We should all be pushing for web apps to be Javascript and HTML. Forget even stuff like canvas and WebGL. We want apps that are function and display useful data in a readable manner, not flashy stuff, right?
I agree up to a point. Functionality is more important than presentation, and certainly we want readable and usable over flashy. That said, there is definitely a place for well-designed visualisations and custom interactions in GUIs, not to be flashy but because they are more efficient and less error-prone. Implementing that functionality in a web context does need some capable tool, whether it's Java, Flash, a D3-backed SVG, or something else entirely.
That's probably just poor programming by whoever developed that particular applet, then. I've worked on projects that used applets for similar embedded UIs and they continued to work fine through many years of JRE updates.
Your fear-mongering is several years of out date. Java applets have had multiple levels of click-to-play style protection for a long time. Malware authors are having much more success targeting things like Android users these days.
A bad tech bet? Java as a web technology has lasted in the region of two decades. There are Java applets that academics wrote as quick illustrations of some concept from their lecture course in the 1990s that are still just as valid and still work just as well today, except for the browser guys and Oracle deciding applets should die. Java has its problems, but it has been one of the most stable and reliable technologies in the history of computing.
If you want to talk about bad tech bets, consider that if a trendy JS framework is still in serious development after two years it's doing well. For some newer features, if all the main browsers can even manage to provide a stable and compatible implementation for two months (long enough for all the evergreen ones to update once or twice) it's a pleasant surprise.
The thing is, Java applets actually were write once, run anywhere in terms of browser portability, at least until the powers that be started making it difficult to run applets in a browser at all. The same was true of Flash.
In contrast, newer technologies that are supposed to provide functionality that plugins were good for, like HTML5 media elements and canvas/SVG/WebGL, have wildly different levels of feature support, implementation quality, and performance across browsers. I understand the reasons browser makers want to drop plugin support, but the alternative browser-native technologies still have a long way to go.
I'm curious: How would that give them any useful evidence in the event of legal action? Is the idea that if the student didn't slavishly turn up to the 28th lecture after the first 27 were rubbish, the university could claim the student didn't really try or something?
At least you got to give some visible feedback on your course.
I remember very well when I went to university that while some of the lecturers were great, too many were clearly just phoning it in, with a level of presentation skills and lack of commitment that would have prompted immediate intervention by management in almost any other professional setting. Spending many hours in a lecture theatre as the bad lecturers droned on adding little insight with their commentary or even just literally writing their notes up on some form of screen for most of the lecture was one of the most unproductive uses of time I have ever encountered. I remember the tuition representatives for the relevant department being openly challenged about this by the students and being unapologetic about it, saying in substance that the lecturers wouldn't accept being told to improve. Of course, no-one outside the university, such as anyone thinking of going to study the same course the next year, could see that exchange.
Sadly, at that stage I hadn't yet figured out how to study well independently either, but I suspect the time I spent with textbooks or reading online instead of going to the lectures was still more useful. Fortunately in my country going to lectures wasn't formally required, so as long as you kept up with the problem sets and related tuition outside of lectures and you learned the material in time for the exams, the rest was up to you.
Given how much more it costs young people today to attend university, I think it would be no bad thing if substandard tuition was held to account. However, for some reason I get the feeling that if this new Big Brother system detected a pattern of many students increasingly failing to attend a certain course of lectures and instead going to the library, studying online, staying in bed, training for their preferred sport, or spending time with their preferred love interest, it still wouldn't be the course officials who were being scrutinised.
Do you really think it's appropriate or helpful for anyone who feels like it to have access to vast amounts of audio/video footage that will often be recorded in sensitive environments?
Keeping an eye on public servants is one thing (though even there I think there are boundaries) but using a tool intended to serve justice as a means of playing creepy voyeur with everyone those public servants come into contact with or discuss during their day is an entirely different thing.
I realise you're joking, but one of the interesting possibilities on that sort of time scale might be for Google to start targetting desktop/laptop PCs with some variation of Android, in which case we really might see mass market Linux on the desktop. It would be interesting to see how that would affect the whole client/server/cloud strategy Google have been pursuing in recent years.
Some other plausible moves in the industry on that timescale might be changes at Apple leading to much increased desktop/laptop market share, possibly combined with a move into the server/back office space.
An outside possibility would be another big player aggressively moving into business computing, perhaps building off Linux and existing OSS initially but also developing substantial new applications of their own, and displacing the Microsoft ecosystem but without shifting so much towards the Google or Apple business models. There are a few organisations that probably have the resources to pull this off if they see an opportunity and decide to commit to it: IBM and Oracle are the first that come to mind.
And of course, there could be a complete change in direction at Microsoft by then. If Windows 10 doesn't do very well by the one year mark despite the extremely aggressive tactics MS have used to promote it -- and if I were a betting man, I'd probably bet it won't do well enough based on sentiment so far -- Nadella is unlikely to retain his position, and a successor who moved back towards more familiar territory might be able to turn things around.
So, plausible options I'm seeing for mainstream computing in 2020 if Win10 doesn't become a huge success: Google spying everywhere, Apple locking up everywhere in its walled garden, old school giant corporations on desktop, or Microsoft almost collapsing but recovering under new leadership. That's quite a depressing prospect.:-(
Nothing targeted at corporate or enterprise includes that at all.
Let's hope that they start. It was already becoming a realistic concern that malware could embed itself in field-upgradable firmware, though as far as I'm aware this form of attack isn't widespread in practice yet. If Microsoft are going to take it upon themselves to start messing with the firmware as well, some proportion of systems getting bricked seems an inevitable consequence, and perhaps this will drive the big name brands with their expensive corporate support contracts to include a hard-coded factory reset feature as standard.
One reason Edge is not ready for deployment is because it doesn't run on Linux on Mac.
Or Windows 7, 8 or 8.1.
Or even Windows 10, if you're running Enterprise on the Long-Term Servicing Branch (LTSB), as surely most big businesses who switch will be.
I think Microsoft have miscalculated on this one: if Edge isn't going to force most customers to switch to Windows 10, then not having Edge on the more popular Windows versions is just going to limit its relevance and make IE11 the new IE8.
Sure, there were definitely other kinds of "awakening" experience for other characters as well. I thought the eponymous awakening was pretty obvious, though.
I know what you mean about the ending, and when I was watching I expected the credits to roll at the same time as you did, not least because it would have been yet another nod to the original movies. However, that would probably have removed the opportunity to use (unspecified fact about original cast) in the marketing for any of the new trilogy. I imagine the hype generated from that opportunity was worth a bit, so the executives probably decided to leave the post-trailer teasers to the Avengers and friends.
But I have no idea where in this new movie we saw the force "Awaken"
In an attempt to avoid spoilers for anyone who hasn't seen it yet, let me just say that there is a scene in a very old place where a very old creature lives, and during that scene a major character has a kind of epiphany, and after that the major character develops significantly throughout the remainder of the film.
It's certainly true that the film is very derivative and looks back to the episode IV-VI roots. Personally, I was happy that they went for that kind of live action, retro feel instead of CGI shiny things everywhere, though the endless cliches and in-jokes did get tiresome.
My biggest criticism was that the bad guys just didn't seem to be... well, much of anything, really. They're just there and they're evil, mmmkay? There's no indication of how in just a generation since RotJ a new power has risen from the ashes of the Empire and been able to build all the things they have by the start of TFA. And I'm afraid none of the miscellaneously evil arch bad guys is a Darth Vader or Emperor Palpatine. Hopefully this can be improved in the next two movies when they're not busy trying to introduce all the new good guys as well.
It's certainly possible that you're right, but equally if the GP poster really does have insider knowledge and really does want to speak without betraying a confidence then surely they really would post anonymously.
In any case, I can tell you the answer to your follow-up questions for at least some small to medium-sized companies I work with: Windows 10's biggest competition is probably Windows 7, which is what the majority of these organisations are already running as their standard desktop.
The difficulty Microsoft has with these customers is that Windows 10 doesn't have a lot of big selling points. I watched and listened to some of the early promotional material, and the loudest message I heard was "it's not Windows 8". Obviously to business customers who standardised on Windows 7 anyway, that's not exactly a good reason to undertake an inevitably expensive and disruptive migration to a new OS.
It is quite simple to show what area is interactive i.e. based purely on colour.
Up to a point, perhaps. But any guidance for a user that relies purely on colour for essential meaning is risky, for all the usual reasons: different colours have different connotations in different cultures, not everyone physically sees colours the same way, and so on. Also, even if you do adopt colour for this, it's tricky to establish a universal convention (which is helpful for usability) since different systems will have different colour schemes.
Please consider that while the UI designer constrained to use flat design has to grapple with those issues, the UI designer with a wider range of tools available might be using completely different effects to distinguish a button and its extent, and has colour available for subtle cues like highlighting the main call to action or next step button, or adding a red or green tinge around dangerous or confirmation buttons.
I look at a radio button from old windows XP era and my current flat designed Android and there is literally no difference other than an internal emboss on the background, and a specular highlight on the dot. It is still 100% identical in the way it displays, a circle that's empty when not selected, and a circle with a dot in it when selected.
And as long as UIs stick with that widely used convention, going flat is fine. Unfortunately, lots of UIs don't.
Take a look at the on/off toggles on recent iOS, for example, which are completely meaningless if you see them in isolation. There is no indication of which side means yes/on/true. In light of the ambiguities of using colour blocks as mentioned above, even that doesn't necessarily help much. To find out what's going on, the user needs to start activating things, which they might or might not want to do. Even how to toggle the control isn't immediately obvious, as it looks like a slider but in fact responds to a simple tap.
At least those toggle sliders, while awfully designed in almost every way I can think of, have the virtue of being a standard on that platform and so something users will probably learn to recognise fairly quickly once they've seen it a few times. The random presentation of toggle controls that you see on a lot of web sites or over-stylised mobile apps doesn't even have that going for it.
Also when the hell did 3 little bars turn into "menu".
It didn't, and actual data from real users consistently shows the hamburger menu and its dotty or griddy variants underperforming. If you ever run into a designer who maintains that using a hamburger menu is a good idea, and who doesn't have a very clear argument for that in some very specific context, you can probably assume you're talking to someone who isn't very good.
I do agree with the flat design having difficulty separating content from control to some degree, especially with defaults chosen.
It's more than just the defaults though. Quite simply, flat design artificially and quite severely limits the range of tools available to the designer to convey meaning. Anything flat design can do well, you can also do well in other visual styles, and you've still got all those other options to use if you need more variation or just some subtle contrast to give an extra cue to the user. The opposite isn't -- and can't be -- true.
Personally, I'm looking forward to the convergence of a few recent technologies that are in their infancy today: the use of HUDs to project directly onto the screen, the use of real-time information about traffic conditions and route planning, visualisations from that route planning software that show a realistic lane or junction arrangement, and in particular the use of sensors and image recognition technology to analyse the road ahead. The latter is already used for a few neat tricks like recognising current speed limits and warning about lane drift, and in particular detecting other hazards in or near the road to reconfigure front lighting to highlight dangers or avoid dazzling other road users.
Put more mature versions of these technologies together, and at some point what I'm seeing when I look "out the window" is what's really out the window, overlaid with enhancements for better vision at night or in otherwise limited visibility, then overlaid again with navigational information that subtly highlights the lane I need to be in or the path I need to follow through a junction if I'm using the automatic route guidance tools, and then finally overlaid with essential information about hazards or urgent warnings. In all cases I can still see what's actually out there as well as my eyes will allow, and everything else other than possibly urgent warning indicators is just a soft/transparent enhancement of the natural view.
For extra points, throw in the view from cameras that replace the way we use mirrors today, across the bottom of the windscreen where I'd just be looking at metal otherwise. Naturally these supplementary views could be overlaid with similar enhancements, and they wouldn't need to have the blind spots that most traditional mirror arrangements have.
I don't know how much more comfortable a well designed system along those lines would make driving, particularly in unfamiliar territory, at night, or in bad conditions, but I'm better it's a lot. I'm betting it would avoid a lot of accidents, too. And with the current pace of innovation in the auto industry, it seems like the kind of technology we could actually have in real production cars within a decade, as long as we don't get sidetracked with all this infotainment crap along the way.
I haven't seen those particular studies that I recall, though I'm not surprised by what you described. Personally, I find the old school approach of actually planning my journey and then paying attention to road signs usually works out just fine.
I'm hopeful that some of the modern developments involving project essential information directly onto the windscreen as a form of HUD will take care of the rest in due course. This, along with better external lights and sensors, is among the few recent developments in driver-facing technologies that I do welcome in cars, though I slightly fear what will happen if the designers get carried away with their toys and start shoving non-essential information (which is almost anything if you're driving) up there as well.
I suspect articles like that have been written about a lot of modern technologies that take what used to be a useful, single-purpose device and try to force other tangential functionality into it. The software version is probably Zawinski's law, which goes back around 20 years.
You also shouldn't be talking hands-free if you care at all about safety and driving properly, but unfortunately some drivers still do. Aside from connections for real-time traffic information and the like, or for genuine emergencies, there are really very few legitimate reasons to have a lot of these new gadgets in any car for the use of the driver.
Another software guy who wants cars to be cars, reporting in.
I read this:
The number of in-vehicle processors continues to grow, and consumers have come to expect their car to mimic smartphone functionality.
and my immediate reaction was that I'd bet a substantial amount of money that this is much more about marketing than about what consumers buying a car actually want.
But then I dislike questionable developments like so-called smart TVs and the Internet of Things as well, so maybe I just want all these kids to get off my lawn...
The buzzwords don't help, IMHO. Creating a UI has always been about more than mere cosmetic details. Good UI designers have considered interaction design and numerous other aspects since long before anyone invented terms like UX, never mind created any of those UX forums. UI work was never just about looks, in all the decades I've been doing it.
However, as with anything, a lot of people who don't have the full set of related skills also invent new terms for what they do that emphasize the skills they do have and gloss over the gaps. Thus we get interaction designers, and UX evangelists, and usability researchers, and visual designers, and animation artists, and front-end developers. This isn't necessarily a criticism, BTW, because of course everyone has to start somewhere. However, it's also true that there are more experienced practitioners who really do have all of those skills and really can build a major UI with one person or perhaps a small team that is better than what a whole bunch of relatively inexperienced specialists would produce.
Also as with anything, people invent new buzzwords to describe the same old stuff that good practitioners have done forever. Presumably they think it looks more impressive to clueless people on a CV or Powerpoint slide. Personally I find the whole UI vs. UX distinction to be completely artificial and unhelpful, but YMMV.
The research I've seen here in the UK supports similar conclusions. Unfortunately, at least for now, the only major variations we have in default speed limits are for different vehicle types.
We do now have variable speed limits in place on some of our motorways (our most significant highways) where in response to volume of traffic, or sometimes because of some other incident or poor environmental conditions, a lower limit than the default 70mph can be imposed and is displayed very obviously on digital signs over or alongside the road, many of which also carry cameras for enforcement purposes. These are one of the few changes in our road traffic rules in recent years that seems to have been a clear win, because as you might expect they do seem to promote smoother traffic flows in congested conditions.
Unfortunately, that system only applies on specially prepared sections of our most important roads, so it still won't allow any discretion to drive a bit faster on a literally deserted road on Christmas morning, nor lower the::ahem:: target speed::ahem:: when, say, there's a bank of fog just over the next hill on a rural road.
So how is a flat design based on poorly chosen design principles, or a bad user experience?
One problem that comes directly from the flat aspect is that there isn't enough variation to clearly identify the interactive aspects of a UI. A horizontal line could be a divider between separate content areas, marking off a heading from a lightly formatted list or table, or an editable text entry field. A filled rectangle could be a text field, a button, a notification message, or just some highlighted content. Numerous examples can be found of basic UI controls like radio buttons and check boxes where it is literally impossible to tell whether the current state is meant to be on or off unless you're already familiar with the convention they use, or sometimes even whether a group of such controls are mutually exclusive or not. Circular or rounded elements sometimes get introduced to distinguish some of these cases, but then those in turn have the same problem that there's no useful affordance in the presentation.
A related problem with the lack of tools to distinguish different parts of a screen is that you often see large colour blocks used for backgrounds. These may themselves become distracting or, worse, clash horribly with the typical strong colours often used with flat designs. Alternatively, ever-increasing amounts of white space get introduced to separate different areas, resulting in an empty-looking UI with very poor information density.
Then we get to the illustrations. In the absence of things like depth and texture, flat design icons tend to become pretty much line art and/or colour blocks. Line art is particularly popular because of icon fonts, which have problems of their own, but that's not strictly a flat design issue so I won't get into it here. What is a problem with either common style of flat design icons is that they can easily become so similar as to be hard to tell apart, again giving poor usability. How often have you see two or more very similar variations of straight/hooked/circular arrows, crosses, stars, plus signs, or other common icons in the same UI, which firstly did completely different things despite looking almost the same, and secondly didn't convey any particularly helpful indication of what they would do in at least one of those cases anyway? We could add some text to help clarify, but then the main tools we have available to indicate that the text and icon are related are proximity, lines, or background colour blocks, which have all the same problems I already mentioned.
I could also get into how poor a lot of the typography and animations typically used with flat design tend to be, but again these aren't inherently a problem with flat design itself, so maybe a little off-topic here. It certainly would be fair to heavily criticise specific implementations of flat design from the likes of Microsoft and Apple on these grounds, though.
That's just off the top of my head, but if you're interested in more, people a lot more eloquent than me have written much longer and more detailed critiques of why flat design is almost universally awful from a usability perspective. I'm sure your search engine of choice will turn up a few of the main ones if you'd like to read them.
Slashdot Mirror
We should all be pushing for web apps to be Javascript and HTML. Forget even stuff like canvas and WebGL. We want apps that are function and display useful data in a readable manner, not flashy stuff, right?
I agree up to a point. Functionality is more important than presentation, and certainly we want readable and usable over flashy. That said, there is definitely a place for well-designed visualisations and custom interactions in GUIs, not to be flashy but because they are more efficient and less error-prone. Implementing that functionality in a web context does need some capable tool, whether it's Java, Flash, a D3-backed SVG, or something else entirely.
That's probably just poor programming by whoever developed that particular applet, then. I've worked on projects that used applets for similar embedded UIs and they continued to work fine through many years of JRE updates.
Your fear-mongering is several years of out date. Java applets have had multiple levels of click-to-play style protection for a long time. Malware authors are having much more success targeting things like Android users these days.
A bad tech bet? Java as a web technology has lasted in the region of two decades. There are Java applets that academics wrote as quick illustrations of some concept from their lecture course in the 1990s that are still just as valid and still work just as well today, except for the browser guys and Oracle deciding applets should die. Java has its problems, but it has been one of the most stable and reliable technologies in the history of computing.
If you want to talk about bad tech bets, consider that if a trendy JS framework is still in serious development after two years it's doing well. For some newer features, if all the main browsers can even manage to provide a stable and compatible implementation for two months (long enough for all the evergreen ones to update once or twice) it's a pleasant surprise.
The thing is, Java applets actually were write once, run anywhere in terms of browser portability, at least until the powers that be started making it difficult to run applets in a browser at all. The same was true of Flash.
In contrast, newer technologies that are supposed to provide functionality that plugins were good for, like HTML5 media elements and canvas/SVG/WebGL, have wildly different levels of feature support, implementation quality, and performance across browsers. I understand the reasons browser makers want to drop plugin support, but the alternative browser-native technologies still have a long way to go.
I'm curious: How would that give them any useful evidence in the event of legal action? Is the idea that if the student didn't slavishly turn up to the 28th lecture after the first 27 were rubbish, the university could claim the student didn't really try or something?
At least you got to give some visible feedback on your course.
I remember very well when I went to university that while some of the lecturers were great, too many were clearly just phoning it in, with a level of presentation skills and lack of commitment that would have prompted immediate intervention by management in almost any other professional setting. Spending many hours in a lecture theatre as the bad lecturers droned on adding little insight with their commentary or even just literally writing their notes up on some form of screen for most of the lecture was one of the most unproductive uses of time I have ever encountered. I remember the tuition representatives for the relevant department being openly challenged about this by the students and being unapologetic about it, saying in substance that the lecturers wouldn't accept being told to improve. Of course, no-one outside the university, such as anyone thinking of going to study the same course the next year, could see that exchange.
Sadly, at that stage I hadn't yet figured out how to study well independently either, but I suspect the time I spent with textbooks or reading online instead of going to the lectures was still more useful. Fortunately in my country going to lectures wasn't formally required, so as long as you kept up with the problem sets and related tuition outside of lectures and you learned the material in time for the exams, the rest was up to you.
Given how much more it costs young people today to attend university, I think it would be no bad thing if substandard tuition was held to account. However, for some reason I get the feeling that if this new Big Brother system detected a pattern of many students increasingly failing to attend a certain course of lectures and instead going to the library, studying online, staying in bed, training for their preferred sport, or spending time with their preferred love interest, it still wouldn't be the course officials who were being scrutinised.
General public - should be free to view.
Do you really think it's appropriate or helpful for anyone who feels like it to have access to vast amounts of audio/video footage that will often be recorded in sensitive environments?
Keeping an eye on public servants is one thing (though even there I think there are boundaries) but using a tool intended to serve justice as a means of playing creepy voyeur with everyone those public servants come into contact with or discuss during their day is an entirely different thing.
I realise you're joking, but one of the interesting possibilities on that sort of time scale might be for Google to start targetting desktop/laptop PCs with some variation of Android, in which case we really might see mass market Linux on the desktop. It would be interesting to see how that would affect the whole client/server/cloud strategy Google have been pursuing in recent years.
Some other plausible moves in the industry on that timescale might be changes at Apple leading to much increased desktop/laptop market share, possibly combined with a move into the server/back office space.
An outside possibility would be another big player aggressively moving into business computing, perhaps building off Linux and existing OSS initially but also developing substantial new applications of their own, and displacing the Microsoft ecosystem but without shifting so much towards the Google or Apple business models. There are a few organisations that probably have the resources to pull this off if they see an opportunity and decide to commit to it: IBM and Oracle are the first that come to mind.
And of course, there could be a complete change in direction at Microsoft by then. If Windows 10 doesn't do very well by the one year mark despite the extremely aggressive tactics MS have used to promote it -- and if I were a betting man, I'd probably bet it won't do well enough based on sentiment so far -- Nadella is unlikely to retain his position, and a successor who moved back towards more familiar territory might be able to turn things around.
So, plausible options I'm seeing for mainstream computing in 2020 if Win10 doesn't become a huge success: Google spying everywhere, Apple locking up everywhere in its walled garden, old school giant corporations on desktop, or Microsoft almost collapsing but recovering under new leadership. That's quite a depressing prospect. :-(
Nothing targeted at corporate or enterprise includes that at all.
Let's hope that they start. It was already becoming a realistic concern that malware could embed itself in field-upgradable firmware, though as far as I'm aware this form of attack isn't widespread in practice yet. If Microsoft are going to take it upon themselves to start messing with the firmware as well, some proportion of systems getting bricked seems an inevitable consequence, and perhaps this will drive the big name brands with their expensive corporate support contracts to include a hard-coded factory reset feature as standard.
One reason Edge is not ready for deployment is because it doesn't run on Linux on Mac.
Or Windows 7, 8 or 8.1.
Or even Windows 10, if you're running Enterprise on the Long-Term Servicing Branch (LTSB), as surely most big businesses who switch will be.
I think Microsoft have miscalculated on this one: if Edge isn't going to force most customers to switch to Windows 10, then not having Edge on the more popular Windows versions is just going to limit its relevance and make IE11 the new IE8.
Sure, there were definitely other kinds of "awakening" experience for other characters as well. I thought the eponymous awakening was pretty obvious, though.
I know what you mean about the ending, and when I was watching I expected the credits to roll at the same time as you did, not least because it would have been yet another nod to the original movies. However, that would probably have removed the opportunity to use (unspecified fact about original cast) in the marketing for any of the new trilogy. I imagine the hype generated from that opportunity was worth a bit, so the executives probably decided to leave the post-trailer teasers to the Avengers and friends.
But I have no idea where in this new movie we saw the force "Awaken"
In an attempt to avoid spoilers for anyone who hasn't seen it yet, let me just say that there is a scene in a very old place where a very old creature lives, and during that scene a major character has a kind of epiphany, and after that the major character develops significantly throughout the remainder of the film.
It's certainly true that the film is very derivative and looks back to the episode IV-VI roots. Personally, I was happy that they went for that kind of live action, retro feel instead of CGI shiny things everywhere, though the endless cliches and in-jokes did get tiresome.
My biggest criticism was that the bad guys just didn't seem to be... well, much of anything, really. They're just there and they're evil, mmmkay? There's no indication of how in just a generation since RotJ a new power has risen from the ashes of the Empire and been able to build all the things they have by the start of TFA. And I'm afraid none of the miscellaneously evil arch bad guys is a Darth Vader or Emperor Palpatine. Hopefully this can be improved in the next two movies when they're not busy trying to introduce all the new good guys as well.
You realise you're defending the creature who brought down civilisation and elevated one of the most evil characters in movie history to power, right?
It's certainly possible that you're right, but equally if the GP poster really does have insider knowledge and really does want to speak without betraying a confidence then surely they really would post anonymously.
In any case, I can tell you the answer to your follow-up questions for at least some small to medium-sized companies I work with: Windows 10's biggest competition is probably Windows 7, which is what the majority of these organisations are already running as their standard desktop.
The difficulty Microsoft has with these customers is that Windows 10 doesn't have a lot of big selling points. I watched and listened to some of the early promotional material, and the loudest message I heard was "it's not Windows 8". Obviously to business customers who standardised on Windows 7 anyway, that's not exactly a good reason to undertake an inevitably expensive and disruptive migration to a new OS.
It is quite simple to show what area is interactive i.e. based purely on colour.
Up to a point, perhaps. But any guidance for a user that relies purely on colour for essential meaning is risky, for all the usual reasons: different colours have different connotations in different cultures, not everyone physically sees colours the same way, and so on. Also, even if you do adopt colour for this, it's tricky to establish a universal convention (which is helpful for usability) since different systems will have different colour schemes.
Please consider that while the UI designer constrained to use flat design has to grapple with those issues, the UI designer with a wider range of tools available might be using completely different effects to distinguish a button and its extent, and has colour available for subtle cues like highlighting the main call to action or next step button, or adding a red or green tinge around dangerous or confirmation buttons.
I look at a radio button from old windows XP era and my current flat designed Android and there is literally no difference other than an internal emboss on the background, and a specular highlight on the dot. It is still 100% identical in the way it displays, a circle that's empty when not selected, and a circle with a dot in it when selected.
And as long as UIs stick with that widely used convention, going flat is fine. Unfortunately, lots of UIs don't.
Take a look at the on/off toggles on recent iOS, for example, which are completely meaningless if you see them in isolation. There is no indication of which side means yes/on/true. In light of the ambiguities of using colour blocks as mentioned above, even that doesn't necessarily help much. To find out what's going on, the user needs to start activating things, which they might or might not want to do. Even how to toggle the control isn't immediately obvious, as it looks like a slider but in fact responds to a simple tap.
At least those toggle sliders, while awfully designed in almost every way I can think of, have the virtue of being a standard on that platform and so something users will probably learn to recognise fairly quickly once they've seen it a few times. The random presentation of toggle controls that you see on a lot of web sites or over-stylised mobile apps doesn't even have that going for it.
Also when the hell did 3 little bars turn into "menu".
It didn't, and actual data from real users consistently shows the hamburger menu and its dotty or griddy variants underperforming. If you ever run into a designer who maintains that using a hamburger menu is a good idea, and who doesn't have a very clear argument for that in some very specific context, you can probably assume you're talking to someone who isn't very good.
I do agree with the flat design having difficulty separating content from control to some degree, especially with defaults chosen.
It's more than just the defaults though. Quite simply, flat design artificially and quite severely limits the range of tools available to the designer to convey meaning. Anything flat design can do well, you can also do well in other visual styles, and you've still got all those other options to use if you need more variation or just some subtle contrast to give an extra cue to the user. The opposite isn't -- and can't be -- true.
Personally, I'm looking forward to the convergence of a few recent technologies that are in their infancy today: the use of HUDs to project directly onto the screen, the use of real-time information about traffic conditions and route planning, visualisations from that route planning software that show a realistic lane or junction arrangement, and in particular the use of sensors and image recognition technology to analyse the road ahead. The latter is already used for a few neat tricks like recognising current speed limits and warning about lane drift, and in particular detecting other hazards in or near the road to reconfigure front lighting to highlight dangers or avoid dazzling other road users.
Put more mature versions of these technologies together, and at some point what I'm seeing when I look "out the window" is what's really out the window, overlaid with enhancements for better vision at night or in otherwise limited visibility, then overlaid again with navigational information that subtly highlights the lane I need to be in or the path I need to follow through a junction if I'm using the automatic route guidance tools, and then finally overlaid with essential information about hazards or urgent warnings. In all cases I can still see what's actually out there as well as my eyes will allow, and everything else other than possibly urgent warning indicators is just a soft/transparent enhancement of the natural view.
For extra points, throw in the view from cameras that replace the way we use mirrors today, across the bottom of the windscreen where I'd just be looking at metal otherwise. Naturally these supplementary views could be overlaid with similar enhancements, and they wouldn't need to have the blind spots that most traditional mirror arrangements have.
I don't know how much more comfortable a well designed system along those lines would make driving, particularly in unfamiliar territory, at night, or in bad conditions, but I'm better it's a lot. I'm betting it would avoid a lot of accidents, too. And with the current pace of innovation in the auto industry, it seems like the kind of technology we could actually have in real production cars within a decade, as long as we don't get sidetracked with all this infotainment crap along the way.
I haven't seen those particular studies that I recall, though I'm not surprised by what you described. Personally, I find the old school approach of actually planning my journey and then paying attention to road signs usually works out just fine.
I'm hopeful that some of the modern developments involving project essential information directly onto the windscreen as a form of HUD will take care of the rest in due course. This, along with better external lights and sensors, is among the few recent developments in driver-facing technologies that I do welcome in cars, though I slightly fear what will happen if the designers get carried away with their toys and start shoving non-essential information (which is almost anything if you're driving) up there as well.
I suspect articles like that have been written about a lot of modern technologies that take what used to be a useful, single-purpose device and try to force other tangential functionality into it. The software version is probably Zawinski's law, which goes back around 20 years.
"We know everyone who breaks the law, we know when you're doing it. We have GPS in your car, so we know what you're doing."
-- Jim Farley, Ford Global VP/Marketing and Sales, 8 January 2014
Unsurprisingly, he then retracted that statement on 9 January 2014.
You also shouldn't be talking hands-free if you care at all about safety and driving properly, but unfortunately some drivers still do. Aside from connections for real-time traffic information and the like, or for genuine emergencies, there are really very few legitimate reasons to have a lot of these new gadgets in any car for the use of the driver.
Another software guy who wants cars to be cars, reporting in.
I read this:
The number of in-vehicle processors continues to grow, and consumers have come to expect their car to mimic smartphone functionality.
and my immediate reaction was that I'd bet a substantial amount of money that this is much more about marketing than about what consumers buying a car actually want.
But then I dislike questionable developments like so-called smart TVs and the Internet of Things as well, so maybe I just want all these kids to get off my lawn...
The buzzwords don't help, IMHO. Creating a UI has always been about more than mere cosmetic details. Good UI designers have considered interaction design and numerous other aspects since long before anyone invented terms like UX, never mind created any of those UX forums. UI work was never just about looks, in all the decades I've been doing it.
However, as with anything, a lot of people who don't have the full set of related skills also invent new terms for what they do that emphasize the skills they do have and gloss over the gaps. Thus we get interaction designers, and UX evangelists, and usability researchers, and visual designers, and animation artists, and front-end developers. This isn't necessarily a criticism, BTW, because of course everyone has to start somewhere. However, it's also true that there are more experienced practitioners who really do have all of those skills and really can build a major UI with one person or perhaps a small team that is better than what a whole bunch of relatively inexperienced specialists would produce.
Also as with anything, people invent new buzzwords to describe the same old stuff that good practitioners have done forever. Presumably they think it looks more impressive to clueless people on a CV or Powerpoint slide. Personally I find the whole UI vs. UX distinction to be completely artificial and unhelpful, but YMMV.
The research I've seen here in the UK supports similar conclusions. Unfortunately, at least for now, the only major variations we have in default speed limits are for different vehicle types.
We do now have variable speed limits in place on some of our motorways (our most significant highways) where in response to volume of traffic, or sometimes because of some other incident or poor environmental conditions, a lower limit than the default 70mph can be imposed and is displayed very obviously on digital signs over or alongside the road, many of which also carry cameras for enforcement purposes. These are one of the few changes in our road traffic rules in recent years that seems to have been a clear win, because as you might expect they do seem to promote smoother traffic flows in congested conditions.
Unfortunately, that system only applies on specially prepared sections of our most important roads, so it still won't allow any discretion to drive a bit faster on a literally deserted road on Christmas morning, nor lower the ::ahem:: target speed ::ahem:: when, say, there's a bank of fog just over the next hill on a rural road.
So how is a flat design based on poorly chosen design principles, or a bad user experience?
One problem that comes directly from the flat aspect is that there isn't enough variation to clearly identify the interactive aspects of a UI. A horizontal line could be a divider between separate content areas, marking off a heading from a lightly formatted list or table, or an editable text entry field. A filled rectangle could be a text field, a button, a notification message, or just some highlighted content. Numerous examples can be found of basic UI controls like radio buttons and check boxes where it is literally impossible to tell whether the current state is meant to be on or off unless you're already familiar with the convention they use, or sometimes even whether a group of such controls are mutually exclusive or not. Circular or rounded elements sometimes get introduced to distinguish some of these cases, but then those in turn have the same problem that there's no useful affordance in the presentation.
A related problem with the lack of tools to distinguish different parts of a screen is that you often see large colour blocks used for backgrounds. These may themselves become distracting or, worse, clash horribly with the typical strong colours often used with flat designs. Alternatively, ever-increasing amounts of white space get introduced to separate different areas, resulting in an empty-looking UI with very poor information density.
Then we get to the illustrations. In the absence of things like depth and texture, flat design icons tend to become pretty much line art and/or colour blocks. Line art is particularly popular because of icon fonts, which have problems of their own, but that's not strictly a flat design issue so I won't get into it here. What is a problem with either common style of flat design icons is that they can easily become so similar as to be hard to tell apart, again giving poor usability. How often have you see two or more very similar variations of straight/hooked/circular arrows, crosses, stars, plus signs, or other common icons in the same UI, which firstly did completely different things despite looking almost the same, and secondly didn't convey any particularly helpful indication of what they would do in at least one of those cases anyway? We could add some text to help clarify, but then the main tools we have available to indicate that the text and icon are related are proximity, lines, or background colour blocks, which have all the same problems I already mentioned.
I could also get into how poor a lot of the typography and animations typically used with flat design tend to be, but again these aren't inherently a problem with flat design itself, so maybe a little off-topic here. It certainly would be fair to heavily criticise specific implementations of flat design from the likes of Microsoft and Apple on these grounds, though.
That's just off the top of my head, but if you're interested in more, people a lot more eloquent than me have written much longer and more detailed critiques of why flat design is almost universally awful from a usability perspective. I'm sure your search engine of choice will turn up a few of the main ones if you'd like to read them.