3 ms·

> nobody with solid background, experience, and/or scientific studies in their hands would in their right mind sketch the current shape of mindless "modern" UIs

> nobody with solid background, experience, and/or scientific studies in their hands would in their right mind sketch the current shape of mindless "modern" UIs So... Since you are talking about scientific studies, could you please reference some studies that back you up and show that flat design is in some way inferior?

j1elo 5y ago
That flat design is worse is maybe not an universal truth, but no doubt it is a well known issue and concern has been shown everywhere. Quoting from my first link below, flat design has been widely criticized by HCI and usability experts. This is one of those things that I'm willing to believe, without requiring a whole hands-on research, based on my subjective views, and on the fact that every time the topic arises, most devs seem to agree. So we know that flat design is worse, or at least we have a very firm intuition. The only remaining thing is to quantify by how much. This paper seems to go into that direction: * https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-22668-2_10 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-22668-2_... This article is very interesting and offers a list of references: * https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/skeuomorphism-is-dead-long-live-skeuomorphism https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/skeuom... And last but not least, there is a whole website which is solely dedicated to collect papers on the topic of flat design: * https://flatisbad.com/ https://flatisbad.com/
- eterevsky 5y ago
  Thank you for providing these links! I read the two articles. The first one is the closest to what I was looking for. It contains three mostly independent experiments, comparing text, icons and web layout. Text and icon do not seem relevant to this discussion. The third part of the study compares a "traditional" website design to a new, flat one. This is more relevant to the discussion, but this comparison has three huge flaws. Firstly, according to the pictures in the article, they were comparing two specific arbitrary websites. It is not clear how this comparison can be generalized. Secondly, the study is from 2015 when flat design language was relatively new. It could measure just the difference between any "traditional" and "new" design language due to the familiarity. Thirdly, the confidence intervals are huge. I don't think there is any pair of values that are confidently separated, which would make this a null result even if the experiment itself were totally fair. The second article is very interesting, but its conclusions are non-committal. I clicked to several of the links from this article. Most of them are opinion pieces, and none that I found makes any judgement call about the comparative advantage of flat design. I'm sorry but I ignored flatisbad.com since I believe Xisbad.com can't be an unbiased source of knowledge about X and should be ignored as a matter of principle.

j1elo 5y ago

That flat design is worse is maybe not an universal truth, but no doubt it is a well known issue and concern has been shown everywhere. Quoting from my first link below, flat design has been widely criticized by HCI and usability experts. This is one of those things that I'm willing to believe, without requiring a whole hands-on research, based on my subjective views, and on the fact that every time the topic arises, most devs seem to agree. So we know that flat design is worse, or at least we have a very firm intuition. The only remaining thing is to quantify by how much. This paper seems to go into that direction: * https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-22668-2_10 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-22668-2_... This article is very interesting and offers a list of references: * https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/skeuomorphism-is-dead-long-live-skeuomorphism https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/skeuom... And last but not least, there is a whole website which is solely dedicated to collect papers on the topic of flat design: * https://flatisbad.com/ https://flatisbad.com/

eterevsky 5y ago
Thank you for providing these links! I read the two articles. The first one is the closest to what I was looking for. It contains three mostly independent experiments, comparing text, icons and web layout. Text and icon do not seem relevant to this discussion. The third part of the study compares a "traditional" website design to a new, flat one. This is more relevant to the discussion, but this comparison has three huge flaws. Firstly, according to the pictures in the article, they were comparing two specific arbitrary websites. It is not clear how this comparison can be generalized. Secondly, the study is from 2015 when flat design language was relatively new. It could measure just the difference between any "traditional" and "new" design language due to the familiarity. Thirdly, the confidence intervals are huge. I don't think there is any pair of values that are confidently separated, which would make this a null result even if the experiment itself were totally fair. The second article is very interesting, but its conclusions are non-committal. I clicked to several of the links from this article. Most of them are opinion pieces, and none that I found makes any judgement call about the comparative advantage of flat design. I'm sorry but I ignored flatisbad.com since I believe Xisbad.com can't be an unbiased source of knowledge about X and should be ignored as a matter of principle.