Microsoft’s design language, Windows Modern, is eerily similar to the paintings of Mondrian. Its abstract world of flat colored planes and typography has lost all sense of connection to anything meaningful or concrete. These deliberately obscure design choices often leave users without any way to discern the function of interface elements.
That rings of unjustified bias. There's hardly any difference between Windows Phone and iOS 7+ in this respect.
IMHO Windows Phone is somewhat more logical to use and has less ambiguous UI elements for one reason: apps tend to consistently use the bottom bar for actions. The bar always works the same and the buttons always have the same style.
On iOS there's more of a tendency to sprinkle buttons anywhere on the screen, and those buttons can be styled pretty much anything: plain text, plain icon, circle-enclosed icon...
> On iOS there's more of a tendency to sprinkle buttons anywhere on the screen
Has it always been this way? iOS has been around longer than Windows Phone and more people have created apps for it. I believe there is a tendency to "interface drift" where when a new design pattern is introduced many developers will race to imitate it. (Consider how Material Design is popping up everywhere, even in places unrelated to Android.) But at some point an app will break from the norm. Either because the UI doesn't fit what they want, or it's a new idea that's an improvement over the standard, or just for the sake of being different. That opens a floodgate as developers no longer consider the base UI to be a rule and more of a loose suggestion. (i.e. After years of everyone using the 3D controls of Windows 95, WinAmp introduced skinning and after that all apps had to be skinnable.) Eventually users complain about the confusing mess of interfaces, so the OS reigns everyone in by rebuild the system UI with the best of the new ideas since the previous version. Developers applaud the new universal design and flock to emulate it in their apps. Thus the cycle repeats.
So is Windows Phone more uniform in its interface because it's designed to be that way? Or is it just not old enough to have drifted away from the standard UI?
iOS used to be tied to a certain ergonomic form factor... a normal human thumb could comfortably travel the entirety of the screen while the device was held in the same hand.
The latest iPhone has dimensions that make this uncomfortable for most people, and so these "sprinkled" buttons stand out all the more.
The human capacity to read and decode symbols is only a recent cultural phenomenon within the great span of our anthropological history. Therefore our eyes have been naturally selected over eons to look at objects in the real world a lot longer then they have been selected to decode symbols. As a result, human eyes actually are better equipped to process shading, geometry and the complexity of physical objects better then it can process a symbol.
Flat design is suppose to be more efficient, however based on our evolutionary history, an all out flat design actually increases the effort the brain needs to go through to process symbols. But really, this achieved efficiency doesn't matter as the difference between flat and adding some shading is negligible. What matters is whether or not we perceive the design as attractive, and that is a purely cultural and subjective factor.
Flat design does have efficiency improvements but it's not where you think it is. The efficiency improvement is not on the user side, but for the developer. Anyone with the talent to make a cover photo, draw a flat square and paste some text on it can now call themselves a professional designer.
Zero talent + minimal effort = Clean Minimal Design.
Maybe I'm exaggerating on the amount of effort required but definitely you don't need the ability to paint like leonardo in order to make a minimal layout.
A good middlee between minimal and "realness" is material design, which plays off of what you are saying (the ease of the brain undrstanding layers and depth).
The amount of effort for good minimal design and good "classical" design is probably the same for people well versed in either. But in either case you still need to learn about it to make it look ok. Shoddy things have always looked shoddy, no matter how many gradients you slap on it.
Material design isn't a thing. It's Google's name for their design language, which is just flat design with more animations. It's not like there's a "school of material design" or a "theory of a material design." So I wouldn't suggest it as an alternative to flat / minimal design. It doesn't offer much of an alternative.
Design languages like Windows Modern (or whatever the design language that used to be called "Metro" is called now) and Material Design are more clear and specific things than "flat" or "skeumorphic" design, which are just descriptors of one aspect of the design approach
And, sure, most of them are evolutions of things that have gone previously and combine pre-existing elements without being revolutionary departures. But that doesn't make them not clear and specific things.
You're taking "isn't a thing" too literally. Yes, design languages are things. But material design is not a complete school of thought. It's one company's design language. Other companies are going to want their own design language, to distinguish themselves from their competitors. They can take inspiration from material design, but whatever you make can't be called material design. Google defines what material design is, and only they can put the material design stamp on something.
And even though material design adds some depth, it's still pretty flat. Sure, cards and panels have a slight drop shadow behind them, but buttons still lack any bevel or border. This isn't much different from current flat designs. Many of them include depth in select places.
> But material design is not a complete school of thought.
Yes, it is. Its actually more of a "complete school of thought" than, e.g., "flat design", which is a vague, ill-defined, poorly-bounded element of an approach to visual design, not a complete school of thought on UI design.
> Other companies are going to want their own design language, to distinguish themselves from their competitors.
Some may, some may not. Design language is hardly the only potential axis of product or company differentiation. Furthermore, you can differentiate on design within the parameters of a design language like Material Design, because -- while fairly comprehensive -- it doesn't dictate all aspects of design. Defining consistency in the areas Material Design leaves open produces a distinct design that is still completely within the bounds of the Material Design.
You're confusing complete with specific. The material design language offers specific solutions to specific cases. But what designers need more is a general theory they can apply to any situation. And the theory behind material design doesn't fundamentally differ from flat design, other than it's focus on animations. It still shares the principles espoused by flat design people (authentically digital interfaces, minimalism).
No, I'm not, I'm saying design languages with well-defined motivating principles like Material Design and Microsoft's ex-Metro language are both more complete schools of thought on design (starting with identified principles that cover broader scope of design problems) and more specific, well-defined approaches to design/interaction (clearly defining both foundational principles and the applications of those to specific areas of design) than things like "flat" design.
A symbol is a symbol. A flat monochrome floppy disk icon represents the concept of saving a file just the same as a lovingly rendered 3D floppy disk or even a photograph would.
Text glyphs are very flat, abstract symbols that represent sounds or ideas (indeed, I'm pretty sure the whole "flat design" trend was inspired by typography in the first place). Sure, we've been hunting beasts for much longer than we've been reading and writing, but written language is still a very old invention in the human timescale. And art predates even that. Humanity has had plenty of experience with symbolic visuals over the ages, I think we're equipped well enough to use basic smartphone apps.
Text evolved from shapes chiselled into rock or pressed into wet clay, so the roots of typography are as tactile and 3D as it's possible to be.
Even ink on a scroll has a 3D feel. The 'paper' - whatever it's made of - has texture, and the way the ink sinks into it has depth and texture too.
Likewise with traditional printing. The sequence of pages creates a 3D object, and old-fashioned heavy letter press books have texture and depth you won't get on a screen.
Modern minimalism only became fashionable a century or so ago, which was - coincidentally - around the time artists started experimenting with extreme abstraction.
Minimalism has one big problem - it lacks scale-independence. A hand-printed book has visual detail across a range of physical dimensions. You can see the cover across a room, but if you look at the print with a magnifying glass, you'll see detail at that scale too.
Minimalist digital typography has detail at exactly one dimension - the size of the content. Zoom out, and you can't see the content. Zoom in, and you see pixels.
It's a difference of metaphorical and literal depth. Ignoring scale-dependence robs content of weight.
So minimalism is literally shallow. It's aesthetic lossy compression - abstraction into illegibility, for the sake of abstraction.
You can get away with that in art if you have something interesting to say. But it's really not the best of all possible solutions for UI/UX.
>Text evolved from shapes chiselled into rock or pressed into wet clay, so the roots of typography are as tactile and 3D as it's possible to be.
>Even ink on a scroll has a 3D feel. The 'paper' - whatever it's made of - has texture, and the way the ink sinks into it has depth and texture too.
>Likewise with traditional printing. The sequence of pages creates a 3D object, and old-fashioned heavy letter press books have texture and depth you won't get on a screen.
But you don't see the depth of the stroke or the texture of the paper when you're reading. You see abstract lines. You don't see the imperfect squiggles our meat-appendages create unless you really focus; at a glance, your brain autocorrects them into the intended strokes.
>Minimalism has one big problem - it lacks scale-independence. A hand-printed book has visual detail across a range of physical dimensions. You can see the cover across a room, but if you look at the print with a magnifying glass, you'll see detail at that scale too.
>Minimalist digital typography has detail at exactly one dimension - the size of the content. Zoom out, and you can't see the content. Zoom in, and you see pixels.
Sure, we're well equipped to handle symbols, but we're better equipped to handle pictures. How much training does a toddler require to recognize the word "duck" versus a picture of an actual duck? I argue that you'd be comparing a time span of seconds to a time span of years.
But again, with training the efficiency in processing a symbol versus a picture becomes negligible. What matters is whether or not it looks good. Right now everyone likes flat design.
The only technical advantage flat design has over a more traditional approach is that it releaves a huge amount of burden from the designer. An icon of a floppy disc is way easier to draw then a 3d picture of a floppy. I would argue that flat design has allowed people with zero skill in traditional art to become "designers"
The second installment of Humanist Interface is out. In this section I discuss the longstanding presence of modern minimalism in the GUI. Flat design is nothing new—it has deep roots.
I wonder why we stopped? Art, architecture and interior design have moved beyond modernism toward richer aesthetics. I'm not sure I'd want to use an interface that looks like Szimpla Kert ( http://bebudapest.hu/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/szimpla41.jp... ) but it would be nice to escape modernism just a little bit.
Uncluttered and ornament-free is functional but it is also a bit boring. Maybe we can make UI feel a little rougher without losing usability.
I do hope that we'll never see an interface like that! I think it's very unlikely though, because unlike "static" art, user interfaces have to be interacted with and have to be learnable, comfortable, and useful. Even in the most interfacey example you listed, interior design, interaction can be limited: a lot of the wildly different designs are still more visual art than they are functional pieces.
If I had to hazard a guess I would think that UI will become more kinetic. We already see this with things like the bounce at the end of a scroll on OSX and phones, as well as with window animations, but it can probably be taken further. The interface could become more like a living, breathing thing than just a piece of paper with some rectangles on it.
Think of a cat: they all have the same basic pieces, they have fairly consistent behavior traits, but they all have different fur and eye colors. The computer could become something of a useful pet.
But that's just my pie-in-the-sky vision, predicting the future is a mug's game.
> I do hope that we'll never see an interface like that!
Oh, it's already happened.[1] I couldn't actually find one with christmas lights but I'm sure one existed at some point. Ten years ago there were millions like this. Some of the wildest stuff came out of Japan where there was a plugin that let you completely rearrange the layout of the windows. (They were tricky to find back then, pretty much impossible now.)
Developers pushed back against rampant customization a few years ago when they got tired of people complaining about problems caused by buggy skins. But some apps such as Firefox[2] still have limited themability that could one day make the fad start up again.
I think you're exactly right. What makes an interface enjoyable to use is how easily you can process the information it tries to convey so if you're going to remove certain cues for aesthetic reasons you have to compensate for the loss of clarity in other ways.
Movement cues and allowing more 'harmless' interactivity in interfaces is a great way to make them more clear while keeping their static visual appearance ultra-minimalist.
I think UI design is one of those case where competition does not foster growth. Companies feel insecure and try to out-fashion their rivals with stylish designs, forgetting the true purpose of interfaces through passionate and radical opinions that make great blog posts but really don't translate well to such a concrete and down-to-earth trade.
I don't want to see one that rough either. But a little rougher visually would be nice. People do play with this space in typeface but rarely computer typeface.
Computer-displayed text tends to be a lot smaller in practice (in arc-seconds on the eye.) A flyer's 96pt masthead might have be scanned from arm's length; a 20pt paperback page might be read rested against one's chest. Right now, though, I'm reading this page zoomed out on an iPhone 6, at the same visual distance as I would with a book—the text ending up at most 1/3rd the perceptual size it would on the book. The backlight-powered contrast makes it legible nevertheless, but I can't imagine how the text could be styled such that I'd notice, while retaining its legibility.
One of the many reasons I like uncluttered and ornament-free interfaces is precisely because they are boring - these are tools at the end of the day and tools should strive to disappear; they are, after all trying to be extensions of myself, not fully realised personalities themselves.
If I want an experience, I'd rather go bungy jumping or parachute diving or whatever. When I want to get on with some work, I want to just that; not participate in a shallow, "user experience", desperate to justify its existence to itself.
"The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it."
[...]
"Such a disappearance is a fundamental consequence not of technology, but of human psychology. Whenever people learn something sufficiently well, they cease to be aware of it. When you look at a street sign, for example, you absorb its information without consciously performing the act of reading.. Computer scientist, economist, and Nobelist Herb Simon calls this phenomenon "compiling"; philosopher Michael Polanyi calls it the "tacit dimension"; psychologist TK Gibson calls it "visual invariants"; philosophers Georg Gadamer and Martin Heidegger call it "the horizon" and the "ready-to-hand", John Seely Brown at PARC calls it the "periphery". All say, in essence, that only when things disappear in this way are we freed to use them without thinking and so to focus beyond them on new goals."
"A good tool is an invisible tool. By invisible, I mean that the tool does not intrude on your consciousness; you focus on the task, not the tool. Eyeglasses are a good tool -- you look at the world, not the eyeglasses. The blind man tapping the cane feels the street, not the cane. Of course, tools are not invisible in themselves, but as part of a context of use. With enough practice we can make many apparently difficult things disappear: my fingers know vi editing commands that my conscious mind has long forgotten. But good tools enhance invisibility."
Doesn't minimalism originate with the fist art forms( cave paintings, fertility dolls), then you got naive art, and then you got art imitating the real counterpart and once there was little left to add we went back to basic symbolism?
And to me it makes sense. It's not that different to me from say a pictographical vs a phonemical representation of human language. They can both do the job very well, you usually pick one or the other and stay with it. Altho, arguably the phonemic representation is more flexible than the pictographical alternative --and we see that with pinyin and romaji serving a purpose in pictographical writing systems.
So with interface symbols, once you learn the cues, it's just as useful as the "full color" version
I doubt all these flat/minimalist designers are doing user or A/B testing. Things feel less usable and more confusing then the previous generation of interfaces. This fashion is not driven by data. Which makes sense since some years ago designers were mocking Google's functional, engineer driven, A/B-tested interfaces. And Google gave in and started hiring the same fashion-following sheep. Now you can't escape it.
I have done A/B design testing on ~10 mid-tier "consumer products" eCommerce sites, and giant firetruck-red 3D bevelled "Buy Now" buttons converted insanely better than minimal ones.
Personally, I want clearly-labelled tactile buttons that make me want to push them. Flat UI is more brutalist than humanist.
Relying purely on scientific data to create an attractive/useable interface can take a million years. The human brain is not a complete a black box as we have the capability of understanding ourselves to a certain extent. As a result, we also have certain awareness of what interfaces we find attractive and useable. AB testing not required.
Do you really need an AB test to determine whether or not hacker news should have a background that switches between black and yellow every half a second? No. Interfaces should NOT be data driven.
Interfaces need to be design driven, and data supported.
On my google page right now, I see "gmail images [squares] [bell] [plus]" I don't have a clue what the squares mean or what the plus means, and the only reason I know what the bell means is because it lights up sometimes. To me the squares should mean "tile the stuff you're looking at", but there is nothing to tile, and no reason to press it. The plus should mean "add a new thing here", but what would I add? I don't know.
I suppose I could investigate, but I don't need google to do anything worth investigating.
My phone has a "tiles" button, too, but it apparently means "menu." (There are multiple such buttons, each looks different.) It also has a search button I've never pressed.
I feel that iconography is far too overused, and it is especially unsuitable for the kinds of abstractions we use for software. It's one thing to put a toilet or a phone on a sign, and a completely different thing to put a circle with a wedge, or a pair of rectangles on a sign.
With regards to the flat trend it's deeper than just everything suddenly being flat. What Google and Apple is trying to develop is a visual/interaction language where the content itself becomes both the content and the interface at the same time.
It's not just about how it looks its as much about how it moves, the choreography so to speak. It's as much driven by trial and error as it is by data and thats exactly how it should be.
"Those in positions of leadership in the community are undoubtedly aware of the history and dangers of modern minimalism, and press forward nonetheless. "
Dangers. Like what?
I hate flat design too, but you're making a big deal out of this. Comparing flat design to Picasso is not just a stretch, but does nothing to disparage flat design. (People like Picasso!)
Here's all you need to know:
Good interfaces provide discoverability and perceived affordance. Overly minimalist designs neglect these needs. They achieve conceptual purity at the expense of providing familiar reference points that humans understand.
Connecting interfaces to art history is neat, but doesn't teach us anything. Art doesn't have to be functional, but interfaces do.
Let's not forget getting rid of basic text cues, often in the name of internationalizing.
An app updates and suddenly basic actions are thrown to random corners of the screen as ambiguous symbols. Google docs is a great example with the big plus inside a circle in the lower right corner as a replacement for the "new" functionality.
While I understand the author's case for expressive design, I think it's important to use the correct logic to make an evaluation.
And the base of that logic is in the premise, which in the author's case is that expressive design, using simulacra of real life, somehow gives a user a better understanding of the actual use of the digital object.
I believe that logic to be fundamentally flawed. As someone here already said, humans have been trained to look at symbols far less time than they were trained to look at real objects. As such, there exists a fundamental divide between perception of a symbol and the perception of an object (even if it's a simulacra, not a real one). Marshall McLuhan outlined it best in his Gutenberg Galaxy, by separating letters (cold medium) from drawings (hot medium). As he was saying, perception accuracy varies between this hot and cold mediums, with hot having the highest accuracy, and cold the lowest.
Now, given this perceptual situation, I contend that given the nature of the digital medium, any kind of symbol used within it will be perceived as intrinsically cold by a given generation/cohort of users. I willingly shift my attention from the symbols to the users because I believe that they should be the true focus of the discussion. And the reality is that the very nature of the digital world and the understanding of its functionality and laws is a very high barrier to consumption for a lot of users.
My argument is way longer, but for the sake of simplicity, let me say just this: I believe that design should focus on advancing the understanding of the object that one uses. As such, I do not believe that expressive interface design holds all the necessary keys to that advancement, being that, in its intrinsic nature what it does is to simplify matters by simulating objects that the user is already familiar with. There are only so many ways to use a hammer and the representation of a hammer is contextually limited.
Minimalism is a temporary finish line. As the author noted, painters and sculptors in modern art have trekked across a very large conceptual space before arriving at minimalistic design approaches. Did this temporary finish line stop development? No, it generated a diverse set of reactions, with some painters re-approaching realism from different directions and some others exploring the limits of minimalist symbols.
I believe that "flat" design is just a way-point, and that having reached this way-point, there are myriad avenues now open to explore more in depth the semantic interconnection between symbols and humans.
I didn't know about the green bubbles from Android texts.
All I know is last December I had to score an iPhone 6 (or die trying) or my daughter's Christmas morning would be ruined.
Now I guess I'm just the uncool dad who announced he's arrived to pick her up with green text bubbles from my loser Android phone (with it's superior hardware at 1/2 the price).
That rings of unjustified bias. There's hardly any difference between Windows Phone and iOS 7+ in this respect.
IMHO Windows Phone is somewhat more logical to use and has less ambiguous UI elements for one reason: apps tend to consistently use the bottom bar for actions. The bar always works the same and the buttons always have the same style.
On iOS there's more of a tendency to sprinkle buttons anywhere on the screen, and those buttons can be styled pretty much anything: plain text, plain icon, circle-enclosed icon...
Still, that's a minor gripe in practice.