I have found the flat design incredibly difficult to use.<p>In particular, the new Apple Music app was almost completely undiscoverable for me. It wasn't until I was reading patch notes that I realized that it had a key feature that I had been searching the UI for more than a month. That feature was to show only the music available offline, and it's hidden behind a down arrow next to a heading label. (Rather than the ... that other menus have).<p>Apple has never been perfect at UIs, but they've always been better than this in my experience. Deciding to hide key information and be as cryptic as possible works great for designers that already know the UI, but it works terribly for users that are still learning it. This type of elementary mistake, all too common by those who are deep in the act of creation, is best corrected by stepping back from the problem and approaching everything with the mind of a beginner. That or giving the device to an outsider and observing them, good old fashioned trials.<p>That's what UX needs these days, not more fashionistas trying to remove data and UI cues. The industry needs a big wakeup call. Mobile and even the web (like Google Docs) are becoming a churn of bad experience.
Bit over-the-top I think, with some misleading statements.<p>Apple still publish the HIG. See the iOS version here: <a href="https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/MobileHIG/" rel="nofollow">https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/UserEx...</a><p>Contrary to what the article says, it does explain why various UI elements are designed as they are – not just thoughtless promotion of aesthetics over interaction.<p>I think people often fall back on 'nobody thought about this and it's rubbish' arguments when the reality is often closer to 'they changed this and I don't like it' – the latter is a <i>totally valid</i> complaint, but it's also qualitatively different.<p>In my personal experience, I've not seen computer-naïve users of iOS struggle to a greater degree with iOS 7+ than with any of the previous versions. YMMV of course, but I think the extent to which it's a problem is overstated.<p>There are a couple of exceptions, of course – the reminders app has some stupid UI decisions that irritate me. But what software doesn't? How about that floating 'create a new document' button that was in Google Docs/Sheets/etc. until recently? <i>Every single time</i> I opened it, I had to hunt around for the button to create a new document because it wasn't where I expected it to be. But that doesn't mean Material is awful – it just means that it's a complex, long-term challenge to create a consistent UI applicable to a wide variety of applications. And I don't think modern UX is all that bad.
"Apple used to lead the world in interface design" does not mean their designs were without serious flaws. Nobody would get up and defend System 7 as the pinnacle of usability, it was downright quirky and strange in places, and by the time System 9 arrived it'd gotten downright surreal. Things only made sense in the context of history.<p>The difference between Apple and other companies is not that Apple gets it right every time, but that Apple genuinely <i>tries</i>. Some other companies literally do not care how their products look, they just ship whatever the engineering team cobbles together with snippets from from Google Image Search.<p>Microsoft's making similar efforts lately, so that's encouraging to see, and even Google is making strides in reducing the amount of rampant ugly in their applications.
The leading complaints about the "Edit Alarm" screen is kinda weird...unless "Apple’s new direction" means Apple's new direction post-2006.<p>The new: <a href="https://unicornfree.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/IMG_7374.png" rel="nofollow">https://unicornfree.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/IMG_7374....</a>
The old: <a href="http://i1-news.softpedia-static.com/images/news2/Apple-iOS-Software-Update-Patch-Ready-for-Alarm-Bug-2.png" rel="nofollow">http://i1-news.softpedia-static.com/images/news2/Apple-iOS-S...</a><p>There was always a "time-wasting dial." The labels were always "styled with more visual impact than the actual data." All four different types of data elements were always "styled the same, with the same visual weight."
Imho, the problem is that flat design is intensely restrictive. Suddenly things that used to be available to freely design with have become UI cues... the designer can no longer play with color and layout and let the buttons stand out by button-bevel and the like... now the color and layout are part of the UI language.<p>Apple, being a design-oriented company, can't keep fiddling with individual app layouts, which means they can't work within the hyper-restrictive design language of flat.<p>Microsoft actually does much better with flat, I find, because I think there are less cooks in the "design" kitchen there.
I've had conclusive data that a 3D-looking button was converting significantly better but have been overruled because of the "sleek", "clean" bullshit that passes for design these days.
It's funny to read this, because I personally find iOS to have by far the best UI of any mobile OS, and I consider the flat design of iOS7 to be a big step forward.<p>Other people feel differently, and they consider Android superior, so clearly there is a difference in taste.<p>The conundrum is that nobody seems to be able to clearly articulate why this is, and this article doesn't really help. For example, it says the timepicker is "awkward, time-wasting, inaccurate". Compared to what? Has anyone been able to measure how much time it wastes and how innaccurate it is?<p>In the end, this article takes a thousand words to say little more than "This doesn't feel quite right to me", and doesn't reveal any root causes. Do people prefer different UIs because of differences in finger size, manual dexerity, visual attention? Does Apple's UI cater to a specific minority of users? Do biological differences make it impossible to satisfy everyone?
<p><pre><code> > Minimalism in software is achieved by simplifying feature sets,
> not stripping away pixels.
</code></pre>
<rant><p><i>Simplifying feature sets</i> should not mean <i>reducing functionality</i>. That is the lazy way. Simplicity should remove the extraneous, redundant, and inefficient; functionality is not that. Functionality with simplicity requires things generality, orthogonality, composability....<p>Good software engineers eventually learn to be able to do this for the <i>code</i> they produce (whether the business case allows it is a separate question). It <i>should</i> be possible for good UI designers to do likewise.<p></rant><p>Edit: I am not disagreeing with the article author here:<p><pre><code> > It’s not minimalism to rip away the very things your users need.</code></pre>
Once a UI design is perfected, as is the case often, companies continue to look for ways to change it simply for the sake of changing it and so they can announce something new. This is true of both Apple and Google in the mobile phone space. Every single time, the new UI is worse because it hasn't been tested and no designer can think of everything. There was nothing wrong with UIs before the flat design. Flat design didn't solve anything. But once Apple implemented it, everyone had to have it. If you don't have it, your app is not "slick" and "cool." And yes, those subjective qualities matter way more than the quality of your app or really, anything else.
Oh, man, I have never wished so much that I could upvote a submission more than once. I wish this article could be pinned at the top of every discussion site used by web and app designers for the next... forever.<p>The only thing in the design world that I find more infuriating than the current trends, and the accompanying blandness and usability issues, is when people try to justify those trends as being somehow superior to what we had before using the worst kind of retro-fitted mumbo jumbo. At least let's be honest that most places have adopted flat design because it's <i>cheap, easy, and quick</i>.<p>At the bottom end of the market, making UIs a commodity is in itself no bad thing. For web applications, you can implement flat design in pure CSS, cutting down the bandwidth required for images. More generally, typical flat design elements are nicely scalable and Retina-ready, because everything is all done with such trivial vector graphics that no real effort or creativity is needed. You can adapt the simple layouts more easily to small screens as well. In fact, why develop anything original or even hire anyone with design skills at all, when you can just slap Bootstrap on it and charge the client an extra 200% for making the site responsive?<p>Unfortunately, for anything above the bottom end of the market, and particularly for promoting UIs that offer better usability and/or more distinctive styles, the current trends are awful for all the reasons this article sets out.
Not that Apple has perfect UI's (The clock dial is awful) but I feel like the ideas expressed in this article are that a UI should be designed as if the user is always using it for the first time. And that simply isn't true. With such a small screen a lot of things need to be considered, such as how easy is it to press a button without moving the hand and if this means sacrificing some natural ease of use - so be it. The user will still quickly learn how the UI works and adapt quickly.
While the old iOS look was getting a little cheesy by the time iOS 6 rolled around, it was indeed very clear for the most part. Wooden bookshelves in iBooks might not have had much function, but the shading and glassy look on controls certainly did.<p>As an example, coming from the angle of an individual who'd never approached a smartphone in his life, the function of the iOS 6 picker/spinner was immediately obvious. The shading and glassy highlights made it look like a real spinner and practically begged the user to interact with it. Distinct section separators made it perfectly clear that each section can be spun separately.<p>Compare this to the picker in iOS 7 and up. Not only is there no shading or highlights to suggest how to interact with it, but now there are no separators — even if one presumes that it can be spun, it looks like the whole thing would spin. To make things worse, oddly skeumorphic 3D perspective has been added into the mix, presumably to try to suggest spinnability, but without partner cues it's just confusing. With this design, so much is left unknown until the user attempts interaction.<p>Reference screenshot:
<a href="http://blog.ittybittyapps.com/images/posts/lifting-the-lid-on-ios-7s-uipicker/UIDatePickerComparison.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://blog.ittybittyapps.com/images/posts/lifting-the-lid-o...</a><p>I personally feel that Apple struck a nice balance between design modesty, usability, and aesthetics with Mavericks desktop, but that's gone with Yosemite. Interestingly though, El Capitan adds in subtle hints of shading and depth in a few places. I wonder if we'll see things start to tilt back in the other direction with OS X 10.12 and iOS 10.
Here's a secret. Apple has <i>never</i> designed truly wonderful user interaction. But they have been unafraid to say "no," less horrible than most others, and opinionated. These discussions don't benefit from a false narrative of them falling from a grace they never held. (Mac owner from plus to pad)
the dramatic loss of color and warmth when the new look came about took me back to the days when I had a PS/2 50z with the VGA gray scale monitor. While everything can look well defined it does at times look a little too stark; if software could have a dystopian air to it compared to what came before they did well.
I could not agree more with this article. Human brains are hard-wired to infer 3D structure from shading. Taking away shading means taking away 3D structure, means taking away one of the most important visual cues there is to help humans grasp interfaces.<p>Also, coming from all the print media, human brains are conditioned to detect and separate important/immediate from un-important/less immediate content by looking at overall page structure and relative weights. Deciding against bold or large fonts for the looks takes that away too.<p>Finally there is a ton of research pointing to the fact that fonts with a healthy amount of thickness is more easy to read than thin fonts. The debate is still on about serifed fonts I guess but using Light Helvetica for kind of everything quite certainly is a step in the wrong direction.
At this point, a lot of decisions that were once skeuomorphic are now a matter of tradition and user expectation. For a whole generation, the image of a floppy means "save" not because of it's physical history but because that's the icon everyone else uses for "save".<p>Abandoning choices like "button means clickable" and "colored and underlined means link" isn't just a move to flat design, it's an attempt to retrain users on software conventions that have transcended their physical origins.
My company does a lot of paperwork. It turns out people want to work on something that looks like "paper" or the final printed out result. The idea of an interface with buttons may be commonplace to us, but there are many people for whom this is equally impossible.
> There was never any evidence that a few decorative pixels hurt the user.<p>Is there any evidence that removing them does?<p>> The HIG wasn’t about aesthetics, it was about interaction.<p>> It was based on research, not trends.<p>It's not about interaction now? It's not about research now? In which ways isn't it?<p>I believe skeumorphism is just about aesthetics and trends. Well, actually I don't, I'm not sure what I should think I'm not aware of any research and can't make a good argument either way. Unlike the author I don't pretend I can though.<p>There might be a problem, it might just be a figment of the authors imagination. In either case articles like this one certainly are a problem.
> ... has produced some of the best industrial design in the history of consumer products.<p>Like the completely non-ergonomic, design-over-function, keyboards?
"so apple legal call was not a threat. it was a request. b.c. jony ive was personally offended by our soundboard. what world do i live in?"[1] - by the author Amy Hoy<p>[1]: <a href="https://twitter.com/amyhoy/status/642446087802982400" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/amyhoy/status/642446087802982400</a>
The author wasn't around when MacOS was new, otherwise she'd remember that the things she thinks are obvious are just conventions that people had to learn. Easier than a CLI, but something to learn just the same.
Software is harder than hardware. Both are incredibly hard, but software is harder. Software has to rely on the hardware, that's why any truly serious builder of software deeply understands the hardware and Apple understands that, with limited resources, hardware is more important to get right.<p>You can always change software later. Hardware stays in the consumer's hands for years. Bad decisions there will go uncorrected, even if you take the extraordinary step of issuing a recall, not everyone will bring in their kit.<p>This dynamic means that every company that has limited means, that is to say, every company, is going to have shitty software. Because hardware is more important, so it gets all the design attention. But software is harder. And if you're not doing hardware, like Microsoft, then your software is still going to be shitty because you don't understand hardware.<p>It's why your VCR was famously hard to program, it's why the entertainment system in your car is horrible, it's why the old stuff that doesn't have any software at all is way more reliable than the new stuff that does.<p>The answer here is not to criticize Apple, but to help them out by engineering better software. I used to hate texting on an iDevice because I loved using Swype and iOS didn't have it. Apple responded to the market with Smart Keyboards, they're not perfect but it beats the old way. Now they have an ad blocking API for browsers.<p>Apple is the tech world's quality champion. No other company in the world can pump out quality like Apple. But again, software is really fucking hard. So let's work together here, folks. Show the world a new way.