Anyone interested in the point about Mondrian would enjoy (the sadly recently deceased) Robert Hughes' documentary series “The Shock of the New” — it's available on YT starting here: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_8y0sQ0HME" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_8y0sQ0HME</a>
I think that design is as much about a feel as it is about a style and getting that feel into users lives is the experience in user experience.<p>Making something outstanding is about making something that people love, like really, really love.<p>Creating an experience with a "hook" is as important as style ever is.<p>The iPhone experience has a hook, Xbox Live has a hook, Facebook has a hook, twitter has a hook, HN has a hook and that experience hook has nothing to do with what the UI looks like right now or in the future.<p>People loved/hated seukomorphic design, but that misses the point. If it enables a particular experience that hooks/delights users, then it's a good thing. If not, it's a bad thing, but the merits of the style itself sort of lives outside of the actual product design discussion IMO.
Clearly the future of design is Metro. Metro is the cleanest and most design-driven GUI ever. And, well, users hate it so much it really has made a ding in Microsoft's earnings. But full steam ahead!<p>Static graphic beauty and usability aren't the same either on the desktop or with phones and tablets. But given sufficient monopoly power, no one has to care. The tragedy is the GUIs got to "functional enough" sometime in the early 2000's and so they are fated simply get worse since more functional isn't a selling point.<p>And on the "it's phones, not laptops" point - people do fewer tasks with phones than laptops. They'll never do more tasks with phones than laptops and so