It would be nice to see some usability studies to see if users actually find the actions on a page as easily despite the lack of 3D, bevels, shadows, gloss, gradients, etc.. We programers often reason things out, like the above article did, just to watch users try to use the app and prove us completely wrong.
At one company where we had flat buttons we made the most commonly desired action on the screen really huge and had a block of smaller buttons below it. In usability tests, no user ever hit that huge button. They all thought it was just a page title or something. We even tried giving them tasks that required using it, but they would go into a different section of the app like the settings and never figure it out.
At one company where we had flat buttons we made the most commonly desired action on the screen really huge and had a block of smaller buttons below it. In usability tests, no user ever hit that huge button. They all thought it was just a page title or something. We even tried giving them tasks that required using it, but they would go into a different section of the app like the settings and never figure it out.