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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."
... and you've got difficult to read and difficult to navigate, some good reasons why the current UIs are less than usable. So... why were these productivity reductions made in the first place?
Never underestimate the tendency of human beings to blindly follow other human beings.
The example in the article is hardly a connection to "flat" UI designs. It looks more like spot the damn difference which is what I would be doing if presented with that test.
But really it's hard to judge those flat UI changes because flatness was only one very small part of the shift. We also lost meaning and context, were introduced to new symbols which seem to be made up by people who were blinded at birth (3 horizontal lines for menu? or was it dots?, WTF is wrong with writing menu), was combined with a massive reduction of colour and contrast, a reduction in font size, an increase in the use of white space...
Really out of all the UI changes in recent years "flatness" is the one that impacts me the least.
...UI designers are replaced with graphics designers.
One of the reasons why Windows 95 was so successful in the corporate workplace was the icon set and look-and-feel. Remember, at that time there were still competitive offerings like OS/2 and UNIX X-windows with CDE, and even Apple's MacOS. Windows 95 took some faux-3d experiments from Windows 3.1/3.11 and ran whole-hog with them to the point that it was almost weird when a legacy application still used flat icons or 2d windows.
Microsoft has regressed with its UI so severely that it's embarassing. They're basically back to 2d icons and a program-manager interface, and from my view it's change solely for the sake of change, not because it actually improved anything. Worse since they've fragmented into pre-metro and metro elements, there are essentially two control panels to take care of the OS where neither method contains access to all of the settings and where there's no clear division of functions between the two.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
That's what I've been saying to the stubborn fad-sniffers. NOW I have evidence to use against them so that they can't merely dismiss me as an old fogie. (I am an old fogie, but a correct fogie!) Thank You, Dear Slashdotter!
One can't easily tell what are buttons, input boxes, etc. in the flat look. It's all a bunch of flat rectangles of different colors. If you don't know the rectangle color coding scheme of a given site, you have to guess. The 70's called, and they want the Partridge Family bus UI back.
Table-ized A.I.
In all seriousness, you can add "really bad looking" to those.
o Design evolution stopped
o Low contrast text fad makes things difficult to read
o Flat UI is difficult to navigate
o Flat UI is really bad looking
Recently, I had occasion to bring up an OS X 10.6.8 virtual machine. The first thing that struck me about the desktop was the dock, which is decidedly 3D and had some very distinctive icons on it right out of the box was "this is really very good looking." Then I looked back at the dock on the 10.12.6 OS X (MacOS) host... ugh. All that flat crap looks terrible by comparison.
My S7 phone used to be the same. Flat as a pancake. Ugly. But for it, I found Nova Launcher, and now at least the desktop looks better with 3D folders (and my phone's desktop is all folders, so that's something, anyway. There are still a few 3D app icons, too.)
I really do wish this mania for flat would go the hell away. Flat is not better. At all. This merde was never more than "change for the sake of change."
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Tim Berners-Lee's vision of the web was that the server would transmit the relevant info (pictures and text) to your browser, and your browser would format it in the manner which was most readable on your device.
Graphic designers and page layout artists went nuts over this because it basically put them out of work. Unfortunately most web designers started off as graphic designers and page layout artists. Their first salvo against reader-control of content formatting was the Flash website. The entire page and navigation was in Flash so the user wasn't able to change, resize, or reformat any of it. They fought for and won the inclusion of immutable formatting tools in the HTML standard. So now we're stuck with idiotic designs like Slashdot's homepage where the "supplemental" sidebar on the right actually has formatting priority over the useful text on the left. If you try to shrink your browser horizontally (like viewing on a phone in portrait mode), the text becomes unreadable in order to preserve the full width of the sidebar.
Apple removed skeuomorphism because it was "Scott Forstall approved" and Jony Ive had to put his own flat-looking-hardware-design into the UI itself.
That's the kind of crap that happens when you put an industrial designer in charge of software user interfaces. By the same Apple logic, my day job is foreman on a construction site so I should be able to design prettier birthday cakes than a pastry chef, right?
#DeleteFacebook
The worst thing from Apple, still to this day, is the smooth plastic connectors to connect anything. Other companies have texturized plastic or even rubberized connectors, making them easier to handle and to pull.
#DeleteFacebook
Apple also started the trend of making the back of your phone as slippery as possible so that you can't place it on a surface with any incline or hold on to it without a death-grip.