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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."
Flat UI design has stopped the evolution of the UK enginering for one generation, fuck Jobs and Balmer for this epic failure.
... 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.
Who didn't know this. But it won't matter. Function does not supersede fashion.
These LUDDITES want everything to look like LUDDITE Windows 95 because they're too stupid to know how to use appy Appdows 10 S!
Apps!
Why can't GNOME compete with KDE?
My credit union recently switched to a flat design. The most glaring issue is not the flatness but the refresh rate of certain pages. If I transfer money between accounts, and return to the balance page, nothing has changed. Refreshing the page won't update the balances. It takes five minutes for the balance page to update.
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.
So can we finally go back to the amazing shiny bubbles of the 90's? Please!
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
It takes a study and loss of revenue for them to figure out what everyone has been telling them from the beginning...Sadly, nothing will come of this until the next NEW! SHINY! horribly designed UI fad comes along.
...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.
Oh you say visual cues help people navigate quickly, gee who would have fucking thought of that? Grant money all around! You get a grant, and you get a grant...
Flat UI designs are akin to getting rid of all road signs and leaving users to figure out navigation by landmarks alone.
... trump a good utilitarian design in the eyes of marketers and business directors any day.
I'm glad that they did a study, because clearly somebody needed a study, but this seems really predictable. How could MS and Apple and these other subpar UI designers not predict that making it harder to tell what is a UI element would make it harder to navigate?
Hopefully next they'll figure out that increasing the number of clicks or keys and hiding the options (aka hamburger menu) also makes navigation harder and slower.
>> The typography-besotted Apple founder was fascinated by WP's "magazine-style" Metro design, and it was posthumously incorporated into iOS7 in 2013.
Wrong. Jobs was a proponent of skeumorphism, as was his protege, Scott Forstall. The flat design of iOS7 was implemented after Jobs death and Forstalls removal from Apple. Had Jobs lived, it's pretty certain he wouldn't have jumped on the flat design train like everybody else did. That's not to say he wouldn't have refreshed the design of iOS. It's just that he was a proponent for the symbolism in skeumorphism, which Jobs/Forstall believed made it easier for first time device users to figure out the OS.
Flat design has many benefits, but usability has never really been one of them.
I've always said that flat UI is a crap originated from Apple. Unfortunately many peoples' response was that I'm an idiot, it's because of less powerful mobile GPUs and it's a trend an every app must be so, bla bla bla....
DACA....is CACA
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...
UI in the 21st Century consists of forgetting all the good things we learnt about UI in the previous century. We should be due a rediscovery of good UI design in the next few years, hopefully sooner now people have realised what a clusterfsck it all is.
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.
Slow and crappy. Yes, before I read anything in the article I'm going to comment b/c I have known for all time that flat GUI is bad GUI. Slower to see where you are and what is in focus. Simple as that. I noticed it in Windows since 7... I never know what window is in focus and I always hesitate, then click when I should double click, or double click when I didn't need to in order to grab focus on something. I can't stand slow computer interfaces, it is gross!!!!
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.
When I first encountered these so-called "flat" buttons, I'd exclaimed out-loud "wait, you mean those AREN'T disabled buttons?", and when our designer said yes, I just groaned. And our designer felt the same, but their hands were tied because that was what the client requested.
There's nothing wrong with flat design. A skilled designer with a good brief can make anything intuitive. A bunch of generic trained-monkey designers just being told to "make it flat" by their managers is the problem.
I blame Chrome more than Microsoft for starting this mess. Can we just bring back Windows 7?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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.
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...
Forgot this one setting. This gives back some contrast to the redicoulous color scheme in iOS post v6. These 3 settings are what made iOS usable for me after v6 :)
Settings->General->Accessibility->Increase Contrast
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.
They long for having the biggest tits of all. Flat? Many would rather die - and have died - than suffer being flat chested. Granted it's a chick thing, but another pair of data points, way up firm and high.
may i just register my frustration with "invisible or hidden UI", the ones that you DON'T EVEN SEE until you happen to roll over the correct area of the screen? with no visual affordance, there's no way to visually discover that there's something to click on. i am dismayed and discouraged that Apple threw out their own very good "Human Interface Guidelines" to foist this insane UI design on us, and then, like Lemmings, the industry has picked it up and run with it, as if apple made some brilliant decision that they must now all mimic, to the suffering of actual users?
We've already discussed that.
Too bad, CEOs and marketing people are clueless idiots in regard to design and functionality and I don't see this flat idiocy being killed any time soon. After all it's foisted by Apple and if Apple does that, that must be right, right?
Nowhere in the article does it say anyone is losing money.
And I take a different view than most of the commenters. Lousy interfaces will keep going because publishers want eyes on their pages, because that's what's currently getting money (clicks are SO passe now that we can inject any damnfool thing into any page at any time).
Often bad UI is attributed to incompetence and/or following the fad when often it's intentional. Seeking to keep visitors on site longer. Also, low content density requiring much scrolling and clicking keeps visitors on-site longer. The recently updated Google News is a prime example. What was easily all viewable on one screen now requires much scrolling and clicking. In my view, that wasn't an oversight, but intentional. Likewise with the reduction of customization options.
In short, what's best for users (lots of info fast at a glance) is often the opposite of what's best for website / app owner (showing little as possible; requiring much effort).
Remember Motif looked way better than the X Athena Widget set that was flat as well, ok there was Xaw3d but hey. But it had to happen that fashion brought Athena's flatness back. So lets rephrase Oscar Wilde by saying "UI designs are a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter them every six months.” Sounds pretty harsh on the poor programmers, and Motif definitely looked good.
Je me souviens.
Yeah, I could have told you this back when Windows 8 came out... oh wait, I did.
Titlebars that don't highlight when the window has focus, monochromatic icons, CAPS MENUS... 30 years of UX research thrown into the toilet when Microsoft decided to turn our desktops into mobile "screens" and now with three 4k displays, I can't even figure out what window has focus and find myself always searching a sea of visually similar icons for the tool I want.
I used to think I wasn't smart enough to navigate the new UIs, but I'm glad to see there are many other dumb people too. I kept thinking "is that a text box, a button, or a label?" and "Did I save the changes I made to the form/settings?"
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
Ohmygod, you mean getting rid of door knobs and those silly "push"/"pull" signs makes it harder to figure out where the damned door is and how to open it? Who would have guessed? </sarcasm>
I say: to the contrary.
From the article:
and so spend more time on a page
... which is exactly what out ad-fueled, metrics-driven brave new internet thrives on. People that spend more time on you site.
Sadly, it has not dawned on the marketing morons yet that perhaps, just perhaps, getting people frustrated by your web app/page detracts from the wares you pander. Oh wouldn't it be great if marketing actually depended on the merits of the product in question? Would you rather buy a product that you really wanted and needed and would be good at its purpose - or one that tries to insinuate itself into your life with all sorts of shady tricks?
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
UI designers have no concept on how to actually use anything. If you want to dumb something down so far that it's harder to use and you can't do anything complex, give it to a UI designer. If you want to make something super complex that few can use without a bunch of training, let the programmer design the interface without input. If you want to make a functional, usable interface, get the programmer involved with the users and actually take their input and use it. No need for a UI designer or even a "usability designer", this job shouldn't even exist, to get involved.
or a case of designers who haven't figured out yet how to make the new design styles functional.
The other day someone showed me an Android app that was confusing them. It had a "like" button that appeared disabled. In Material Design the widget would be called a "Toggle button with an icon", and here's the thing about it that particular widget: it only has two states: on or off; there is no "disabled" state. The visual cue for "not focused" looks to any ordinary mortal like the visual cue that other widgets with a disabled state (like the humble checkbox) use for "disabled".
I'm retired now, but having designed apps and user interfaces for decades, I can follow the designer's logic here: I only need two states: like/not liked. A flat icon button look sooo much cleaner than a frumpy old checkbox, and if I need to disable the thing I'll just make it invisible. But the thing is users haven't read the MD design guidelines; they have infer what's going on from the conflicting cues MD gives them.
Now the MD guidelines do kinda sorta steer you toward using toggle buttons in situations where they're unlikely to cause confusion, but design still takes judgment. And reading the MD guidelines, it strikes me that most people who need to produce an Android UI are presented with many subtle judgments to make when choosing between alternatives, and where there are a lot of choices there are a lot of opportunities to make bad choices.
I think UI glitches happen for the same reason that security glitches do: not enough developer training and schedule pressure. MD makes it easy to create a UI that looks modern and clean, but your job isn't done when a UI looks good; it has to minimize the cognitive load on the user as well. To do that there's no substitute for closely observing an untrained user struggling with your app. Find every little bump that trips him up and file it flat, even if you have to use a dumpy old checkbox.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
He preferred icons that had meaning to real world objects and, as such, blocked any and all attempts to "plastify" the UI - much to the chargin of the UI designers who immediately raced ahead and changed it all in iOS7 TWO YEARS after Jobs DIED!
He didn't bless it, they finally had the chance to overrule him!
Zune? Isn't that what everyone on Earth is using for music instead of cassette tapes and a Sony Walkman?
So that's for a store, where usability is considered a good thing.
What if this wasn't a store, and just "content" surrounded by ads? Might you still be able to make the case that worse is "better?"
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
I asked Biswas, "How did you know there was a gold bar there?" "Easy uncle, (all friends of parents are called uncle/aunt by Desi kids) Just keep testing to see what happens, and you find out". "What!? Did you bang your head on each brick on that passage 8 times??". "32 times uncle, yes, thats what I did!". Mrs Ranjana Ranjan was proud her young child protege knew more than the graduate student!
Looks like young Biswas is all growned up now. Biswas Ranjan, the software architect and UI evangelist became the Guru of flat interfaces. It looks like. "Everyone click on every pixel 32 times to figure out what happens." "Next page is like next level. Each next page must be increasingly harder." "It ain't no picnic people. All web sites must be like Mario brothers."
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Guys, the UI is defined by product managers. But most of them are blindly copy paste others ideas, no questions asked. If flat designed is used by Apple that means it is the best design ever. You forget about first time user experience, if you work with application for the first time it is better to have UI having excessive number of labels, messages and duplication of functionality, but when you operate the same application again and again having excessive UI elements makes it trashy. So yes, flat UI kills first time user experience for sure. But when we operate site on daily basis, we like to have more content instead of UI elements.
The latest trend are the "mobile friendly" websites that companies also use as their main site. While they may work on a small smartphone screen, on a laptop or desktop they are pure wastes of space. As an example, our bank recently changed their online interface. Where I used to be able to see 20-30 transactions on the screen, I can now see 5. It becomes a scroll-fest. And, really, who is going to pay bills, or reconcile a month's worth of transactions on their phone? Really?
Or the Swiss trains: they have a wonderful new website, mobile friendly, with big pictures and all stuff that moves and wiggles. Of course, the menus pop up and cover the screen when you accidentally mouse over them, it loses your selections from one screen to the next, forgets you are logged in when you want to pay - in fact, it's almost impossible to actually purchase a ticket. But it's modern! And mobile friendly! Crap.
Designers have a disease: They feel a need to "make their mark" by changing things, even when changing means making them worse.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
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."
If you're someone who subsists on ad revenue, this is a good result. Users look at ads on your website longer than your competitors. They look hard at your ads too, because they have to look hard at everything to find what's active. They probably click on ads more often too, in a desperate attempt to find the page controls.
This reminds me of the early days of television, when shows were effectively produced by the advertisers, and their characters would seamlessly start talking about how great their sponsor's product was in the middle of the show. There were inevitably scandals, which eventually led to regulations separating commercials and the programs. But that hasn't happened on the web yet, so designers are perfectly free to be as confusing as possible about what's a website control and what's an ad.
Flat design is not some hipster inspired departure from good design, or change-for-the-sake-of-change as some are implying. Metro and other flat designs were very specifically an attempt to develop standards for a new crop of devices and screen sizes. 3D designs did not port easily from desktops to tablets to phones, whereas simple flat designs do.
The intersection of browser and desktop reinforces this need for flat designs. Think about how easy it is to develop cross-device CSS for flat designs as opposed to graphically intensive interfaces. Not to mention the obvious differences in asset sizes.
If there are gripes to be made about new UI design, it shouldn't be about "flatness". What's gone by the wayside are concepts like discoverability -- being able to look at a UI element and discern immediately what its function is. Old school text menus, for instance, are perfectly understandable: located at the top of the screen, categorized hierarchically. Everyone knows immediately how to interact with one, and a "flat" design doesn't detract at all from it's function. It does however, lack eye-candy. Users are dazzled in the short term by flashy interfaces, and companies trying to distinguish their product will inevitably appeal to flash over function.
Shit - did I type that out loud?
What the hell is "UX" anyway? We have all these women who hate tech but joined it anyway and all they're doing is scribbling all over the software industry with fat crayons without knowing how software is supposed to work.
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do that.
I have noticed at least one UI where it would seemingly give you two choices, but make it look like there is only one by making that item as a button and the other as a flat. For example, [ Yes, I opt-in ] No, do not want
I suspect that every symbol replacing text is another item they don't need to translate for non-English markets.
Only to have to end up spending money on translation anyway when marking up each icon with alternate text for users with disabilities in non-English markets.
I think the real problem is that while a mouse works well with long and skinny targets, a finger on a touch screen needs a more square target, and icons are more square than text.
Of course. Everything's voice activated now. "Speak 'friend' and enter."
Oh great, another circle-jerk story where Slashdotters can come together and wallow in their on superiority and exclaim how all those other people are idiots and only we get how to do things right.
Yawn
If people spend 22% more time on pages, they are spending 22% longer watching ads on those pages. It's not a design flaw, it's a feature!
The other alternative is to use a custom CSS in your browser that adapts things to the styles you like.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Why do people always seem to forget that the "or never" side of this equation was once mere months away from tossing Apple onto the Adam Osborne junk heap.
Furthermore, the "function" you are discussing is the belated arrival of a working virtual memory subsystem where one could realistically run two piggish programs at the same time.
On the one side you've got the cult of the cast iron pan: everything I ever cooked, I cooked in this one pan (and it's the only pan I owned).
Obviously, high in usability.
On the other side of this, you've got a working commercial kitchen.
Obviously, low in usability.
In A Day at elBulli they document that a single service for 50 customers generates "2500 pieces of crockery, cutlery, and pans"—that being just the large or delicate excess over what already went into the commercial dishwashers.
I actually spent a bit of time studying spaced repetition (Anki is much loved by the LessWrong crowd). When measured, it seems to work, but then you get personal testimony that runs against the grain:
A vote against spaced repetition — 10 March 2014
Eventually I realized what was going on. SR is testing your memory recall in a strictly single file measurement regime (ah, the glory of owning just one pan).
I keep most of my notes in a wiki. Just the other day I rolled over 200,000 pages views in my own wiki. That's a lot of randomly spaced repetition of my own notes and ideas.
It's surely not as effective when measured against carefully titrated SR in a single-file recall regime.
But then I realized that every time I visit a page on my wiki, I'm recalling the context of the page and its contents on six dimensions simultaneously: why did I create this page, what have I forgotten, what I have remembered, does the structure read easily in a single glance, where can I amend a link for next time, what associations does it invoke against the grain of my present quest?
There's no way SR would activate my brain as usefully when measuring in the eight-dimensional space I occupy by habit and preference. But there's also no way one could ever contrive a test environment to track progress in this messy "every burner at once" cognitive world.
People who multitask in a distracted way might even benefit from Jobs' horrible legacy of raked rock-garden fixity.
People who multitask in a deeply engaged way have no use for this single-file shit.
Finally, the guy who said that the CLI is the "flattest" interface ever is full of it. Text remains the deepest representation humanity has yet achieved. Carefully supplemented with media (this is harder than it looks), it's but half a step shy of the mythical Vulcan mind meld.
xkcd excels because Randall is really good at capturing the essential cliche of the idea.
All those cliches originated in the One Interface to Rule Them All: also known as human language (a lifetime of practice required, do sign up now).
The trend of automatically hiding elements that are critical to navigation, or basic program function (e.g. scrollbars, the copy button in 1Password) is a scourge. Doesn't matter if you show it when the mouse gets close enough, as it's unintuitive.
Dynamic elements that cause other elements to rearrange themselves when they update (or are hidden/shown) are also a scourge. Looking at you, browser guys. Horizontal screen real estate is not what's at a premium. you don't need to hide nav buttons for any reason, on all but the tiniest of screens.
Finally, regarding flat UI design: imagine editing a spreadsheet with no gridlines drawn. That's what using flat UIs tends to feel like. You need clear boundaries to visually demonstrate where the program will accept an input for each given action. Something, something, scourge.
That is all.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
Just because one page looks empty does not mean is quick or simpler, the code inside might be doing a lot of things.
Seriously, an example can be found in the google webpage code is awfuly big and complex just for a search input webpage.
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...
Forgot this one setting. This gives back some contrast to the redicoulous color scheme in iOS post v6. These 3 settings are what made iOS usable for me after v6 :)
Settings->General->Accessibility->Increase Contrast
My 2 cents:
"When mere mortals need to resort to the accessibility settings to make your product usable, it is shit to begin with."
That goes for phones, websites, anything that puts form over function.
I wonder how many people seeing slashdot for the first time know that you can click the title of a heading to go to the forum.
There used to be a link below each heading that brought you to the full summary and forum. They got rid of that in some UI rework.
Oh, and did you know that those icons on the right of the title are buttons? And those things at the top are menus.
Just another horrible thing about windows 10 vindicated. Chock full of dark patterns and terrible user interface design.
The network flyout is a great example of this. You dont know what to do until you click it.
Which Are More Legible: Serif or Sans Serif Typefaces? — 17 February 2008
This is a nicely done synopsis; though I personally don't trust it as far as I can throw it, it does cast the debate in a different light: that unfamiliarity is the enemy of productivity and that the actual design (up to a point) turns out not to matter as much as we thought, further down the road.
The main cause of self-inflicted unfamiliarity: bored GUI design teams.
About that putative preference for sans serif: I personally love the clean look of sans serif for text I'm not forced to read. If the text is decorative, or supplementary, or only rarely essential to the purpose of the screen, sans serif can be a fine choice.
But if my purpose in life is to actually read and process and remember and mentally index the content, it's serif fonts all day, every day, and nothing but.
Funny, Firefox has a setting for that, which I tend to exploit.
If imposing a serif-font-only override against the page designer's wish breaks layout so badly I can no longer read the page (this is not common, but not uncommon, either) I will actually just cut and paste the article text into some large browser input text box (there's usually one handy), and read it there.
I've made heavy use of user CSS to eliminate page clutter on all my most frequent sites, which also makes my cut&paste text excision tool more effective.
I added a button to flip image content of many web pages on or off. Half the time I turn it off to clip something, then neglect to turn it back on for half a day (or half a week)—it takes me that long to chance across an article where I actually miss the photographic or graphical design flourish.
Just the text baby.
Yet again, another fine synopsis that shallowly testifies to a paucity of hard-core curmudgeon focus group spleen vent.
Because Steve Jobs died. Yeah yeah, I know a huge number of readers here don't respect him, but here is the thing: He appears to be the ONLY POWERFUL figure in the computing industry to understand one simple truth: The single most important thing about a computer (of any kind, whether it is a traditional computer or a phone, or a tablet, etc.) is HOW the damn thing integrates with HUMANS. That's really the damn key to all of it. Without any consistent leader saying "THIS is RIGHT" and "THIS other thing is WRONG" it's left up to people with no mother-fucking clue about what makes a good UI. The current utter ass-hats at Apple are only a tiny and insignificant amount better than anyone else at this, which is why the Mac OS and iOS have taken such a dramatic turn for the worse, and without Apple to lead everything else can go to hell too (why bother to try and be good when nobody else is?) Apps like Firefox, which used to adhere to excellent Apple design guidelines now have shit like preferences that load in a damn browser tab (like Chrome) instead of in a proper preferences windows. That confuses the shit out of most of the general population. It's now all a race to the bottom of dumb-ass people designing what they think looks good (and which, might I add, it often doesn't) and the hell with usability. If Steve had managed even another 5 years it might have been enough to make his design paradigm "stick" in our universal consciousness, but he didn't, and now it's just a free-for-all of morons fucking things up all over the place. It's a great time for someone else to come along and build the next great thing though! All it has to do is properly integrate with the way humans needs things to work. It doesn't have to be the fastest. It doesn't have to have the most bells and whistles. It just has to be easy to see, easy to use, and work properly, that's it.
Nu neuzheli? I noticed that as soon as I came across one of those UIs a few year ago...
Goofle needs to fix the UI on search, badly.
It's about time someone pointed out the lack of the emperor's clothes. These Artsy-Fartsy "Clean" designs are great if you're browsing a Monet art show. If all you want to do (All!) is get information, they are slow, they get in the way, they make the site unpleasant.
And Zune? What a Role Model! Just because a megacorporation does something doesn't make it good. Consider Wal-Mart baked chickens.
Honestly, if Microsoft came out with Steaming Turd Interface, half the manufacturers in the visible universe would be touting STI 2.0 Compatibility.
Don't take life too seriously; it isn't permanent.
The consequence is that users find navigation harder, and so spend more time on a page.
Funny how the companies leading the flat UI uptake are the same companies that sell advertising. While users are spending more time looking for navigation controls they're more likely to see advertising.
Your post worth to be a article of it's own right. Shall I suggest the article title to be [The cancer that is killing desktop]?
I keep hearing about this new UX discipline, how it used the latest research from cognitive science to design the most efficient user interfaces abd how that new approach will make all of our software so much better.
Well all I've seen from UX experts were massive failures like this one. How long will it take until people realize it's a sham?
My primary interface to the world is ssh. (I'm generally a Cisco/Palo jockey, and I find CLIs to be more efficient than GUIs).
Recently, our desktop team rolled out Office 2016. My, and most people's primary use for the suite is email. Besides the fact that it's a complete piece of shit, I CAN'T READ THE DAMN THING. I'm not *that* old, but my vision is poor to start with, and age isn't helping. Light Blue on white? Are you out of your fucking mind? I don't know if our rollout was poorly done, but neither of the two themes (OS X) available to me address this.
And, on a related note, why??? It's a goddamn email client. It's been doing pretty much the same thing for 20 years, why move everything around? This is actually what drove me to Linux as a primary leisure OS (always Linux for real work)- because MS seemed to feel the need to keep rearranging shit. Yeah, yeah, whizbang up your OS, but keep the network config and important shit where I can find it. Idiots.
It's the fault of the fucking morons who ENABLED them, those Peter Principle no-brain pricks in middle management, who switched off their critical analysis functions when they got PROMOTED, thereby making them infallible in their own eyes.
"Rockstars" who believe that making a change is better than the status quo, simply because it gives them visibility in the organisation.
Me-me-me-me-me. Look at me and my pretty little pony, with shiney baubles and whistles and pings.
And on upwards, all the way to the CxO suite, where the "captains of industry" are likewise prone to swallow their own bullshit and force it on others, because that's what "having a vision" is all about, and if you don't "have a vision", then you're a nobody. :(
Fuck, but I hate identity politics in politics, but I hate it even more in business.
And in the end, it all falls to the legal environment, where line-level employees have no recourse for abuse from above.
"I am your boss and my authority will be respected", even if it's not actually a respectable position that they've taken.
If you've got no way of having grass roots intelligence permeate upwards, then you are guaranteed a disaster, sooner or later.
And the world, unfortunately, is only becoming increasingly authoritarian, so we can all expect awesome new shittiness for the foreseeable future.
Are you saying that finding icons and buttons on a colorful display is slower than using keyboard shortcuts and commands? Who'd have thought.... Fucking idiots. User experience my ass.
I have huge difficulty using Material Design apps. Pushing the first cardinal sin of bad design: Making the style, the look more important than ease of use.
The larger problem is that Microsoft in particular and the industry in general is fixated on changing userland, usually by adding more eye candy, while ignoring the underlying OS issues (Microsoft's kernel team is notorious for their attitude). The Microsoft Office 2007 Ribbon is probably the best example of this. Ribbon happens and then none of my users are smart enough to navigate Excel or Word anymore. Stop jacking with the UI. The freakin' "File, Edit, Print" menus are *more than good enough* to see even the most moronic of users (bumbling) through their work day. I feel like XP was the last, best iteration of that desktop paradigm, 7 was okay, and 8 was a total flop in part due to the flat interface. New UI does not equal new operating system. Grow the f**k up and work on "better," not "different."
Thanks for the suggestions. I definitely like the increased contrast and having the button shapes back. My eyes aren't old enough (yet) for the bold text to be necessary, but the other two definitely help.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
In many of the cases I'm seeing here, the following probably happened:
The designer can give good consultation on what works and what doesn't, but ultimately the people paying the bill will make the decision.
Many people on /. seem to think UI/UX designer means someone who randomly slaps shit together.
No, UX is ALL ABOUT TESTING YOUR WORK.
User testing is probably the best part of the process. Getting to know how real people react to designs is really rewarding.
Problem is, you pay for that. So convincing a cheapskate boss to pay for it doesn't always go well. In that case all you can do is follow design trends and hope it all comes out in the wash. Try A/B testing which is cheaper as well.
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There ARE people who go into design also tend to dislike the idea that UI concepts have to be tested and follow rigid guidelines, but that's another matter.
My boss sent this: https://i.imgur.com/osUaSF5.pn... to our developers to re-think their design... Really has me fearful for the future of applications.