As sort of a sidenote: websites about UX seem to have the worst UX. Clicking the link, I'm not only met by a social sharing bar that uses 1/6th of the screen and screws scrolling up (because for some reason it should follow through my scrolling but somehow only be visible when scrolling upwards), but a faux-chat window overlaying the content where a Tom is asking me how he can help me. Not at all, thank you. At least being so up-front about how absolutely terrible your website is means I didn't stay long enough for a modal asking me to subscribe to their newsletter to pop up.
Does anyone actually believe that this crap leads to a better user experience? Are UX concepts and standards so inbred that the people involved just can't separate chocolate pudding from excrement anymore?
As a UX designer I have seen a lot of this stuff over the years and I always find it funny. DesignerNews.com, which is an imitation of this site, is chock full of articles like this.
The big thing to understand is a lot of people in The Blogosphere(TM) who post articles about UX don't really give a rip about anything other than the pageviews whether it's for ad revenue, establishing themselves as a thought leader, or trying to market their company. Even worse, there are some people who don't even ACTUALLY know much about UX, they just want to post an article about it to spread around LinkedIn and seem relevant by harping about the importance of UX, etc.
Having said all that, if you sift through all the garbage there are some great resources. Some of the big players in the space tend to do it well. InVision's blog, for example. UXPin are pretty good. There are lots of little ones like UXPowerTools' content marketing emails that are starting to do a good job as well.
At this point as someone who is always trying to improve as a UX designer, I have become accustomed to vetting the 100:1 ratio of garbage articles to bad ones.
I literally know nothing about UX, but I have to say a visit to UXPin's website instantly turned me off. First, they put this great big demand for my email front and center when I barely even know what their site is (and a single line explaining it is not enough to get me to sign up). The entire website is covered over with "modal grey" with no X box or anything else showing me I can close it, just some links at the top that are not obviously clickable because of the grey modal. Turns out it isn't a modal at all you can just scroll down (no indication of that) and that the small links are clickable. Once I was past that, it was fine and dandy, but if I were actually interested in being a customer rather than a curious person trying to figure out what I was missing, I probably would have just left.
Yeah, the product isn't great. To the point about UX blogs though, theirs is pretty solid https://www.uxpin.com/studio/blog/. It isn't bogged down by social sharing widgets, scroll jacking, or pop ups (last I checked)
I saw it was like designernews.co and I was about to ask how it's that imitation of this site. I agree about these "UX Sites" doesn't present good UX. NNGroup website[1] does its job great since they are pioneer on user experience and usability. They frequently publish articles about how all these pop-ups, modals etc effects the usability.
I just mean imitation in it's simplest of forms, which is to say, some creator saw HN and thought it would be good to do a design-focused version. The idea itself is good, it's just a lot of junk gets posted there. I still visit it. Some improvements would make it much better.
This should have been obvious, I guess, but when I read your comment it felt like a revelation. Suddenly, so many articles make sense. It reminds me of the inconsistency inherent in most books about how to beat the market.
It took a lot more effort/diligence than I had figured it would to keep all the links straight and add what I thought was helpful narrative context. I wasn't having much fun or seeing a whole lot of support, so I stopped.
> As sort of a sidenote: websites about UX seem to have the worst UX. Clicking the link, I'm not only met by a social sharing bar that uses 1/6th of the screen
This comment anecdotally reinforces my impression that UX people today (I assume you're either a UX people, or a people interested in UX) have a bias for full-width sites and browsers.
I rarely run my browser full-width (and I think many UX/UI designers rarely do anything else but full-width).
When I opened the page under discussion, I didn't see any social sharing bar at all, just editorial content. And when I read your comment I went "huh?" And then "oh."
So I full-widthed my browser, and saw what you're complaining about. (I didn't notice any scrolling problems. And I didn't notice a popup; that may be because of my adblocking addons.)
As far as I'm concerned, this site exhibits very good UX for this particular aspect of the site. If the browser isn't wide enough to display the sidebar, it gets moved to below the editorial content. That's so refreshingly respectful!
Most often I see "beautiful" sites that have to be sidescrolled if the browser isn't full-width. I do two things in that situation:
1. I turn off styles, which then makes everything flow within the viewport (It's 1990 again!) and moves all the blocks to the order that they appear in the html. Because all I care about are words and pictures, not features. Again, in this site's case that works fabulously, because the site makers ordered their blocks so that editorial content is first; abcnews.com is a good example where, if you turn off styles, the content of interest doesn't appear until you scroll way down the page.
Good UX, in my book, would be omitting the information in the sidebar altogether, because it somehow manages to be less relevant to the content than the pointless stock photos that illustrate it. I don't care that the article was shared 59 times, and the fact that I can share it on social networks is not mind blowing enough to me that I have to be reminded of it by a bar popping in and out of view like a mole throughout the whole article. Neither are the cool icons or Tom's helpful tone. What would I even need your help with, Tom?
It's also important to note that the bar of social network icons are not below the editorial content shere they would dwell on any remotely useful website, but on top of it. The design feels almost contemptful of its audience. My experience as a user is that I am disrespected and hated.
> This comment anecdotally reinforces my impression that UX people today (I assume you're either a UX people, or a people interested in UX) have a bias for full-width sites and browsers.
I used it on a cell phone. My choices there are limited to landscape or portrait mode, both of which behave awfully in subtly different ways. They obviously went out of their way to make a mobile version of the layout, though. They just didn't think it through, because they suck at UX.
And yes, since I am a user, I am interested in my experience. I can't say that I have a bias for full-width sites and browsers, but even if I did, why should my experience be worse in full screen than in a smaller window? Why should it be worse on a phone? The content is text. You read it from left to right, from the top to the bottom. Laying it out in a way that doesn't inspire self harm is not rocket science. Despite these vapid UX blogs making their snake oil salesmanship out to be valuable and insightful, they've failed to find a solution for the most basic problem. They can't even lay text out without having useless crap hovering over it. It's like calling yourself a plumber when you can't even flush your toilet.
Frankly, I'd rather side scroll, because at least then I'd have to make a conscious effort to see all the non-content.
No, not at all. If he doesn't like it, then he doesn't like it, I can't disagree with that at all.
My point is that the page builders consciously thought of this part, and came up with a reasonable and accommodating design, which I (a narrow-width user) only noticed because of the comment.
>As sort of a sidenote: websites about UX seem to have the worst UX.
That reminds me of my numerical methods professor who gave talks on how to present things - and his lecture was literally the worst at the entire uni and this is not just my opinion, this fact was established by anonymous student vote. He had power point presentation slides stuffed full of formulas - literally 10-20 lines of mathematical theorems and proofs, and he just clicked through the pages, leaving no more than a few minutes for such complex slides.
Now if only the Google maps (mobile version) devs would read this. On Android anyway, no matter how much you zoom the text labels on things like street and highway numbers will not enlarge.
5 years ago that wasn't the case.
Type `ho`, stop there, and it will suggest your home location (if you have it set). Continue typing and it will serve up results that have `home` somewhere in the name.
Its typical Google, I can imagine an engineer going 'hmm, this way if they want to go to their actual home location, they can just tap on it, and if they continue typing, they can quickly find home depot!" not realizing this blatantly violates the Principle of Least Astonishment.
You see the same with Android 7.0 in the pulldown quicksettings: if you haven't fully pulled down the quicksettings, a tap on Wi-Fi turns it off. But if you pull it down completely, a tap suddenly opens a network selection menu, despite the icon giving no indication it will do something different. This again, violates POLA. Its purely a power user feature (how often is a normal person gonna be on a Wi-Fi network that isn't already set..?). Even worse is that some icons (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth) act in this 'dual' way, yet some others keep working the same (Torch, Orientation Lock).
Obviously Torch and Orientation Lock don't really have any options beside on/off so they shouldn't have a menu.. its just that, from an UX perspective, its better if all your buttons act in a homogenous way, especially if they look the same!
These are all typical examples of Google being a company with engineering in its DNA, whereas Apple is a company that breathes design.
What astonishes me is how much GMaps doesn't learn. Every time I use the map to go to a place by car, my way back is back home. But it doesn't suggest it by default, and doesn't even get the hint when I type "home"...
To me, this is how IA will look. It knows you perfectly from a Bayesian perspective, but some product manager decided that the bayesian suggestion is the only place that won't be suggested to you...
Same for distance. There may be a restaurant called "The Place To Be" next to you, but it will ask for anything named "Place" within 1000km...
Off topic but does anyone else feel that Google Maps (and in general Maps) have just regressed in quality? In particular, while using directions. The most common problem I face on my iPhone (and I've heard the same from people using Android) is - compass orientation. It's so predictably bad that I have now started moving the opposite direction which the compass suggests. I'm more right than wrong when I do so. This wasn't the case 5 years ago on my iPhone4 when Google and Apple worked together to create the Maps application. I wonder if it has got to do with the same event.
I've used multiple phones across continents but yet tend to suffer from the exact same problem. Strange!
This is not the app's fault. The compass sometimes needs to be re-calibrated and that involves waving your phone around. The app should prompt you to do so if it thinks the calibration is off though...
Sure, but I think the font should be (to some extent) scaled proportionally to the map area or perhaps some other way of making the text larger. A typical use case for me is zooming in on a highway to see what exit number a particular ramp is. Today that info is basically unreadable on either platform.
On the other hand, I don't want to see giant a 'D' over where I live because on a far out zoom level it happens to say 'UNITED KINGDOM', and someone wanted to zoom in to see the font.
Noted is the distraction from automatically changing carousels. I've found this a major area of concern -- not just carousels but any autoplay content, automatic slides, and text marquees. And beyond distraction, these elements assume a specific pace of reading and require the user to build UI understanding to get back to interesting content they glimpsed in passing. If the content is compelling enough to display, it's compelling enough to present well.
We once built a site (for a major consumer brand) where the client insisted on so many carousel slides that they started duplicating slides in the lineup because it had been too long since they’d been seen.
(Our recommendation was to avoid a carousel, but the client had to have it!)
Today's really broken web site - Bank of America online banking. I'm running Firefox 53 (latest version), with Ghostery and Privacy Badger, on Ubuntu Linux. BofA's site had worked well for years. Then they added some new features. Not good ones.
BofA's site now complains I'm using an "unsupported browser", even though they claim to support Firefox. About half the time, login just hangs. Refreshing the page shows a logged-in state.
When transferring funds from one account to another, sometimes the transfer process hangs. The "Approve transfer" button darkens, but the page is not refreshed. Sometimes the transfer has taken place, and sometimes it hasn't.
Yesterday, I did a transfer between accounts, and reached this situation. I looked at the account status and didn't see the outgoing transfer listed. So I re-did the transfer, and then saw the outgoing transfer listed. I printed the account transaction history.
Today I get a warning that an account is overdrawn. Checking account status, I find that there are now two identical transfers between the accounts, resulting in one being overdrawn and the other being overpaid. An hour of phone calls, mostly on hold, was required to fix this mess.
BofA's web site is using TouchCommerce ("Engage with your customers the way they want to engage") Adobe Audience Manager ("Build audience profiles that you can use anywhere"), and Tealium ("a single approach to connecting data across teams, vendors, and touchpoints in real time"). They've added ads for "special offers". They use these even on live transaction pages, which is a possible security flaw. Code from those sources produces huge numbers of browser errors (the obsolete "star property hack" for IE6 causes many of them) indicating sloppy code.
"Congratulations, here's your first set of glasses" - the present I got when I turned 50.
While the site focuses on seniors, a lot of the suggestions are good ones in any case - fonts larger than legalese and with good contrast will make your page more easily approachable and less likely to lose viewers who get frustrated because they can't read what you're trying to say.
There's a limit, though. I end up browsing most modern websites at ~60% zoom, because the text is so huge I find it distracting. Luckily the browser zoom feature is pretty great these days, so users can view at any size they like.
There's a limit, though. I end up browsing most modern websites at ~120% zoom when I'm tired, because it's more comfortable. Lay back in chair, still read comfortably. There's so much wasted whitespace it usually doesn't even break the layout.
I'm 29 and my eyesight with glasses is ok. Been wearing 'em for 22 years.
But really the worst offenders are gray text on lighter gray background websites. Whyyyy designers why?
Since the browsers remember zoom level I just set it to be comfortable for whatever it is and forget all about it, I had to check what I have HN set to on my desktop and it's 190%.
It's not that I can't read it at 100 it's just tiring and I have mild astigmatism so I get eye strain.
The HN default of tiny text is headache inducing. I have pretty good vision, but HN is one of the few sites where I have to crank it up to 150% zoom minimum.
It's weird, I think HN's text size is perfect and view the site at 100%. I clicked through to your link and immediately scaled it down to 66% to make it readable.
> But really the worst offenders are gray text on lighter gray background websites. Whyyyy designers why?
Color calibration.
On a good monitor, 10 or 12bit depth, 1000 to 10000nits of contrast, which designers tend to have, black text on white background has such a high contrast that it creates actual pain, and migraine.
So they use dark grey on light grey instead, and then, for them, it looks exactly like newspaper text.
A customer on a cheap, garbage monitor – maybe just 6bit of colors, 50nits of contrast – on the other hand, can’t even reach the contrast of a newspaper if they’d go full black on white contrast.
The contrast between the darkest black and the brightest white on a cheap monitor is equivalent to the contrast ratio between 40% (approx #666666) and 60% grey (approx #aaaaaa) on a designer’s monitor.
Yeah I know. I use the same monitors that designers use. Or at least used to a few years ago when Apple monitors were still The Thing To Have. Haven't upgraded in a while.
You know what happens with those gorgeous monitors with perfect contrast and beautiful calibration when it's sunny outside and my blinds aren't down or I'm physically outside with my laptop? They turn flat black. Can't see shit.
Also designers sometimes push the contrast thing too far. In both directions.
The problem is the contrast ratios. The contrast between 0% black and 100% white on a good screen is so high, it physically causes pain, even migraines. Which is why on HDR screens, the colors of CSS are actually limited to avoid ever going darker than grey or brighter than grey, and the contrast is still very large.
#000000 on a cheap screen is equivalent to #666666 on an HDR screen, #ffffff on a cheap screen is equivalent to #aaaaaa on an HDR screen.
So if a designer uses something that looks exactly like newspaper contrast to them, it’ll look unreadable on a cheap screen.
> The problem is the contrast ratios. The contrast between 0% black and 100% white on a good screen is so high, it physically causes pain, even migraines.
Maybe that means you need to turn down your screen's brightness.
It's called sRGB and it supposedly has a "black point" which is not entirely black. Nobody uses it though, on photos it would be useless. Also for me black on white is perfectly fine in a well lit room. White on pitch black is indeed problematic. Anyway, it could be a user/browser preference instead of a designer preference.
Lowering brightness shouldn't distort color-calibration too. You are supposed to match your brightness to the surrounding lighting too.
On Firefox that's "View ... Page Style ... No style." And I do that enough times per day (precious snowflake designers, take note) that I installed the Firefox addon "Disable Style button" which adds a red/white "CSS" stop sign button. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-style...
Honestly, that one button fixes almost every UI/UX problem I encounter. I never use Reader Mode, I never open developer tools, I just nuke styles, read the site and move on.
As alluded to, yes it's "ok". How good it is varies based on how tired I am. I like sites at 100% or less zoom in the morning, and often at 110% or more zoom towards the end of the day. Also depends on how far away my screen is.
For example, I tend to put my phone screen very near my face in the evening.
No such thing as perfect eyesight when you've been wearing glasses since you were 8 ;)
About half the devs in my team have their font rendering cranked up on their desktops, and they're all in their 20s, so it's not just old people who benefit from this.
First change I make on any Windows box is to bump up the desktop rendering to 125% or 150%, depending on the monitor size and resolution. I also set a minimum font size in Firefox of 14.
Honestly, I've worn glasses all my life, and it's never occurred to me that, when I'm not wearing my glasses, the websites are the one's at fault for not making themselves more readable.
I think "web developers should make things more readable" is addressing the symptom and not the problem. The solution is simple when it comes to readability: wear corrective lenses.
First, as your eyes lose the ability to focus (which is a gradual process, not a step change), you find that over time you need more and more lenses: one for objects at 18 inches (your laptop), one for objects at 24 inches (your monitor), etc. You don't always have the proper lenses at hand when you need them.
Second, all the transparent bits of the eyes slowly become less transparent with time. Some problems (cataracts for instance) can be fixed with surgery; others would require replacing the entire eyeball.
Third, a number of unlucky people develop problems with their retinas, which may or may not be fixable, and the fixes rarely leave the retina in as good a shape as it was when it was younger.
So "wear corrective lenses" is not a bad suggestion, but if web designers are targeting older people, they need to assume the the reader's eyes are not what they once were, and that there may not be much that the reader can do about it.
I think something mentioned in the article that's usually not mentioned is the loss of motor skills as you age. I find that for myself, a 20-something year old web developer, it's easy to fall into the 'Everyone on the internet is like me' mindset. However I try to maintain perspective by observing my grandparents as they browse the internet on their iPads. The loss of motor skills is easily one of the most frustrating parts of web browsing for them. If they have to try more than twice to click your small hamburger menu that you put conveniently right next to the 'Log out' button, they'll simply give up and move on to the next thing.
An example of what I feel is an elegant solution - They used to have the hardest time playing/pausing YouTube videos when they would rely only on the buttons. However, once I showed them how to play/pause by clicking the entire video, they were relieved and much more appreciative of the technology. I think that this approach is more sound; instead of simply making everything larger, or having larger clickboxes, simply create multiple ways to interact with the content that doesn't interfere with other users. Nobody is upset that you can play/pause videos by clicking on them, but I imagine they would be if the play/pause buttons were 5x larger than they are now.
Here I foolishly hoped for some evidence of true understanding of the aged. Unfortunately the tl;dr is:
1) News flash, old people are out there, they have money, and some of them even know how to go online.
2) We need a term for this new species... I know, how about 'digiboomers!'
3) An old person is basically a collection of disabilities you need to plan around.
4) In light of 3) when an old person abandons a task it's probably because they're bewildered, not because your game is weak. (Not a word on how to address deficiencies in your content, that their lifetime of experience will enable them to pick up instantly. Or their experience and subsequent impatience with scams, marketing and bullshit. Or the higher level of quality and depth they're seeking in all arenas. Or for that matter, what they're like or what's important to them.)
Something that should have been explicit on the vision topic: Disabling pinch-zoom guarantees some fraction of people with vision issues (of all ages) are just going to disengage.
The article focuses on over 55s who have money to spend online. I liked the part that spoke to how 40 year olds and up are less likely to explore a website and more likely to abandon a task.
I run into this a lot when I watch how my older users interact with our site. They act like they are about to hit the nuke button when performing some actions on the site, and I am sitting there thinking it is totally fine, even if you mess up you can just go back. But there is so much anxiety around accidentally messing something up that they would rather abandon the task than do it.
I hope that I can continue to improve my skill in UI/UX because it is so critical as a web developer.
Suggestion - have a reasonably prominent button that restores defaults (or whatever the analogue is). This is often a headache when dealing with systems - easy to get into a situation where not obvious how to get back - e.g. window minimized and can't find it again.
Some sites have "don't be scared" text, which some users might actually read. For instance: "Once you push this button, you will have another chance to review your order before it is submitted". Or when appropriate, a "be scared" warning: "Once you push this button, your order will be submitted, and it cannot be cancelled".
If you are targeting older users, keep in mind that many of them are accustomed to reading text, and would prefer a couple of explanatory sentences to a semi-mysterious icon.
> Things you can do to make your website easier to use include making sure that clickable links and buttons have a decent clickable area, and that pages can be navigated using just the keyboard
Hah. I don't know why this receives mention - while I'd love it if it were common practice, nobody actually thinks about this and it's unlikely to change. And it's not just web sites: let's not forget the slew of Electron apps where keyboard integration is nonexistent, partial, or an afterthought.
The UX world has gone so far backwards, regardless of age, in the last five years it's hard to know where to begin: flat design, washed out colors, thin fonts, buttons that look like badges that look like input boxes that look like borders, modals that take over the entire screen with only a faint x in the upper right corner to indicate what is going on, input fields with internal labels that disappear as soon as anything is entered, and on and on.
Just going back to bootstrap 2, for all its problems, would be a step forward at this point.
Being able to tell things apart at a glance equals a "shotgun blast of color"? We're not talking about the Hotdog Stand theme, you know.
The more methods you use to differentiate things from one another the easier it is to navigate an interface. Abandoning depth so completely was already stupid, mostly-white-on-blue-uniform-squares? You have color, use it! That shit was awesome when I was 19 and wanted to make my XFCE monochrome because I thought it looked cool. It's not awesome when major OS companies copy my awful teenage taste in desktop aesthetic just because it makes for slick-looking screenshots. Please, someone, have better sense than that.
Is not something to aspire to. If you think that's easy on the eyes I can only assume you never used interfaces back when you could tell one thing from another without having to play Where's Waldo—which, admittedly, was pretty long ago at this point. Look at the buttons on that dialog! Who OK'd that?! Look at those crappy icons that look like the 404-not-found of the icon world! Don't look at where Mail is on the far left. Look at the center of the screen. Tell me which one's mail. Can you even guess? Just tried it on my MacBook, and I could tell what every icon was out of my peripheral vision, thanks to the "shotgun blast of color".
Overuse of color was done because designers could do things like photographic icons, gloss, gradients etc rather than because it makes things more distinguishable for the user.
OS X in particular had multiple levels of shininess which made it hard to distinguish the actual shape of the objects - they learnt their mistake and are attempting to roll it back years after Microsoft popularised digital first design. The Linux DE's haven't even learnt that yet.
Windows mail uses an envelope symbol. It's far more obviously mail than a picture of an eagle flying in the sky with a white scalloped, stamp-like border. Do people even use stamps anymore?
Compare with the OS X-style "Cars: fast as lightning" which I guess is a car but is so detailed I can't really tell.
I won't defend the stamp thing's discoverability (though it's not that bad—and besides, if you know what an envelope is you probably know what a stamp is, and if you don't then it's because you're somehow encountering envelopes exclusively in non-mail contexts so how is that going to be associated with mail for you? Anyway...) but I don't think it matters how appropriate an icon they use if half of them are same-proportioned, white, and sitting in identical blue squares that are mostly wasted ("negative") space, compared with MacOS icons that are larger in proportion to the space they're granted and use color so you can tell what they are without having to look directly at them.
Looking back at Leopard screenshots (I assume that's part of the era with the supposed excessive-shininess?) those icons were slightly worse because smaller (probably configurable though? I don't remember) but their shape seems to be a bit more apparent and distinctive (most of mine on Sierra are squares or circles) so I'd call it a wash, usability-wise. Maybe slightly favoring the new ones because color is easier to distinguish in peripheral vision than shape. I'm not seeing a practical problem with the use of depth, aside from "depth is bad now, because reasons".
Microsoft's Win10 design is like the kind of thing developers come up with when they manage to banish designers from a project—not saying that's what happened, and I doubt it is, but it really looks like it (I can't get over that drop-down box, god, it's like I tried to style it). It's incredibly bad. It reminds me of really old "how to make your web forms pretty" tutorials from the pre-CSS days. I seriously thought I was in some kind of safe-mode when I started it up the first time.
[EDIT] actually, rather than pre-CSS, let's specifically go with "when people used the term DHTML". STRONGLY reminiscent of that time period—but not of finished websites, of web design tutorials from that time period.
> besides, if you know what an envelope is you probably know what a stamp
An envelope is an arbitrary thing that means email. Much like a floppy disk is an arbitrary thing that means save. The postal system and floppy drives are about as relevant as each other.
I prefer the taskbar icon look - ie, raw shape - than the colored background look too. But the raw shapes certainly are far more better than the distracting, detailed pictures which serve only their designers.
The Win10 design is what happens when designers consider users over themselves. I think you're favouring OS X simply because you're familiar with it. But it's clear that Android since 4, OS X since 10.10 are all following the same direction that Microsoft popularised way back in the Zune era.
If you got 1000 people who'd never used a computer before, and asked them to find 'mail' between the 'envelope' and the 'picture of the eagle with the scalloped background' were mail it's predictable what the outcome would be.
You... really think icons are more user-friendly if you take away color differentiation? I find that entirely confusing. It's the result of a "make this interface look like something out of a Mission Impossible movie, we want those screenshots to look slick!" directive, not a user-friendliness effort.
[EDIT] As for familiarity, I started on DOS, was a Windows user from 3.1 through 10 (finally ditched 10 a couple weeks ago because it pissed me off one too many times) including NT3.5 and 4, plus 2K, and mixed in a ton of Linux plus a fair amount of BeOS and a touch of QNX starting around the Win98 era. I've used KDE since IIRC late version 1 or early 2, Gnome since before it was bad, and spent lots of time in both Windowmaker and XFCE for good measure. I've used CDE on Solaris in anger. I only jumped on Apple devices ~5-6 years ago for work. With all that context, I feel confident asserting that the Win10 interface looks like the punchline to a joke that I just don't get—it's got nothing to do with exclusive familiarity with Apple.
I've used all those systems you have, and the worst are ones where someone had tried to use the entire palette or colors and greatest graphic detail in shapes.
Right, now give me 6 apps with the same mail icon and help me find the one I like. The one that supports my mail provider and has my contacts in it. Not the other ones.
The bird is distinct. I know it's thunderbird because that's the icon thunderbird uses. I can upgrade windows and still find it. If you are making things easier for new users but ALSO worse for existing users, you're not doing anyone any good.
But you probably "grew up" with the prior, more easily discoverable interface versions. (Remember that when Steve Jobs presented the iPhone, he had to explain the "flick to scroll" gesture, because it was so new - previously, you'd have to touch a tiny triangle in the corner of the scroll view, with a stylus, to scroll... :-)
When I gave my mom an iPad, which already came with the fancy new thin flat iOS design, I had to first switch to a larger, fatter font (thanks, Apple, for making this possible in the Accessibility settings!), and then spend quite some time explaining things, as many controls ("yes mom, that word is actually a button you can press") and gestures were not easily discoverable.
The fat 3D buttons were much easier to discern. (Note that Apple also has a "Button Shapes" settings in Accessibility to re-enable them, though not as "3D". Maybe they could have a global "beginner" or "senior" setting that would switch these settings over from pretty to functional and discoverable...)
iOS 6 was the pinnacle of iOS UI discoverability. I'm still baffled at some of their decisions. That slide-to-unlock element was perfection. It never needed to change because you almost certainly can't do any better (OK, sure, using the home button to trigger unlock now is better, but as far as on the screen unlock initiators, that's it). Any kid or oldster immediately understood it. And 3d-ish buttons are a thing for a reason. It's gotten a little better since the WTF-is-this-shit days of iOS7, but not much.
It went from "what should my grandma use? Definitely an iPad, no question" to "what should my grandma use? Ugh, god, a Chromebook I guess?"
Now force-touch, and new gestures, and crap sliding from the top and bottom of the screen, on top of everything else. It's much easier to get lost in for someone who's half-terrified of computers, which is still lots of people, and I'm not sure it's much better for the rest of us, either.
Flat design is bad UX because it took a useful and familiar dimension, simulated depth, out of the toolbox. I agree that simulated depth was over used and that the minimalist aspect of flat UI did improve aesthetics in many cases, but it was a net loss due to the UX problems it caused. The right thing was to do depth aesthetically correctly (only a few pixels are needed, and only on important elements) while still retaining the usability advantages of it.
Unfortunately the design world (and the art world more generally) appears to be extremely prone to binary thinking: either something is obviously wonderful, or it must be discarded completely.
flat design and washed-out colours are great compared to the graphics-and-rounded-edges horror that we used to contend with. Everything else, I agree with - especially around indistinct controls. Modals are fine as long as they have a clear shadow background and there's some kind of cancellation button on the main modal - and also, pressing ESC or clicking the shadow should close a modal. That's just UX 101.
> flat design and washed-out colours are great compared to the graphics-and-rounded-edges horror that we used to contend with
See my sibling comment: flat UI improved default aesthetics but hurt UX. We should have retained simulated depth (and higher contrasts for important UI elements) for the usability advantages. It was a matter of refining what we had, rather than tossing it all out.
flat UI doesn't have to be completely depth-free though. I agree with you when it comes to completely flat (metro-style) design where no depth cues are provided. Material and bootstrap styles are considered flat UI, from what I understand.
Accessible site design is the default state! It is only ruined by what "designers" (pointlessly) add to pages. The "how", therefore, is easy: stop screwing with things.
Nobody asked your site to mess with my preferred font sizes or colors. Nobody asked you to break or poorly reinvent the standard system controls, especially since (at least on Macs) normal controls have strong accessibility support built in.
also, when iOS started out, most apps responded to double-tap by expanding the screen to near zero margin and enlarging the text; this no longer seems to work the same way in both applications or on many web sites. PIA.
Does anyone actually believe that this crap leads to a better user experience? Are UX concepts and standards so inbred that the people involved just can't separate chocolate pudding from excrement anymore?