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It's Official: Users Navigate Flat UI Designs 22 Percent Slower (theregister.co.uk)
Reader Zorro writes: The mania for "flat" user interfaces is costing publishers and e-commerce sites billions in lost revenue. A "flat" design removes the distinction between navigation controls and content. Historically, navigation controls such as buttons were shaded, or given 3D relief, to distinguish them from the application or web page's content. The mania is credited to Microsoft with its minimalistic Zune player, an iPod clone, which was developed into the Windows Phone Series UX, which in turn became the design for Windows from Windows 8 in 2012 onwards. But Steve Jobs is also to blame. The typography-besotted Apple founder was fascinated by WP's "magazine-style" Metro design, and it was posthumously incorporated into iOS7 in 2013. Once blessed by Apple, flat designs spread to electronic programme guides on telly, games consoles and even car interfaces. The consequence is that users find navigation harder, and so spend more time on a page. Now research by the Nielsen Norman Group has measured by how much. The company wired up 71 users, and gave them nine sites to use, tracking their eye movement and recording the time spent on content. On average participants spent 22 per cent more time (i.e. slower task performance) looking at the pages with weak signifiers," the firm notes. Why would that be? Users were looking for clues how to navigate. "The average number of fixations was significantly higher on the weak-signifier versions than the strong-signifier versions. On average, people had 25 per cent more fixations on the pages with weak signifiers."
Settings->General->Accessibility->Button Shapes
&
Settings->General->Accessibility->Bold Text
I've showed these two changes to many many friends, all of whom are so grateful. This doesnt fix everything, but at least you can see the OS level navigation properly. Maybe this flat design stuff will start to decline with this report...
If something is clickable, make it look clickable. If some items are clickable and some are not, they should look different.
But hey, we've only known this for 17 years. Maybe not everyone has caught up yet.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com...
(Scroll down to the "etrade" example.)
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Colored rectangle? I wish. Lately I keep looking for and eventually finding UI elements that are the same color as the background.
Low contrast text fad makes things difficult to read
The fun thing is when that affects your IDE, particularly when it's entirely graphical. Until version 2015 LabVIEW had nice black graphics in its icons (equivalent to functions in text languages). With version 2016 they went low contrast, hard, so that icons all appear disabled now (there's a wrap around option that allows one to disable areas of the screen and fades the icons there -- all icons look like that now). End result: older programmers complaining and asking for an UI option to switch between low contrast and high contrast, as it isn't like the old icons don't exist anymore.
National Instruments's answer was to the effect that: under focus group tests the lower contrast was welcomed (I wonder if they tested it with 20-years-old only); that nature has no hard blacks so low contrast is easier on the eyes; that industry as a whole is moving towards low contrast so better you guys get used to it; that adding a high/low contrast switch would move engineering effort towards a low priority feature; and that if you're not being able to discern the icons, your monitor is uncalibrated, so call a specialist to calibrate your monitor or buy a better one.
Older programmers answer to this was to uninstall LabVIEW 2016, go back to LabVIEW 2015, and to stick to it for as long as it's supported.
Good thing my company didn't purchase the upgrade to LabVIEW 2016. I still have the version I can comfortably look at. :-)
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
In the case of a flat UI the hammer is the right tool to reshape the brain on those that came up with the idea.
The flat UI is like Windows 2.11.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.