Flat is poor design, the fad of the moment, and will hopefully be gone in short order. If anything, Flat as a design trend is elitist: it creates "secret knowledge" of how to operate a visually unhelpful interface, enabling "those who know" to help those confused by fucking awful design.
I agree with your point. Not sure why the down vote, so I'll add to your thought stream…
I dislike Flat design because it removes visual affordances that help novice users navigate a new interface. I loathe Google Maps on iOS because it is unclear to me that certain icons act as both buttons and draggable inputs. I've been casually using the app since its release, and I continue to be frustrated by it today.
While the original iOS design provided visual embellishments that served two purposes. First, textures provide familiar context giving new users a sense of immediate understanding. Second, basic features were obvious to intuit. It was clear what was a button and what was interface chrome. The same cannot be said with iOS7. Yes, it's easy to learn that colorized text is a button. But, it must be learned, and is easy to miss when quickly scanning the interface.
For these reasons I believe the parent's points are valid. I do not however want to abandon flat design, but personally hope that we find a balance between styles rather than adhere to flat design orthodoxy.
I've heard a lot of complaints against flat mentioning novice users specifically and I have 2 things to say to that in regards to iOS7:
1) It's a tool people use daily that they'll get used to quickly, I don't mind if new users have a slightly higher learning curve (in theory, I don't concede that it's actually the case here).
2) Anecdotally it seems to not be difficult to figure out. My 3y/o has had no additional trouble navigating my iphone/ipad since I upgraded to iOS7. Neither has my wife or my 4y/o.
The key point is flat tends to remove visual affordances. E.g. The iOS6 video player has a bright blue 'done' button. A quick visual scan finds that button immediately. iOS7 foregoes the button for just the text, so now it looks like every other UI control, requiring the user to now read instead of scan. Yes, it's small, but I've noticed that since using the iOS 7 betas I feel a little less connected to my phone for lots of small reasons like this.
Regarding your second point, it is still quite easy to figure things out. But, I'd contend that it is harder than before. I just wish we could have a balance between extreme skeumorphism and flat designs.
So if the novice user is hindered by flat design, why do you think that Windows Phone is killing it in the budget market in Mexico? It's also doing really well when feature phone users move to their first smart phone.
I second this. The author provided a comparison between the two system anyway. Though I think he is more likely talking about this topic from an Android user's perspective. I wrote my thoughts regarding iOS 7's UX almost 2 months ago: http://mattzlw.wordpress.com/2013/07/24/ios-7-beta-ux-thinki...
Moreover, flat itself is just a name we call on graphic design. It is just one of many elements of UX design. Everything starts from a bar with a large screen on our palms.
If you're going to discuss flat UI and compare the major platforms, omitting WP8 is absurd. WP7 jumped straight into the deep end of modern flat design, and WP8 continued the trend - some of the new iOS screens look like palette-swaps of Windows Phone.
How is omitting WP8 in an article like this "absurd"? The author shares what he learned from designing for the most popular platforms. WP8 isn't among them. I prefer having a well researched article where the author obviously deeply analyzed the nuances instead of some random collection of differences someone found comparing screenshots.
The author at one point says "Thank god the Windows phone failed".
It's one guy's opinion and he probably has limited experience with the WP platform - or just doesn't like it. I wouldn't have chosen to consider the rising market share as a sign of WP 'failing', but that's how the author apparently sees it.
Internet blog posts, specially the kinds written by people in tech that gets shared around on HN tend to have opinionated, often inflexible view on things - as if their understanding and by extension the reality is immutable. This is not entirely bad because it does spur on good discussion. Just don't take everything you read to be encyclopaedic facts and don't be surprised with 'absurdities' of these sort.
And I do agree with you abt WP OS. It has a fine design language, is very pleasant to use and was ahead of its time in embracing flat design accentuated with tasteful transition effects. I can see some iconography and other stuff on iOS 7 screen-grabs that appear to have been inspired by WP8.
A long time iOS user, I recently got lured in by WP8's smooth, no frills stylings and Nokia Lumia's edible designs. WP8 started late, yes. But it's in no way asleep or doomed. Happy so far with it.
Good comparison, but I found the point about the back button being needless and confusing a bit weird. Using Android as my primary mobile OS, I feel like someone's cut off a thumb whenever I use iOS devices. The back button, to me, is fairly critical.
The point about the back button was just weird. It's a button, which is for going "back". In literally every app with multiple screens this is a fairly obvious concept, but on Android you have the benefit of not having to allocate screen real estate to it, and having the button conveniently thumb-reachable.
I have only used Android as my primary phone. But, I am still confounded by the back button. For example, I am using twitter and get a notification ( from say Facebook ) and jump in to the app from the notification drawer. I see the photo, like it and want to go back to the twitter app. I hit back expecting to go to Twitter but it takes me to the facebook feed. This is not "wrong" but seems messy.
I wish that Android makes it more clear to app makers what the back button should/can do, and then make them adopt a similar behaviour.
The back button is very inconsistent on Android. For instance, within Facebook, anytime I hit back I go back to whatever I was doing in Facebook, no matter how long ago I did it! Facebook seems to keep a global history of everything I've every done in that app that persists for days and days.
In contrast, most apps after they are auto-closed by the system, lose their history. One could argue that Facebook is maybe "more correct" here, but for the most part, "back within this current session" is what I want, which leads into the next point.
If I tap a URL within some app that opens up the Android web browser, and I then hit the back button, I am brought back to my app. So I sort of expect this behavior, but again, different apps act very differently here. This is where Facebook's usage is really strange, I tap on a FB notification, go into the FB app, hit back, and rather than be brought back to whatever I was doing before, I am navigated to some conversation I last had a week ago. (I obviously don't use the FB app that often!)
There are plenty of other examples of inconsistent back button usage even throughout core OS experiences. What back is going to do when I am in the Text Messaging app is solely dependent upon how I entered the app.
(And then there is the entire thing about browser sessions from clicked on URLs within apps being entirely different than browser sessions from when I manually open the browser)
I'm not sure how the passage you quoted is in disagreement with your comment.
Sure, WP7 was the first major phone operating system to go flat. However, that doesn't have anything to do with the fact that a major design difference between iOS and Android in the last year or two has been that Android is 'flat' and iOS is not.
This site went out of its way to give me a bad experience on mobile (bad enough that I didn't finish reading the article): the page I received on Android/Chrome was so narrow that I couldn't unzoom enough to fit what I consider a reasonable amount of text on the screen.
I'm seeing it as a very faint gray outline. My guess is that the svbtle theme is using the shadow DOM to customize scrollbar appearance (couldn't find where he's doing it in a cursory search of the applied styles though). Check out Chris Coyier's article on the subject here: http://css-tricks.com/custom-scrollbars-in-webkit/
Minor point. I think the article is incorrect regarding long press being absent on iOS. I think it's been available for some time as UILongPressGestureRecognizer.
