As a personal anecdote, I've spent quite a bit of time watching toddlers interact with the world. In my experience, if it looks like a button, a toddler can tell it's a button and will be interested in pushing it. (And might even say "button"!) If it looks like a switch, a toddler will be interested in switching it. If it looks like a button on a touch screen, a toddler might still think it's a button. If it's a flat blob that looks like every other flat blob designed by that designer (but looks nothing like a flat blob by other designers!), toddlers don't recognize it as a button. Shocker, I know.
Obviously, the majority of computer users aren't toddlers, but I think there's a lesson here. I really miss the old Windows 3.1 / 95 / 98 days when controls were more or less standardized and you could reliably tell which were buttons, which were radio buttons, which were okay buttons, etc.
> Obviously, the majority of computer users aren't toddlers, but I think there's a lesson here. I really miss the old Windows 3.1 / 95 / 98 days when controls were more or less standardized and you could reliably tell which were buttons, which were radio buttons, which were okay buttons, etc.
Agree.
Also: tooltip help when you hover over an icon.
Also: menus (for discoverability)
Also: manuals/help files (yep, most software shoudn't need one, but now we are in a worst-of-all-state: new software is not self explanatory, doesn't use familiar designs and the manual is gone :-/)
When my youngest daughter was still a toddler, she would try to swipe on our 32" bedroom TV that was more or less at her height.
What I'm trying to say is that your mileage might vary. I think it all depends on their experiences.
If something looks like a button and they try to push it, is because in real life buttons have a certain look and feel.
But I'm pretty certain that if you teach them at an early age to discern what does what in a flat UI, they'll have no problem switching from one UI to the other (I actually learned _from her_ that in the Android YT app you can swipe those pesky lower right corner videos to make them go away).
And we're still to try flat in real life ;)
A similar 'experiment' with similar results is landing page optimization. You want to be very clear what you're trying to communicate and what you want the visitor to do with as few distractions as possible.
It turns out the same types of optimizations that you make on a landing page are good UI/UX features for past-middle-aged people to use. Computers don't have to be hard, we just put everything on the screen and have the user sort through what each thing does and whether it's in or out of context for the current action.
I suspect there's actually quite a market to develop such UI for. Given a service that standardizes UI over a wide array of applications (web apps, mobile apps, desktop apps), I bet there's a large enough market for it.
Implementation would be interesting and most likely quite hard to achieve, though.
Not all software came out of the Win32.dll (or earlier, or later) worlds.
Having worked on a number of platforms (MVS, CMS, VMS, Unix, plus the usual desktop kit), I'd come to recognise signatures of those platforms. Under Unix, recognising the original X11 Xt, Athena, Motif, Tcl/Tk, gtk, Qt, Java, and Gnome toolkits is largely second nature.
No, all applications don't look and behave the same. (Xt scrollbars FTFW!!!).
But: if you do recognise the toolkits, you've got a pretty good idea of the provenance of the application, and how it's going to behave and what quirks it will have. At least up to a point.
Notably, NNG uses a more 'real world' methodology, testing realistic user tasks in browsing websites. For the unfamiliar, 'Nielsen' is Jakob Nielsen, an authority on usability, working and writing on it for two decades now, and he's a big advocate of usability testing in design process. (BTW, “Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity” of his is an excellent writeup on how websites should function—I'd bet it's as valuable today as it was in mid-2000s for me, because the functioning of humans doesn't change.)
They also noted that flat design has made some steps back to the immediate recognition of the olde pseudo-3d interfaces, notably with 'Material design': https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flat-design/ But not many steps.
It's remarkable how UI design followed architecture (as in: buildings) down the dark alley - both went on a crusade to expose inner substance of things by cleansing it from "redundant ornamentation", both ended up steamrolling over the ergonomics, the human comfort, in the fight for the inhuman ideal.
It doesn't even seem specific to UI design but design in general! We've been visiting a newly built indoor pool lately. The male / female shower/toilet signs are stylized so around 50% of people who get there first don't understand which is which! Also, the changing rooms are unisex single cabins that open both sides to let you enter to the bath area - but with no signage on them at all. So if you enter from the clothed side and all cabins are taken you stand in front of a white wall of doors with no idea what you should do next.
Designers! Fcking stop and think what you're doing if you change designs that have worked for many decades!
except in UIs it was not reduntant because visible contours was a deliberately added functional component to take advantage of our (very fast) depth-perception capabilities. The equivalent in architecture would be to remove handles from doors
This is a common architecture complaint, but remember that the Victorian architecture you showed was the 1% of buildings; the majority of buildings people lived in during the Victorian era lived in cramped, smelly, and ugly buildings.
There has to be a better approach than to just settle on one of the two extremes: what architecture styles have a mix of moderate ornamentation, but with straightforward and utility-driven design?
Pretty sure current architecture (≥2000s) is indebted to modernism for its entire look, but also incorporating ideas of Scandinavian/German/Swiss industrial design (which itself is derived from modernism)—thus mixing utilitarian cleanness with ‘humanist’ shapes. And ‘after-modernist’ design in general builds on modernist ideas for materials but dispenses with pure geometry, returning to more pleasant contours instead.
There's no need to go overboard with ornamentation when you just want to get away from concrete. And notably, modern web and app design turned into a continuation of current publishing design—which played with geometric Swiss layouts for a while back then but left them behind, just borrowing good ideas.
One possibly explanation for these results which would be less interesting that their suggested conclusion: bigger items with smaller margins are better than smaller icons with larger margins.
The difference on the icon results were particularly large and convincing, and if you look at their example icon stimuli, clearly the flat icons are simpler (as expected) and presented with more margins (perhaps also as expected in flat design), but that also means to get the same number of icons on screen, the icons were smaller.
I think it's at least worth considering whether that might explain a large part of the difference.
Another limitation is that tiny and non-diverse sample size, and the fact that it's a few years old. They had just 20 students, almost all male, Russian university-student-aged - it's just not a huge or diverse sample; and the experiment was run in 2014; people have a few more years of flat design expectations under their belts now.
Looks pretty decent, those results, but I still think it's a little early to draw solid conclusions based on this alone.
When I worked in design, I was always a fan of clean, modern, Swiss inspired design. But, that was mostly print (magazine ads, direct mailers, etc). When I moved into GUI design (early 00's), I went overboard on beveled, 3D, overly ornate designs. As did many people.
"Flat" design was a natural response to the endless bevels. Which, was also taken to an extreme. iOS 7 was, imo, the worst representation of this. The icons, the palette, and especially the entirely-too-thin font weights were all awful.
I think a flat base design, with dimension added in appropriate areas is a happy medium for GUI's. I'm still on MacOs 10.12.6, which I think represents this pretty well. As does the the Material Design widgets. Even if I think they're a little boring stock.
I'm a fan of clean design, which is most definitely not flat.
The trouble is UI and UX stopped being anything about productivity and became simply empty fashion.
iOS 6 was an excess of 3D shine and starburst effects, and skeuomorphism excess like news looking like a set of library or newsagent shelves. Mitigate some of that and the UI would have been lovely. And finished.
Since iOS 7 the excess flatness detracts from usability and discoverability. I still feel the camera icon looks annoying wrong and bland, as do settings, photos, calendar, passbook, compass, safari. Games and Passbook are determinedly unrepresentative of anything at all, just random blobs of colour conveying nothing at all.
Still, on the plus side MacOS and iOS have not followed through with the excess of bland extreme flatness that is Windows 10. That still seems to want to push the propaganda of a phone GUI on the desktop that started in 8. Several years of regular use and I still hate it at every touch. Even adding every tweak I can find to make it more like 7 and it's still a significant step back from 7, and two headed in typically Windows fashion in that settings are partly in apps partly in old control panel. Usually control panel is required for basics that for some reason aren't felt necessary to allow configuration of any more. Never a complete transition from one to other.
After all this progress? I find the app based settings worse in every respect, and perfectly typifies the ethos. Fixing a ton of things that were not, in any respect, broken. I guess they knew that or they'd have continued to permit theming. :)
I really like that site and the concise descriptions of the problem.
..it's also a little madding to read for too long as one starts to ask themselves "why did they do that" over and over again.
I feel like mystery meat navigation is just the new hotness, like it was before as people played with UI paradigms. The issue I see is that , as the examples in that blog point out, there is nothing conaitent to learn and apply later which is why we came back to more traditional UIs for a while.
> Our results suggest replacing the flat style user interfaces with interfaces based on the design principles developed over decades of research and practice of HCI and usability engineering.
Apple should just revert HEAD to the iOS 6/OS X 10.6 branches and back-port any bug fixes. Almost all of the last near-decade of work in UIs has been a mistake.
> Almost all of the last near-decade of work in UIs has been a mistake.
You keep saying this, and it's just not true. The extreme skeuomorphism in the older iOS versions was just as maligned as flat design is today. I wouldn't mind adding some more shading to buttons to make them more easily identifiable, but let's leave the cheesy leather textures in the Calendar app dead and buried, please.
I'm not a fan of the Windows 95-era design either. As an example that comes to mind, traditional menus have atrocious usability. Ribbon-like interfaces that feature actual buttons you can click or tap on, with more important buttons larger and/or highlighted, have been a huge improvement over trying to wade through a sea of identical-looking pull-downs full of text. It's important to remember that the move away from pull-down menus was informed by a good deal of end-user research, a lot more than this article.
Regarding iOS, I'd like to see this study try modern UI fonts like San Francisco. There's a reason why Apple, Google, and Microsoft invested in new fonts, and that's because faces such as Helvetica (which, by the way, was used in iOS 6) that weren't designed for screens are harder to read.
To be honest, I thought that quoted sentence weakened the authors' argument. "based on the design principles developed over decades of research and practice of HCI and usability engineering" comes across as sour grapes.
Elementary OS has done well in this regard, I think. They’ve avoided most trends, and have focused on refining their UI. I wish they’d get more funding and traction.
I was one of the original beta Mac developers, back in '83. Before the Mac was released. The idea then was to visually duplicate real world interfaces, and I gotta say they are easier for everyone, across the board, to grasp. Still, to this day, there are many people who do not use computers on an hourly basis, and they certainly do not get familiar with flat interfaces. However, the much maligned over-done interfaces are grasped immediately. Imagine that. It is because the software operates to mimic a real world item that person of many is familiar using already, without software. It is as if the entire reason for the UI is being missed by modern UI "experts" because duplicating real world objects and their innate feedback is too boring, or something. Imagine it as a stepping stone to n augmented reality where you are mimicking real world items, if you must. Real world mimicry is intuitive, and that is hands down easier. I don't need a study.
Flat design is form over function and this study appears to prove it. Usually in design there's a reaction against the tyranny of the mainstream. I never liked flat design, even just aesthetically, and I've been waiting for the backlash in this case, but when will it ever arrive!
Never?
1) Users didn't ask for flat design
2) There's absolutely no evidence that flat design are better and there are evidence that they are worse
Yet I don't expect that UI will go back to 'classic UI', many of those who create UI care more about being perceived as modern (or more accurately not being perceived as outdated) than efficiency, so flat design will probably be replaced by another 'fashion driven design'..
I did not spend that much effort on this.. I know the text-shadow on links is kinda bad, and I'm also not happy with the green for visited links. But other than that, this made HN much more readable for me, I figured you might enjoy it as well:
I feel like I experience the downside of flat design daily while using the gmail and google calendar interfaces. Finding items and discerning the different areas seems to take longer than it used to. N=1, so your mileage may vary.
Everyone who has put at least a little bit of thought into UI design knew from the beginning that flat design is bad.
But no, it is 2019 and we still have scrollbars and buttons that are barely visible. Just because Google and Microsoft unreasonably decided to do it that way and every other one blindely copies that (because how can a those big, big companies be possibly wrong?). Fuck accessibility, even though we serve billions of customers on a daily basis.
When Apple did the flat redesign of iOS, it caused a lot of problems for my grandma who could already barely tell something is a button. I know I've struggled with toggles and check boxes that don't make it apparent they're active.
Minimalism is one of those things where simplicity is the goal, but not the measure of success. It seems many people (I'm looking at you Windows 10) forget the design part of flat design. Making all the icons indistinguishable general forms is simpler, sure. This study makes the same mistake: it finds removing indictors of function make things harder to read. But they forgot to indicate function in other ways to compensate. It's as if you intended to prove goto isn't bad by removing it from a language without break, return, continue, or loops.
I often have a hard time finding an app I want to use on my iPhone. And I don't even have that many apps. Either I'm finding it hard to distinguish the icons from each other, or the icons aren't distinct enough for my brain to firmly associate an icon with its app.
We shouldn't have to rely on post-hoc science to tell us that. Designers should not be allowed to execute in counterproductive ways in the first place, and there was nothing non-obvious about this. We have rules about how road signs should look. How are we going to get back the time lost now?
Probably a bad example because its signs on public, state owned roads. Private roads don't have signage requirements, you can even have your kids drive your cars without a license on private roads.
However we do have building code and more importantly the ADA which sets standards for businesses (like, ya know, websites) to meet minimum accessibility standards.
The problem is I don't see any congress where the average number of mathematicians within their ranks is within a margin of error of 0 or rarely enough scientists to fill counting on one hand being capable of writing actually good regulation in this or any software related regard.
A question to any design enthusiasts and experts here: What currently maintained web/CSS framework has not gone the flat-design way, is inline with HCL guidelines, and has a reasonably complete widget set.
If I wasn't a grumpy old product manager, I would be tempted to get cynical and say that flat imposed higher cognitive load which keeps you on the page/UI longer which gives more time for other things to get your attention and create the mental lock in thru mix of attraction and sunk (time) cost...i.e.ive spent so long to figure this out I may as well stay and look around.
Another Responder pointed out that material design is better. Maybe I'm ignorant but I don't see how. Perhaps icon quality/diversity is better these days but the basic premise of 2D facsimile for real world 3D objects is still there.
Personally I prefer that UI things can be easily and uniquely related to action. This can be achieved by education I. E. sliders now look like nice rounded corner progress bars of yesteryear but we have gotten used to them thru their imposition on us by G and A.
That said I have used a few very old GUI programs and their look now is jarringly uncomfortable even though the tools are great and the UI is clear.
> Another Responder pointed out that material design is better. ...I don't see how. ...the basic premise of 2D facsimile for real world 3D objects is still there.
Material design uses shadows to add a third dimension. The shadows cause boundaries and can help indicate parts of the interface that can move independently.
I would definitely not claim this is much better, but it is at least a little bit better.
A related thing is contrast ratio of text on background. I try to test on at least a few computers/displays and when choosing between two almost equally subjectively good pick the one with higher contrast.
I expect that they would see even stronger results if their population were in a developing country. Flat design shifts the processing load for the user interface from the designer to the user, and it depends heavily on the user being used to computing interfaces so that they can guess correctly.
> Our results suggest replacing the flat style user interfaces with interfaces based on the design principles developed over decades of research and practice of HCI and usability engineering.
This feels like a straw man argument. Of course nicer looking design is usually worse for function. If nothing else, just sticking to ONE type of consistent design lets all users rely more on memory. They seem to assume that user interfaces are designed with the sole goal of being usable. Have they seen any modern furniture?
When they say "our results suggest that" they don't mean that the product (e.g. a web site) would be better in some sense such as making more money long term. They say it would be easier to interact with. I completely buy that.
But that's the easy part of the equation to prove! The hard part is: does a site that's nicer looking according to a majority of users but 5% harder to interact with get enough extra business to offset the more difficult UX? Does the company valuation or other metrics such as ease of attracting talent improve? This is the similar to the question "would a furniture maker sell more of this chair if it was 10% more comfortable but a bit uglier?".
Good to read this work, more work like this is needed and the design community needs to pay attention to it.
Watch a six year old try to use google for the first time; results are swamped by a blizzard of ads and maps and diversions. This is design driven by greed and a/b testing at it's worst - our tools are only just fit for purpose and the costs that that imposes on us are hidden and absorbed personally.
[+] [-] amluto|7 years ago|reply
Obviously, the majority of computer users aren't toddlers, but I think there's a lesson here. I really miss the old Windows 3.1 / 95 / 98 days when controls were more or less standardized and you could reliably tell which were buttons, which were radio buttons, which were okay buttons, etc.
[+] [-] eitland|7 years ago|reply
Agree.
Also: tooltip help when you hover over an icon.
Also: menus (for discoverability)
Also: manuals/help files (yep, most software shoudn't need one, but now we are in a worst-of-all-state: new software is not self explanatory, doesn't use familiar designs and the manual is gone :-/)
[+] [-] ericol|7 years ago|reply
If something looks like a button and they try to push it, is because in real life buttons have a certain look and feel.
But I'm pretty certain that if you teach them at an early age to discern what does what in a flat UI, they'll have no problem switching from one UI to the other (I actually learned _from her_ that in the Android YT app you can swipe those pesky lower right corner videos to make them go away). And we're still to try flat in real life ;)
[+] [-] dehrmann|7 years ago|reply
You could say the same for early iOS apps that just used the default Apple widgets and style. I think ~every app I use know has its own style.
Funny enough, this is less true on computers. Except games.
[+] [-] karmakaze|7 years ago|reply
It turns out the same types of optimizations that you make on a landing page are good UI/UX features for past-middle-aged people to use. Computers don't have to be hard, we just put everything on the screen and have the user sort through what each thing does and whether it's in or out of context for the current action.
[+] [-] sharpercoder|7 years ago|reply
Implementation would be interesting and most likely quite hard to achieve, though.
[+] [-] dredmorbius|7 years ago|reply
Having worked on a number of platforms (MVS, CMS, VMS, Unix, plus the usual desktop kit), I'd come to recognise signatures of those platforms. Under Unix, recognising the original X11 Xt, Athena, Motif, Tcl/Tk, gtk, Qt, Java, and Gnome toolkits is largely second nature.
No, all applications don't look and behave the same. (Xt scrollbars FTFW!!!).
But: if you do recognise the toolkits, you've got a pretty good idea of the provenance of the application, and how it's going to behave and what quirks it will have. At least up to a point.
I do still prefer button-resembling-buttons.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] z3t4|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buboard|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aasasd|7 years ago|reply
Notably, NNG uses a more 'real world' methodology, testing realistic user tasks in browsing websites. For the unfamiliar, 'Nielsen' is Jakob Nielsen, an authority on usability, working and writing on it for two decades now, and he's a big advocate of usability testing in design process. (BTW, “Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity” of his is an excellent writeup on how websites should function—I'd bet it's as valuable today as it was in mid-2000s for me, because the functioning of humans doesn't change.)
They also noted that flat design has made some steps back to the immediate recognition of the olde pseudo-3d interfaces, notably with 'Material design': https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flat-design/ But not many steps.
[+] [-] DenisM|7 years ago|reply
This is what I see when I look at the web (+Electron) today: https://www.google.com/search?q=modern+architecture&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=brutalist+architecture&tbm=i... This is what I would prefer to see: https://www.google.com/search?q=victorian+architecture&tbm=i...
[+] [-] m_mueller|7 years ago|reply
Designers! Fcking stop and think what you're doing if you change designs that have worked for many decades!
[+] [-] Gibbon1|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buboard|7 years ago|reply
except in UIs it was not reduntant because visible contours was a deliberately added functional component to take advantage of our (very fast) depth-perception capabilities. The equivalent in architecture would be to remove handles from doors
[+] [-] lalaithion|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevinlou|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aasasd|7 years ago|reply
There's no need to go overboard with ornamentation when you just want to get away from concrete. And notably, modern web and app design turned into a continuation of current publishing design—which played with geometric Swiss layouts for a while back then but left them behind, just borrowing good ideas.
[+] [-] emn13|7 years ago|reply
The difference on the icon results were particularly large and convincing, and if you look at their example icon stimuli, clearly the flat icons are simpler (as expected) and presented with more margins (perhaps also as expected in flat design), but that also means to get the same number of icons on screen, the icons were smaller.
I think it's at least worth considering whether that might explain a large part of the difference.
Another limitation is that tiny and non-diverse sample size, and the fact that it's a few years old. They had just 20 students, almost all male, Russian university-student-aged - it's just not a huge or diverse sample; and the experiment was run in 2014; people have a few more years of flat design expectations under their belts now.
Looks pretty decent, those results, but I still think it's a little early to draw solid conclusions based on this alone.
[+] [-] H1Supreme|7 years ago|reply
"Flat" design was a natural response to the endless bevels. Which, was also taken to an extreme. iOS 7 was, imo, the worst representation of this. The icons, the palette, and especially the entirely-too-thin font weights were all awful.
I think a flat base design, with dimension added in appropriate areas is a happy medium for GUI's. I'm still on MacOs 10.12.6, which I think represents this pretty well. As does the the Material Design widgets. Even if I think they're a little boring stock.
[+] [-] NeedMoreTea|7 years ago|reply
The trouble is UI and UX stopped being anything about productivity and became simply empty fashion.
iOS 6 was an excess of 3D shine and starburst effects, and skeuomorphism excess like news looking like a set of library or newsagent shelves. Mitigate some of that and the UI would have been lovely. And finished.
Since iOS 7 the excess flatness detracts from usability and discoverability. I still feel the camera icon looks annoying wrong and bland, as do settings, photos, calendar, passbook, compass, safari. Games and Passbook are determinedly unrepresentative of anything at all, just random blobs of colour conveying nothing at all.
Still, on the plus side MacOS and iOS have not followed through with the excess of bland extreme flatness that is Windows 10. That still seems to want to push the propaganda of a phone GUI on the desktop that started in 8. Several years of regular use and I still hate it at every touch. Even adding every tweak I can find to make it more like 7 and it's still a significant step back from 7, and two headed in typically Windows fashion in that settings are partly in apps partly in old control panel. Usually control panel is required for basics that for some reason aren't felt necessary to allow configuration of any more. Never a complete transition from one to other.
After all this progress? I find the app based settings worse in every respect, and perfectly typifies the ethos. Fixing a ton of things that were not, in any respect, broken. I guess they knew that or they'd have continued to permit theming. :)
[+] [-] interlocutor|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andyidsinga|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jimktrains2|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wahnfrieden|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rayiner|7 years ago|reply
Apple should just revert HEAD to the iOS 6/OS X 10.6 branches and back-port any bug fixes. Almost all of the last near-decade of work in UIs has been a mistake.
[+] [-] pcwalton|7 years ago|reply
You keep saying this, and it's just not true. The extreme skeuomorphism in the older iOS versions was just as maligned as flat design is today. I wouldn't mind adding some more shading to buttons to make them more easily identifiable, but let's leave the cheesy leather textures in the Calendar app dead and buried, please.
I'm not a fan of the Windows 95-era design either. As an example that comes to mind, traditional menus have atrocious usability. Ribbon-like interfaces that feature actual buttons you can click or tap on, with more important buttons larger and/or highlighted, have been a huge improvement over trying to wade through a sea of identical-looking pull-downs full of text. It's important to remember that the move away from pull-down menus was informed by a good deal of end-user research, a lot more than this article.
Regarding iOS, I'd like to see this study try modern UI fonts like San Francisco. There's a reason why Apple, Google, and Microsoft invested in new fonts, and that's because faces such as Helvetica (which, by the way, was used in iOS 6) that weren't designed for screens are harder to read.
[+] [-] hn_throwaway_99|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] christophilus|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bsenftner|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] discreteevent|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buboard|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] renox|7 years ago|reply
Yet I don't expect that UI will go back to 'classic UI', many of those who create UI care more about being perceived as modern (or more accurately not being perceived as outdated) than efficiency, so flat design will probably be replaced by another 'fashion driven design'..
[+] [-] PavlovsCat|7 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18752033
[+] [-] Epskampie|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] progfix|7 years ago|reply
Everyone who has put at least a little bit of thought into UI design knew from the beginning that flat design is bad.
But no, it is 2019 and we still have scrollbars and buttons that are barely visible. Just because Google and Microsoft unreasonably decided to do it that way and every other one blindely copies that (because how can a those big, big companies be possibly wrong?). Fuck accessibility, even though we serve billions of customers on a daily basis.
[+] [-] dehrmann|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] c3534l|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonhendry18|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buboard|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zanny|7 years ago|reply
Probably a bad example because its signs on public, state owned roads. Private roads don't have signage requirements, you can even have your kids drive your cars without a license on private roads.
However we do have building code and more importantly the ADA which sets standards for businesses (like, ya know, websites) to meet minimum accessibility standards.
The problem is I don't see any congress where the average number of mathematicians within their ranks is within a margin of error of 0 or rarely enough scientists to fill counting on one hand being capable of writing actually good regulation in this or any software related regard.
[+] [-] anilgulecha|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] news_hacker|7 years ago|reply
https://blueprintjs.com/docs/
[+] [-] buboard|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zoom6628|7 years ago|reply
Another Responder pointed out that material design is better. Maybe I'm ignorant but I don't see how. Perhaps icon quality/diversity is better these days but the basic premise of 2D facsimile for real world 3D objects is still there.
Personally I prefer that UI things can be easily and uniquely related to action. This can be achieved by education I. E. sliders now look like nice rounded corner progress bars of yesteryear but we have gotten used to them thru their imposition on us by G and A.
That said I have used a few very old GUI programs and their look now is jarringly uncomfortable even though the tools are great and the UI is clear.
Progress?
[+] [-] saurik|7 years ago|reply
Material design uses shadows to add a third dimension. The shadows cause boundaries and can help indicate parts of the interface that can move independently.
I would definitely not claim this is much better, but it is at least a little bit better.
[+] [-] karmakaze|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wilde|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alkonaut|7 years ago|reply
This feels like a straw man argument. Of course nicer looking design is usually worse for function. If nothing else, just sticking to ONE type of consistent design lets all users rely more on memory. They seem to assume that user interfaces are designed with the sole goal of being usable. Have they seen any modern furniture?
When they say "our results suggest that" they don't mean that the product (e.g. a web site) would be better in some sense such as making more money long term. They say it would be easier to interact with. I completely buy that. But that's the easy part of the equation to prove! The hard part is: does a site that's nicer looking according to a majority of users but 5% harder to interact with get enough extra business to offset the more difficult UX? Does the company valuation or other metrics such as ease of attracting talent improve? This is the similar to the question "would a furniture maker sell more of this chair if it was 10% more comfortable but a bit uglier?".
[+] [-] sgt101|7 years ago|reply
Watch a six year old try to use google for the first time; results are swamped by a blizzard of ads and maps and diversions. This is design driven by greed and a/b testing at it's worst - our tools are only just fit for purpose and the costs that that imposes on us are hidden and absorbed personally.