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.
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.