Love it. Well said.<p>This trend of design fashions negatively impacting usability has become so blatantly visible across the web (and apps, and desktop interfaces) during this century that I've become quite curious what psychological/organisational effects are at force.<p>Are there historical examples of the same tendency that can be examined? Tools, signage, forms or public spaces becoming a progressively more difficult and less usable mess under the aegis of "making things easier for users"?
> Users are forced to explore pages to determine what’s clickable. They frequently pause in their activities to hover over elements hoping for dynamic clickability signifiers, or click experimentally to discover potential links. This behavior is analogous to the behavior of laboratory rats in operant-conditioning experiments.
The worst thing about this trend is it also affects usability on websites that do provide sufficient (albeit subtle) cues.<p>It's like raising the general UX noise level from previous experiences which over time will train people not to trust their initial instincts.
The analysis of the 'mobile footer menu' case study seems a bit misguided.<p>Sure, everything on that image looks about as clickable as everything else. But the user didn't click on everything -- he clicked on 'Shop', repeatedly.<p>Why?<p>The article mentions 'language' as a 'contextual clickability clue'... but language is much more powerful than the cues whose absence the page laments. The non-exist visual (un)clickability signifier doesn't help... but language is the overriding issue in that experience.<p>It's widely held that If something is clickable, it should have a clear & reliable 'information scent' -- it should tell you what clicking it will do. People don't click on things because they're clickable -- they click because they think it'll do what they want.<p><i>The converse is also true</i> -- If something has a clear 'information scent', it should be clickable, and should do what it implies it will. Information scent makes people <i>want</i> to click on things -- and they'll be disappointed even if they immediately realise they can't click.<p>In the case study, the user clicks on 'SHOP' because 'SHOP' is where he wants to go. (there is a 'shop' page on the site, BTW). Clearer styling would make the experience less bad, but the only real solution is to <i>make SHOP clickable</i>.
This is my understanding of how we ended up with today's flat UIs with <i>less affordances</i> even though many (most?) users dislike them. HN can tell me if I was told incorrectly.<p>1) GUIs in 1980s like MS Windows 1.0/2.0 had flat design[1]. The buttons were flat. No drop shadows. The "flatness" was not a deliberate design intention but simply the first iteration of a graphical UI to supplant text mode DOS console.<p>2) In 1990s, MS Windows 3.0/3.1 introduced 3-dimensional sculpted buttons. An visible improvement in UI affordances. Windows 95 further extended the 3D look where whole window edges, etc had sculpted look.<p>3) This era includes the Apple Mac OS X GUI ("Aqua
) that had 3D look and buttons had depth. It includes the Steve Jobs quote, “one of the design goals was when you saw it you wanted to lick it."<p>4) The zenith of affordances is reached with Windows Vista/7 "Aeroglass" where windows could cast translucent drop shadows on the desktop. Effects like that required heavier computation such as "alpha channels". Hardware-assisted (premium graphics card) was required. Desktop computing power (both cpu and graphics chip) to deliver all this GUI effects was not a big deal. This was the time period before "skeumorphism" became persona non grata.<p>4) iPhone/Android mobile phones come on the market in 2007/2008 with low-powered CPUs and precious battery life. Now, things like painting 3D heavy UI and rendering translucent drop shadows are seen as a massive extravagance. A waste of cpu & battery power. In 2012 Windows 8 and 2013 iOS 7, everybody removes the last 20 years of 3D GUI affordances and makes everything flat again.<p>5) To make the GUI consistent between mobile phones and desktops, Microsoft makes the desktops flat as well even though there is abundance of computing power. Therefore Windows 8/8.1 looks like Windows 1.0 again[1]. The Apple Mac OS X is also flatter but at least they kept the windows casting drop shadows.<p>What's interesting is that the marketingspeak from Microsoft/Apple/Google about "flat design" talks about it being "modern", "clean", and "fresh". To me, it seems like it's really all about the current limitations of mobile phone cpus and forcing a UI consistency to the desktop users. Basically, it's punishing the desktop users by enforcing the lowest common denominator across device platforms.<p>Hopefully, we'll get a new trend where everybody will go back to styling GUI elements with some hints of "clickability" without gratuitous skeumorphism. We just need some balance.<p>[1] flat UI in 1985: <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=windows+1.0&source=lnms&tbm=isch" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/search?q=windows+1.0&source=lnms&tbm=...</a>