is unfamiliar and the best design for the user that already knows how it works are always at odds with one another. Do you balance the game for new players or for diamond league?
  - johnqian 5y ago
    Exactly this. Design is always a compromise between discoverability and post-discovery efficiency. Programming languages are the extreme case of the latter; literally everything requires a reference, but once you’ve got the reference memorized you’re invincible.
dandellion 5y ago
> If it's not obvious, it's probably not a critical feature, just a nicety for those who discover it. That's a really bad way to go about usability. It's pretty frustrating you're looking for a feature to have to hunt for it like you're playing a point & click game. At that point I wouldn't even call it a feature, it's an Easter egg.
- bno1 5y ago
  Exactly my thoughts. Who's to say if a feature is critical or not? It's the user.
  - raphael_l 5y ago
    I would say this is not entirely correct as a standalone rule. Just to make it clear, I completely disagree with this statement the OP made: > If it's not obvious, it's probably not a critical feature, just a nicety for those who discover it. There is a huge difference between discoverability and hierarchy. If the user can't distinguish between an interactive element and a static label, the UI has failed. But there is definitely nuance in the degrees of hierarchy and importance. If every button looks the same with every affordance necessary for a user to recognise it as such, it might be great in terms of discoverability, but in most cases it would still be bad design because as a user I can't easily distinguish between primary, secondary or tertiary actions. This is of course also highly dependent on the business goals and overall context of the design. If you have a marketing page you might want to clearly distinguish actions that lead to the sign up or download of your product (this – in most cases – is what you would like your users to do and also what your users eventually want to do themselves). If you have enterprise software that is highly customizable and completely different for each and every individual, you might want to shy away from opinionated hierarchy of importance. In this case, it would be very much dependent on the user and therefor their choice. Typically the context is – at scale – more on the former side than the latter. If I have, for example, a notes app I would say the hierarchy favors the creation of new notes rather than going into settings to change the appearance of my notes. That doesn't mean it shouldn't be discoverable, only that the design should clearly dictate what's more important (especially on a temporal dimension: I'll add notes more often than I would edit the style) and therefor influence the appearance of both actions. Let me know what you think.
Derbasti 5y ago
I'd actually be willing to bet that we will go back to a more 3D look before the decade is over. Not my big toe, though. I need that. Maybe, a bottle of beer, or something? I'd argue that the flat 2D look is cool these days because it is different from the skeuomorphic 3D look we had before. It will look old and faded in a few years, and in the search for a fresh look, we'll rediscover a more tactile 3D look. Anyway, I actually like the flat 2D style as well. It might be that many current programs are not doing it well merely because they haven't had much experience with it. This will sort itself out in a few years. Much like the super-skeuomorphic apps from a few years ago that included things like stitching and torn-off paper in calendar apps and notepad apps, respectively.
Findecanor 5y ago
Something you much see too often is that a designer tries to copy some design, without understanding why that it had been designed that way in the first place. That is how you got bad flat design. That is how the idea of metaphors got skewed into skeuomorphism — and likewise, how metaphors got swept away by the movement against skeuomorphism.
- pmontra 5y ago
  Maybe most designers are not even designers but only developers, frontend or backend, and the best they (we!) can do is copy something we already used which could come from other non designers. All the reasoning is lost in the process.
joppy 5y ago
What do you think of the iOS podcasts app then? I have no idea of where to press to view details of a podcast, vs to start playing it. On the main page, the black text starts playing a podcast, and the purple text shows details. Further into the app, the purple text will start playing while the black text will view details. While playing, neither the purple nor black text do anything (they act as title/subtitle). Clicking on a picture is also pretty unpredictable. This is admittedly not a flat vs non-flat design problem, but it is exacerbated by the flat design. If actions which started something playing were outlined or something, it would be so much easier to use.
- johnqian 5y ago
  I never used the podcasts app before but just gave it a try. I can't seem to reproduce what you're describing. On the top-level pages ("Listen Now" and "Browse"), only the purple play button plays the podcast for me, clicking the purple text (the duration of the podcast) does nothing, and everything else opens the detail view for the podcast. Pictures always open detail views. What version of iOS are you on? I'm on 15.3.1.
  - joppy 5y ago
    I’m also on 15.3.1. The huge “Up Next” menu (the first thing on the first page) is what I’m describing - perhaps you need to subscribe to some podcasts before you see it. Clicking the purple durations next to the play button always starts the podcasts playing for me.
solatic 5y ago
> Why do we need to remove unneeded clues, you ask? To make room for more important things. If Instagram was littered with gradient buttons and blue underlined links, they'd draw attention away from the real content, the pictures. If Figma had too much personality, it'd influence users' designs. This is an oversimplification and not always correct in all situations. Take the original article as an example. How did 3D buttons take away from the "more important things"? Does making "New List" a flat button and thus barely distinguishable from the "To Do" title help to enhance, somehow, the "To Do" title? Does not the strong blue in the flat button ("Add Tasks...") draw user attention to it, distracting from the rest of the UI, rather than withdrawing from the rest of the screen to allow "more important things" to shine? If flat design really succeeded at helping to direct users' attention to what is important, it wouldn't be subject to the criticism that it confuses users. Users would be helped, not hindered, by such design, no?
- berkes 5y ago
  > A lot of designers abuse it, making their UIs ambiguous. ... > This is an oversimplification and not always correct in all situations. You are both saying the same thing, I guess. grandparent states that it is "possible to do flat design well" and gives examples (Apple). I don't have anyhting Apple, don't like it, but I do find their designs awe-inspiring. To me, this comes from their investment in detail. The issues you describe "Does making "New List" a flat button and thus barely distinguishable" is real and an example of bad design. Not a proof that all flat-design always is bad. It shows that too little time and effort was poored into this piece. I'm not sure how I would fix this particular issue. But I'm confident that within the contstraints of "flat design" and time and effort (investment) in details, this is solvable. I'm also confident that without the constraints of flat-design, the time and effort needed would be far less. But here we are.
- johnqian 5y ago
  I should have addressed the original article. As a sibling commenter mentioned, I didn't say all flat designs are good, quite the opposite. That to-do list design is very mediocre. A desktop to-do list app that I think is super well done is Reminders on MacOS. Its basic functionality is immediately intuitive, and it gives love to power users too with its secret ability to parse natural English (e.g. "laundry at 9") for adding notification times.
SquareWheel 5y ago
I think this is a fantastic comment. I've always seen design as just trends, but you're completely right that is serves a specific purpose, and as that purpose changes so does the design. There may still be trends, but we can at least reason about them.
birksherty 5y ago
> It used to be that UIs needed to be skeuomorphic to be familiar and recognizable, but now simple outlines can do the job. Nope. It just makes everything horrible, more pressure on brain to find out and slow in the end to do everyday operations. It's just the designers who love these just for the looks (they don't even know what design actually means), not for any usability. Tech would have better without these type of "designers".
danachow 5y ago
> iOS is mostly flat It’s less flat today then it was - because they’re clearly backpedaling. > There will always be people who hate everything Apple designs Apple ripped off flat design from Microsoft. > Why do we need to remove unneeded clues, you ask? To make room for more important things. Last I checked, some texture on UI elements didn’t take any additional space. Your arguments are entirely unconvincing. Blurred background effects are nothing new - and that’s something that’s been done with GPUs from nearly 20 years ago. They haven’t been able to make it anything more than a fad.

matsemann 5y ago

I disagree on iOS. Give an iPhone to someone never having used one before, and I'm sure they won't even be able to unlock it. I almost cringe when I see UX people with iPhones. Yes, it's esthetically pleasing, but please don't take too much inspiration from the way things work.

odonnellryan 5y ago
Yeah from someone who supports users sometimes they have no idea how to use their iPhones.
pmontra 5y ago
The first time somebody handed me an unlocked iPhone asking me to send a SMS (she was driving) I wasn't able to do it. I had to ask her where to touch. She was really surprised. I had a few years of experience on Android and 10+ with feature phones. On the other side, I asked another friend of mine to take a picture with my Android phone a couple of weeks ago and she (an iPhone user) wasn't able to find the camera app. I had to open it for her. It was on the home screen, maybe it's different on the iPhone.
- toqy 5y ago
  On iPhone you can swipe left on the Lock Screen, or press the icon on the Lock Screen, or you can pick it from a menu you pull down from the top of the screen, or find the app via icon, search, full app list. Maybe other ways I don’t use or know. I would assume that it’s similar on android, access the camera from lock screen or app. I’d probably try the iPhone style swipe the lock screen if I didn’t see a shutter or camera looking icon, otherwise I’d use search (if I could find that) to find the app.
  - pmontra 5y ago
    Maybe that's what happened. I removed everything from the lock screen and she could have inadvertently locked the screen.
toqy 5y ago
If they can’t read “swipe up to open” then they’re going to have a rough time in life in general
- matsemann 5y ago
  But that text is a lie! You can't swipe up to open. You have to swipe up from the bottom to open. So not just a general upwards swipe.
  - michaelsalim 5y ago
    Precisely. And the text isn't even guaranteed to be there (I don't use iOS).
PennRobotics 5y ago
I had to Google how to turn on an iMac.
michaelsalim 5y ago
Seconded. Wasn't able to unlock one the last time I touched an iPhone. And I even owned one - iPhone 5. Some people I talk to share similar experience.
Spivak 5y ago
Yes but on the flip side I don't give two shits about discoverability, I already know how to use my phone. Snapchat is actively terrible for discoverability but it's really efficient once you know. The best design for someone who is unfamiliar and the best design for the user that already knows how it works are always at odds with one another. Do you balance the game for new players or for diamond league?
- johnqian 5y ago
  Exactly this. Design is always a compromise between discoverability and post-discovery efficiency. Programming languages are the extreme case of the latter; literally everything requires a reference, but once you’ve got the reference memorized you’re invincible.

dandellion 5y ago

> If it's not obvious, it's probably not a critical feature, just a nicety for those who discover it. That's a really bad way to go about usability. It's pretty frustrating you're looking for a feature to have to hunt for it like you're playing a point & click game. At that point I wouldn't even call it a feature, it's an Easter egg.

bno1 5y ago
Exactly my thoughts. Who's to say if a feature is critical or not? It's the user.
- raphael_l 5y ago
  I would say this is not entirely correct as a standalone rule. Just to make it clear, I completely disagree with this statement the OP made: > If it's not obvious, it's probably not a critical feature, just a nicety for those who discover it. There is a huge difference between discoverability and hierarchy. If the user can't distinguish between an interactive element and a static label, the UI has failed. But there is definitely nuance in the degrees of hierarchy and importance. If every button looks the same with every affordance necessary for a user to recognise it as such, it might be great in terms of discoverability, but in most cases it would still be bad design because as a user I can't easily distinguish between primary, secondary or tertiary actions. This is of course also highly dependent on the business goals and overall context of the design. If you have a marketing page you might want to clearly distinguish actions that lead to the sign up or download of your product (this – in most cases – is what you would like your users to do and also what your users eventually want to do themselves). If you have enterprise software that is highly customizable and completely different for each and every individual, you might want to shy away from opinionated hierarchy of importance. In this case, it would be very much dependent on the user and therefor their choice. Typically the context is – at scale – more on the former side than the latter. If I have, for example, a notes app I would say the hierarchy favors the creation of new notes rather than going into settings to change the appearance of my notes. That doesn't mean it shouldn't be discoverable, only that the design should clearly dictate what's more important (especially on a temporal dimension: I'll add notes more often than I would edit the style) and therefor influence the appearance of both actions. Let me know what you think.

Derbasti 5y ago

I'd actually be willing to bet that we will go back to a more 3D look before the decade is over. Not my big toe, though. I need that. Maybe, a bottle of beer, or something? I'd argue that the flat 2D look is cool these days because it is different from the skeuomorphic 3D look we had before. It will look old and faded in a few years, and in the search for a fresh look, we'll rediscover a more tactile 3D look. Anyway, I actually like the flat 2D style as well. It might be that many current programs are not doing it well merely because they haven't had much experience with it. This will sort itself out in a few years. Much like the super-skeuomorphic apps from a few years ago that included things like stitching and torn-off paper in calendar apps and notepad apps, respectively.

Findecanor 5y ago

Something you much see too often is that a designer tries to copy some design, without understanding why that it had been designed that way in the first place. That is how you got bad flat design. That is how the idea of metaphors got skewed into skeuomorphism — and likewise, how metaphors got swept away by the movement against skeuomorphism.

pmontra 5y ago
Maybe most designers are not even designers but only developers, frontend or backend, and the best they (we!) can do is copy something we already used which could come from other non designers. All the reasoning is lost in the process.

joppy 5y ago

What do you think of the iOS podcasts app then? I have no idea of where to press to view details of a podcast, vs to start playing it. On the main page, the black text starts playing a podcast, and the purple text shows details. Further into the app, the purple text will start playing while the black text will view details. While playing, neither the purple nor black text do anything (they act as title/subtitle). Clicking on a picture is also pretty unpredictable. This is admittedly not a flat vs non-flat design problem, but it is exacerbated by the flat design. If actions which started something playing were outlined or something, it would be so much easier to use.

johnqian 5y ago
I never used the podcasts app before but just gave it a try. I can't seem to reproduce what you're describing. On the top-level pages ("Listen Now" and "Browse"), only the purple play button plays the podcast for me, clicking the purple text (the duration of the podcast) does nothing, and everything else opens the detail view for the podcast. Pictures always open detail views. What version of iOS are you on? I'm on 15.3.1.
- joppy 5y ago
  I’m also on 15.3.1. The huge “Up Next” menu (the first thing on the first page) is what I’m describing - perhaps you need to subscribe to some podcasts before you see it. Clicking the purple durations next to the play button always starts the podcasts playing for me.

solatic 5y ago

> Why do we need to remove unneeded clues, you ask? To make room for more important things. If Instagram was littered with gradient buttons and blue underlined links, they'd draw attention away from the real content, the pictures. If Figma had too much personality, it'd influence users' designs. This is an oversimplification and not always correct in all situations. Take the original article as an example. How did 3D buttons take away from the "more important things"? Does making "New List" a flat button and thus barely distinguishable from the "To Do" title help to enhance, somehow, the "To Do" title? Does not the strong blue in the flat button ("Add Tasks...") draw user attention to it, distracting from the rest of the UI, rather than withdrawing from the rest of the screen to allow "more important things" to shine? If flat design really succeeded at helping to direct users' attention to what is important, it wouldn't be subject to the criticism that it confuses users. Users would be helped, not hindered, by such design, no?

berkes 5y ago
> A lot of designers abuse it, making their UIs ambiguous. ... > This is an oversimplification and not always correct in all situations. You are both saying the same thing, I guess. grandparent states that it is "possible to do flat design well" and gives examples (Apple). I don't have anyhting Apple, don't like it, but I do find their designs awe-inspiring. To me, this comes from their investment in detail. The issues you describe "Does making "New List" a flat button and thus barely distinguishable" is real and an example of bad design. Not a proof that all flat-design always is bad. It shows that too little time and effort was poored into this piece. I'm not sure how I would fix this particular issue. But I'm confident that within the contstraints of "flat design" and time and effort (investment) in details, this is solvable. I'm also confident that without the constraints of flat-design, the time and effort needed would be far less. But here we are.
johnqian 5y ago
I should have addressed the original article. As a sibling commenter mentioned, I didn't say all flat designs are good, quite the opposite. That to-do list design is very mediocre. A desktop to-do list app that I think is super well done is Reminders on MacOS. Its basic functionality is immediately intuitive, and it gives love to power users too with its secret ability to parse natural English (e.g. "laundry at 9") for adding notification times.

SquareWheel 5y ago

I think this is a fantastic comment. I've always seen design as just trends, but you're completely right that is serves a specific purpose, and as that purpose changes so does the design. There may still be trends, but we can at least reason about them.

birksherty 5y ago

> It used to be that UIs needed to be skeuomorphic to be familiar and recognizable, but now simple outlines can do the job. Nope. It just makes everything horrible, more pressure on brain to find out and slow in the end to do everyday operations. It's just the designers who love these just for the looks (they don't even know what design actually means), not for any usability. Tech would have better without these type of "designers".

danachow 5y ago

> iOS is mostly flat It’s less flat today then it was - because they’re clearly backpedaling. > There will always be people who hate everything Apple designs Apple ripped off flat design from Microsoft. > Why do we need to remove unneeded clues, you ask? To make room for more important things. Last I checked, some texture on UI elements didn’t take any additional space. Your arguments are entirely unconvincing. Blurred background effects are nothing new - and that’s something that’s been done with GPUs from nearly 20 years ago. They haven’t been able to make it anything more than a fad.