From a non-designer's simple point of view, this flat thing is insanity. Designers I find are very willing to follow latest fads and trends without really evaluating or thinking about it.
Someone rebelled and wrote a blog how skeuomorphs are bad, put some pictures of leather textures up for everyone to laugh at. The next thing you know, you get OS UIs (Windows 8), websites and a whole bunch of other interfaces where you have no freakin' idea what to click. It all looks flat and so I end up mousing around elements on the screen like a drunk person stumbling in the dark trying to find how this thing works.
How about a little drop shadow on that button so it looks like, you know, a button? "Oh but it looks like a real world button and we shouldn't have to mimic the real world...blah blah.." -- I don't care about the philosophy of design or whatever the latest thing came from Apple labs, I want to get my stuff done and just knowing what is clickable is helpful.
I completely agree. I have been using a Windows Phone 8 for a month and while I still like live tiles, but the whole experience is annoying. The flatness makes applications difficult to navigate and read after a long work day. Text, buttons, and other widgets are not clearly demarcated and applications tend to become 'text and squares soup'.
I have now put my SIM card back in my two year old iPhone 4 since, although the interface looks a bit daft these days, it has good usability.
(On live tiles: they are cute and give a personal touch to your phone, but they are to small to be informative for many applications.)
Yeah, it's like communism for interfaces: all tiles are equally important and get the same amount of real estate. :)
It makes it impossible to create a taxonomy, because the only thing you can do to organize them is put them in groups.
In Microsoft's defence, Apple haven't done anything to fix the problem of people with several screens of apps, which is basically impossible to navigate enjoyable. I almost always use Spotlight to open apps that aren't in the first two screens nowadays.
> In Microsoft's defence, Apple haven't done anything to fix the problem of people with several screens of apps, which is basically impossible to navigate enjoyable. I almost always use Spotlight to open apps that aren't in the first two screens nowadays.
If you are wanting a single screen with access to all of your apps... I'm not sure there is a way to that. iOS provides three ways of opening an app: springboard, spotlight, and Siri. Springboard is pretty good, and when combined with folders you can store quite a lot on just the first page.
I am not aware of a UI idiom that would provide access in a way you imply.
I'd like a single folder for each application type, then an alphabetical list of apps - maybe working something like the contact list. As it is I am stuck with dozens of folders (for each letter of the alphabet, and because of 12 app per folder limit, I have four "Games S" folders.
I actually feel the opposite way. If the search is fuzzy and incremental with good visual feedback there's no way I'd rather launch things than typing their names, except maybe dedicated keyboard shortcuts. Of course, something else is needed for discovering apps.
This is true on a computer, but on a mobile device I suspect you're in the extreme minority; typing an app's name on an onscreen keyboard is an order of magnitude or two more complex than tapping its icon after a swipe or two, especially when familiar with the layout.
No. There is nothing enjoyable (meant to write "enjoyably") about having to use the search feature for something as simple as opening as finding and opening an app.
If you're using iOS, limit your home screen to two pages, and only allow a max of 3 or 4 folders.
Since doing this, my experience finding apps has improved significantly. It does mean you have to be frugal when installing new apps (add one, delete one sometimes). But then you're forced to keep only the stuff you use.
I tried to uninstall a bunch of apps a while ago, but since my iPad also got hooked up, the apps keep getting redownloaded and -installed, after I install it in either device.
I haven't looked into fixing it, but I have way too many apps for my own good anyway. But even so, I'd still have a lot of apps on my phone.
That's why I'd like to be able to hide them somehow, for instance by tagging them and only make them appear, if I want something in Games or such. As it is, I have one or two screens full of games.
In Windows Phone 7.8 and Windows Phone 8 user-level application tiles are available in two sizes -- where the size of the tile can be chosen by the user.
I find Android to be a good middle ground. Enough cues to make actions obvious, but not totally over the top like iOS. It also has widgets, which are similar in functionality to live tiles.
Well, to be fair, iOS store launch apps all looked like the System Preferences app. It wasn't till apps went out of their way using design as a differentiator that it had beautiful unique apps.
Windows Phone barely gets any attention, so the apps that get written for the platform use all the stock UI widgets, making everything look boring and bland. Plus XAML has a pretty steep learning curve if you try to do anything outside of the simple templates Microsoft provides.
> The next thing you know, you get OS UIs (Windows 8), websites and a whole bunch of other interfaces where you have no freakin' idea what to click.
Thank you! I feel like nobody is allowed to say it on the internet, because Microsoft finally released a phone UI that isn't objectively terrible, but I find Metro goddamn confusing on a phone. The "People" app is a disaster. Little bits of text hanging off the side of the screen, no indication about what's clickable anywhere. My mom is supposed to use this?
It may be important to remember that flatness is not something that came out of Apples labs. To the contrary, the 'clickable' look on buttons was invented at Apple (Xerox had flat buttons). And the reason, surprise, surprise, was and always has been usability. I don't see them reversing that any time soon.
That skeumorphism has seriously gotten out of hand in iOS 6 is a different debate. Ive will fix this.
What aggravates my particular swimsuit area is that no one who rattles very loudly on this topic seems to realise that there is more to skeumorphism than flat and textured.
By way of example: one of my favourite skeumorphs is Apples "head shake" when you enter the wrong password to unlock a Mac.
Flawless execution.
I know that something went wrong, I know what went wrong without ever reading a manual, it's friendly and gets the point across without big red Xs and intrusive DONGGG!! noises.
The fake leather stitcing stuff is dumb. I think that there are many designers who are guilty of throwing the baby out with the bathwater though.
This very page has over a dozen different click-able targets, and only one is a button with a shadow. Yet we seem to be able to find our way around just fine...
With due respect to pg, HN's UI is not something to aspire to, though it has subtle things that make the difference between "meh, but usable" and "omgwtf".
The problem I've found with Windows 8 is that there is no visual difference between clickable text/icons and nonclickable text icons. The whole experience comes one of trial and error where you tap on random things like an idiot to see what elicits a response and what doesn't.
The web's way of solving this problem is by underlining text that can be clicked. HN violates this in many places, but at the very least text links underline when moused over - not ideal, but works, and is something that doesn't exist in touch-land.
Ditto, we've been using rollover effects for years to demarcate clickable icons from the unclickable. This entire strategy is now kaput thanks to touch.
We don't necessarily have to have drop shadows, but what we do need is a consistent and unambiguous language that clues the user into how the UI operates. Windows 8 currently lacks this in a really, really bad way. We can do this without skeumorphs, but we still need to do it.
And therein lies the greatest problem with this flat design trend - many designers are going flat without remembering that skeumorphs carry a lot of user hinting that you have to replicate.
> This very page has over a dozen different click-able targets, and only one is a button with a shadow.
I remember initially HN didn't strike as a particularly intuitive site. It worked and I am using it because of the community and the content, I am used to it by now.
Ok maybe there some value in having users slowly discover cool features by randomly trying to click things. I don't know. But at least it, seems, the core functionality should be somewhat obvious.
Buttons on the web for every link don't work, but I like some special markup to show links (traditionally it is the underlining but anything else can work as well).
To me there is often a tension between making something looking cool and making it functional. I'll admit the look of the flat interfaces maybe cleaner (whatever that means...) but unless it is meant to just be looked at, it also has to be functional.
Note that HN is abiding by common customs that many people on the internet will have encountered a lot: usernames are clickable, things in the header/footer are clickable, "action words" without context are often links (i.e. "link", "parent", "flag", "comments").
Someone rebelled and wrote a blog how skeuomorphs are bad, put some pictures of leather textures up for everyone to laugh at. The next thing you know, you get OS UIs (Windows 8), websites and a whole bunch of other interfaces where you have no freakin' idea what to click. It all looks flat and so I end up mousing around elements on the screen like a drunk person stumbling in the dark trying to find how this thing works.
How about a little drop shadow on that button so it looks like, you know, a button? "Oh but it looks like a real world button and we shouldn't have to mimic the real world...blah blah.." -- I don't care about the philosophy of design or whatever the latest thing came from Apple labs, I want to get my stuff done and just knowing what is clickable is helpful.