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from the designer-egomania-vs-user-ergonomics dept.
In a not so recent (2015) study Flat Design vs Traditional Design: Comparative Experimental Study scientists measure the performance of current and past interface styles. They reference multiple past articles and studies (some freely avaliable like Ref 3 or Ref 11) so they are not walking new ground, just measuring some more.
Some interesting background:
The density of screen information [in flat design] is often extraordinarily low [10].
...
The main criticism was that flat design ignores the three-dimensional nature of the human brain, which is extremely sensitive to visual cues linking interfaces to the real world. The removal of affordances from interactive interface objects means that users regularly perceive interactive elements as non-interactive, and non-interactive elements as interactive.
Despite these limitations flat design is becoming more and more common, and criticism of experts in HCI [Human-Computer Interaction] and usability is generally ignored by the software industry and graphic designers.
They used different tests: finding a word in text, finding an icon among others and finding clickable objects in a webpage. The process included eye tracking and recording of mouse motions. Subjects were students below 30 years old and already using similar interfaces, so effects in older or disabled persons were not studied. Font tests showed similar times, but worse cognitive load (derived from eye motions) for flat style. Icon tests showed worse times and mental load for flat style, a more complex task pushing the brain out of semiautomatic mode. Webpage tests were also against flat style, with high miss and false alarms indicators.
The conclusions were clear:
Our experimental study supports the opinion expressed by many HCI and usability experts that flat design is a harmful tendency in area of user interfaces, and should be replaced by interfaces based on the design principles developed over decades of research and practice of HCI and usability engineering.
Now we have more proofs that "flat design is inferior to traditional design", we aren't just whiny users opposed to change that don't understand what is going on. Based in personal experiences, and those of older persons around me, my conclusion is that any "UI/UX expert" that keeps parroting the modern interfaces is just a fad-following graphic designer at best (I expect more from those too... but they keep on disappointing me), and in any case should not be allowed into the HCI field. There were other studies, and this one is around 4 years old, so maybe it's time to get back into saner styles. Not that I hope things will improve quickly, after realizing that — since this study — things have slid more and more into simpleton mode.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday February 11 2019, @06:16AM (11 children)
I have been trying to figure this out for ages. To me, KDE3.5 and 4.x were the peak of design for the desktop for OSS, Windows XP and 7 for the MS side, and OS X from, say, 10.4 to 10.10 or whenever they went full flat-tard on us. I've watched the flat design take over with a mixture of disbelief and horror, constantly asking myself if this is *really* what people want and how they can function with it.
And I've been trying to figure out the rationale behind it all, and failing. It's not the software equivalent of Neo-Brutalism (if anything that was Win95 and company). It's not Art Deco, for sure; that would be early OS X maybe. Definitely not cyberpunk like some aspects of Enlightenment. The best I've been able to come up with is "They're trying to get a "Zen" look and doing about as good a job as Mortal Kombat does with east Asian culture in general" but even that doesn't feel right. At the same time, it doesn't feel like a deliberate troll either. I'm stumped.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by driverless on Monday February 11 2019, @06:59AM (5 children)
Yup. It was bad enough when Microsoft got eaten by flat-tard zombies with the Windows 8 and 10 UI, but the KDE Plasma 5 look may as well be called Windows 9. Did someone look at the Windows 8 UI style and think "that's been such a brilliant success we just have to copy it in Linux"?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 11 2019, @01:29PM
Why in the loweet fricking hell does my Ubuntu 18.04 have a "slide up to unlock" ON MY FUCKING DESKTOP MACHINE </rage>
(Score: 3, Funny) by VLM on Monday February 11 2019, @02:14PM (3 children)
Oh, nice stealth anti-systemd joke, I tip my hat at that one. That was smoooooth.
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 11 2019, @05:14PM (2 children)
Pretty sure systemd has shit-all to do with UI.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 11 2019, @07:02PM
Thanks to Red Hat's submarine takeover of GNOME, it's got everything to do with the UI.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 12 2019, @10:17AM
When your ui requires systemD? It has everything to do with it.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday February 11 2019, @08:57AM (2 children)
The first time I was exposed, as a dev, to it was bootstrap with jQuery.
It may very well originate in the lazy-as-fuck web designer estetics, until some twisted retarded mind got to promote it as a 'the new dadaist UI art movement' or something.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Monday February 11 2019, @12:02PM (1 child)
Don't "real" designers go on retreats to learn to eat kale and wheatgrass, and come back wearing skivvies and polished leather shoes without socks, and thinking everything could do with more white space, even the little icons...and everything should be shades of one colour..
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 4, Funny) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday February 11 2019, @11:09PM
I caught one of those in my hipster trap (bear trap with a can of PBR on the plunger...) the other day. Oddly, convincing him that having only one leg was a "minimalist aesthetic" didn't seem to go over too well.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 5, Informative) by choose another one on Monday February 11 2019, @03:58PM
tl;dr: it goes back to marketing taking over the web, form over function and marketing materials didn't have 3d controls.
I think it began in the late 90's, in fact I saw it happen first hand (but in just one of many many places where it happened round the world).
It began when marketing noticed the Web. Quite suddenly, web sites were taken out of developers' (and others) hands and placed under the marketing department. Marketing guidelines standards and people with no idea about functionality beyond paper thickness and billboard size were suddenly in charge. The corporate logo had to be exactly the right Pantone colours, on every monitor (yes really), corporate fonts and size guidelines had to be adhered to, on every device, user preferences be damned, and so on. The "graphic designer" became "web designer" without acquiring any functionality skills - and graphic designers were a lot cheaper than developers.
First they worked in Photoshop, as they always had, and when they presented their "designs" for web pages and ideas about how they would actually _work_, the developers laughed, cried, swore or beat their heads against walls screaming "no it can't be done like that". So the designers used Photoshop slices, took the resulting mess to the head of marketing and said "see, it can be done" (it'll even work provided the users have computers with 100x the memory we have now and 100x the CPU power and 100x the connection speed, course the server will fail but that's the dev's fault. Then someone invented DreamWeaver and the designers could do "everything" (and if it got too complicated in html, just use Flash). The developers retreated behind the server room door.
For a while, it was just the web, a new platform with no need (yes, really) of the decades of accumulated knowledge and standards on user interfaces, accessibility and so on, besides which no one wanted to spend the money to teach all that to the web designers because that might make them as expensive as developers.
But it couldn't last - soon everything _had_ to have a "web interface", and why build two interfaces, so the "web interface" became "the interface", and we threw away all the UI and accessibility on the desktop too, then "web page" became "web application", and they were flat. With every application going flat-web and the OS in danger of being made irrelevant by the browser, OSes went flat too so they could look just as pretty (and work just as badly). The rise of the smart phone actually provided a respite and possible way back to sanity - limited pixels, limited cpu/gpu, limited bandwidth all drove a move back to apps and mobile-sites that were simple, quick and functional and had clear UI for getting stuff done on a limited client platform. Couldn't last though - phone screen res (and size), cpu and bandwidth are now up with the desktops, and flat, bloated, design has taken over there too - megabytes for a single mobile page?, no problem.
I don't think it'll go back until we actually get usable 3D/VR, a 3D paradigm might drive a return to 3D controls - but by the time that happens (if it does) I fear that flat will be so entrenched that you'll pull up a virtual flat screen in a 3D environment and stab at random places on it to try and control stuff.
(Score: 3, Informative) by The Archon V2.0 on Tuesday February 12 2019, @05:37PM
First flat controls I saw were some old version of Quicktime. I wasn't the only one annoyed: http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/qtime.htm [gp.co.at]