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."

Comments

Add in the 'low-contrast text' fad...

[QuietLagoon]

... 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?

Re:Add in the 'low-contrast text' fad...

[DontBeAMoran]

And once you add the "thin as fuck" fonts, it makes things impossible to read as well as difficult to navigate.

Sometimes I have to turn off CSS to be able to read the fucking content. How is that for bad design?

Re:Add in the 'low-contrast text' fad...

[ShanghaiBill]

Because UX/UI designers now days obviously never read a book regarding the subject of user interface design.

Also a lack of usability testing. My UI designs were subjected to usability testing a few times, with customers video recorded while attempting to accomplish a task. Watching those videos was a very humbling experience. I kept trying to scream "NO! Not THAT button!", but since it was a recording, they didn't hear me. Afterwards, my designs got much simpler.

One book that helped me is Microinteractions.

Hallelujah!

[Tablizer]

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.

What a mess

[fyngyrz]

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."

Re:What a mess

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got a term for this disease that I use a lot when I'm trying to explain how and why user interface design has gone down the toilet lately: Phonification. (Often spoken alongside another phrase I coined: "You can't say crap without app." That's another topic, though.)

Another few sins I'd like to add to the list:

* Non-standard iconography: Icons that mean the same thing appear differently between programs and platforms.
* Non-obvious iconography: Icons are used which have no obvious meaning. Why is there a ball-and-stick molecule thing for 'share'?
* No text to describe what icons or buttons do, even as an option, even when text would fit. If you're lucky you can get a mouse-over tip. Very lucky.
* Interface elements do not reside in predictable or consistent regions of the screen. I thought this was a basic rule of GUI design, but I guess not.
* No obvious visual cues for when a button can or can't be used. (I'm looking at you, Citrix.)

It's more than just change for the sake of change. It's a bunch of stupid valley hipsters and brain-dead suits who don't know the first thing about visual communication, throwing away nearly forty years of GUI design standards and principles (which have been tried, proven, and I would dare say perfected, over that span of time,) just so they can make something that looks trendy and sophisticated, when it's really just annoying. When people complain, they assume the problem is with the user, and not with the bullshit design ideas that they're embracing. (So in a lot of ways, an interface that's like them.)

It's bad enough that so many sacrifices have to be made for palm-sized touch screens (don't even get me started on these,) but piling ugly pastel colors, flat interfaces, gigantic empty margins and spaces, unreadable fonts, and cryptic icons that roam from page to page, all on top of that, has made the smartphone user experience an exercise in frustration. Whenever this rot spreads to other platforms (especially design choices that only make sense when you're dealing with a touch screen, on a platform where the touch screen is absent) I just groan and shake my head and ask, "Why? Why would you do this to your program?" Deliberately reducing the usability of your programs, especially for new users, just for the sake of looks is not a valid artistic decision! Function first, form second, it's the golden rule of design!

There's a damn good reason absolutely everyone hated Windows 8. To the design leads at Microsoft and beyond: Stop trying to shove this down our throats, people. We don't like it, you can't make us like it, and we're not dumb for disliking it.

On the topic of phones, wanna know what my favorite phone is from the last ten years? The Jitterbug. Yes, I'm aware that it's a phone specially designed for the elderly, but look at that interface. It's fucking glorious. If this is a phone for old people, then call me Grandpa. I want this kind of design to be standard, everywhere.

As for the phonification of the web and the desktop, stop, please, just stop. These people have no idea what they're doing. Interface design has become a cargo cult, and it's probably going to take another Mother of All Demos (and maybe a viable alternative to that cancer, the touch screen,) to get everyone back on track.

Re:Group think

[mikael]

I always thought those click-and-explore DOS games were the inspiration for modern GUI. You used to frantically click objects on each screen to see if it had any purpose. Now we have websites that have the same functionality.

The irony is

[Solandri]

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.

Re:The irony is

[Tablizer]

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 [or user preference].

This conflicts with the marketer's view of the world. The marketer wants to control the message, and that includes the look of the message. If they want to attract a given "cohort" (demographic), they want to be able to shape and style the content that way to attract that demographic, and sometimes ONLY that demographic to weed out alleged riff-raff and/or not waste ad fees on unlikely buyers.

And how can you get a jump on the latest style if you cannot convey the latest style? Purple denim's the latest craze? Okay, Marketing Joe wants the page show a purple denim font. If the UI dev doesn't deliver, he/she is fired.

Vulcan vs. Ferengi culture conflict.

Re: Fuck flat design

[tysonedwards]

Itâ(TM)s almost like that flat, minimalistic design impeded your ability to quickly and effectively understand the content.