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: 4, Insightful) by Mykl on Monday February 11 2019, @03:19AM (3 children)
I can't agree more with the premise behind TFA. Some of the interface elements within iOS now are so pared back, they may as well be hidden.
I was using the 'Share' popup screen in iOS' "News" app for a couple of months before realising that the options presented on the screen are actually part of an (invisible) horizontal set of options which can be scrolled if you scroll further to the right. There is no indication on the screen (well, apart from about 5-10% of an almost invisible white button on a light grey background) that there is anything else to choose from.
I blame this on Apple appointing Jony Ive to their software division. The guy makes beautiful looking hardware, but really has no place in the software world, where minimalism is actually making our lives harder.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday February 11 2019, @03:35AM (2 children)
My friend's first job out of Caltech was to work on Mentor Graphics' [mentor.com] Electronic Design Automation suite.
At the time it was written in PASCAL and full of Apollo-specific code. Rather than use p2c - which in my own experience while the C was largely unreadable, the accuracy of the translation was unquestionable - Mentor, in it's infinite wisdom, rewrite an entire $250k/DevSeat tool in C++ - starting in 1985; C++ really did _not_ work until 1998 or so.
He had two, maybe three managers. One was a Hardware Manger who was _expected_ - and told my friend and his teammates that he'd be "learning software on the job". He assigned my friend to write a utility to translate various file formats into each other.
A week later, Rod checked in his completed code then asked Mister Learning Code On The Job to assign him a new project. "YOUR JOB IS NOT TO DO NEW PROJECTS IT IS TO WORK ON YOUR FILE TRANSLATOR!"
Rod got laid off when the very first - _profoundly_ buggy - release of Mentor's C++ product shipped. It's failure to be... uh... "accepted" by the marketplace led to mass layoffs. Quite ironically, had Mentor instead chosen to write a new tool in hexadecimal machine code, well that would have taken Rod _two_ weeks.
Three, tops.
He went on, in partnership with a close friend, to purchase an Old Folks Home, which worked out really well.
When his partner Dianne got her home foreclosed, she and Rod hit the books - in the Law Library! Dianne kept her home, now they do "Law And Motion", that is, legal research and brief writing for attorneys.
As a hobby, Rod submits - unsolicited - Habeas Corpi for inmates who he feels were unjustly accused, but has yet to actually spring anyone.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 4, Funny) by Whoever on Monday February 11 2019, @06:28AM (1 child)
Ah, "late.0" Good times.
(Score: 2) by fadrian on Monday February 11 2019, @01:54PM
I started when that company had 300 people and bugged out halfway through the 8.0 debacle. I've never regretted it.
That is all.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday February 11 2019, @03:24AM (1 child)
You say that like it's a bad thing.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Freeman on Monday February 11 2019, @05:27PM
"simpleton mode" good, "so simple, that you can't differentiate" not good. Seriously, you want a simple interface that's easy to navigate. What you don't want is a simple interface, that's not easy to navigate. Simple != User Friendly.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 11 2019, @03:31AM (1 child)
I hope the moron who invented the flat BS dies in hellfire. I have an Asus tablet running Android 4.2, they never updated it past that, it was a Nexus 7 clone with SD card slot. Everything on it is clear and readable, menus are easily distinguishable. Total Commander are icons can't be confused. On new Android versions it's all gone to flat shit and I hate this childish chic fashionable moron designs with a passion. Thise designer fuckers should go to kindergarten and the kids would boo them there.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Monday February 11 2019, @02:03PM
Material design from a dev perspective has quite a bit of focus on z-level.
I guess I think of my phone more as a dev than a user, LOL, because I thought of the story as a stealth "material design android is superior to IOS" type of thing.
I suppose, the layers being very 3-d internally does not imply the ... rendered UI experience is necessarily very 3-d in appearance.
Android UI design is inconsistent (as with the rest of the Android experience) because every location relationship of widgets is done by XML attributes relating to IDs (a single line of XML meaning the top of this button aligns with the bottom of the textbox of some name) EXCEPT z-axis where overlap and layering solely in the Z axis is done by embedding widgets inside the XML for other widgets. This is consistent with old fashioned html but is a crap design decision for a blank space.
I like how awful android is designed as a developer; makes my pay higher. I can't imagine programming a mobile device that isn't a horrible design experience; I imagine it wouldn't pay as well...
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 11 2019, @03:36AM (4 children)
example? I'm too lazy
(Score: 3, Informative) by Ken_g6 on Monday February 11 2019, @04:18AM (3 children)
Apparently, iOS [wikipedia.org] is a flat design. [wikipedia.org] The opposite seems to be skeuomorphic design. [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by driverless on Monday February 11 2019, @06:48AM (1 child)
Only if you're using a pretty peculiar scale. Both flat and skeuomorphic designs sit right next to each other on the braindamage scale. Something like Ubuntu Emerald or Windows Aero, depending on your OS preference, are at the opposite end of the scale.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Monday February 11 2019, @08:53AM
You seem to think that if one end of the scale is bad, the other end must be good. But in reality, that's rarely the case; the good stuff is usually in the middle. If on one and we have starving, on the other end we have overeating; both are bad. If on one end, we have parsimony, on the other end we have wastefulness. Again, both bad.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday February 11 2019, @02:07PM
skeuomorphic design always turns painfully anacronistic, with kids under the age of 40 mystified by a UI made entirely of floppy disks, filmstrip reels, walkman UIs, slide rule radio dials, just madness.
Meanwhile I like UIs that expand my possibilities perhaps in an abstract manner, not a VRML representation of a retro-experience.
With a side dish from gaming of the old tradition of marketing bitmaps and background images being a little fancier than the actual game experience such that the initial assumption is the skeuomorphs are mere visual candy or eye fluff, now wheres the real (probably ugly) UI elements?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 11 2019, @03:40AM (9 children)
Making text hard to read makes the text harder to read.
Disguising elements by not distinguishing them makes it hard to discern selectable and editable things from static elements.
Hiding features and controls makes it hard to discover them.
Grass is green.
Water is wet.
Today's UI designers need to quit pulling stuff out of their asses and start paying attention to the work that led to the HIG behind early Mac and Windows UIs. Even CDE/Motif kicks ass over the flat UIs we're forced to work with today.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Monday February 11 2019, @04:47AM (7 children)
Oy, Sherlock!
If it is so obviously evident and evidently obvious that "flat design" is so baderest, how come we get this in all applications starting from mobile and ending with... the fucking Visual Studio? (for the lack of an immediate better example of a complex UI)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 11 2019, @05:27AM (5 children)
Most likely some idiot with too much authority wanted to distinguish their product from all the rest (the ones that followed some form of design rules) so had some artsy types create something that was completely the opposite of usable but that s/he thought looked pretty. The sheep saw that and, instead of questioning it, decided that they didn't want to miss "the next big thing", so copied it. We all now suffer as a consequence.
Basically, the competent people were taken out of the design loop and the job was handed over to the artsy-fartsy glue sniffers.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday February 11 2019, @05:58AM (3 children)
Which means someone with even a rudiment of authority will have to tell them, ain't it? Otherwise they are stupid enough not to listen to common-sense.
In other words, the uttering of "The emperor is naked" by the study does have value. (contrary to the belittlement expressed by the AC starting the thread).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday February 11 2019, @09:50AM (1 child)
The emperor gets confused by all the lines, 3D buttons, and icons. He's old, and he wants simpler things so he can tap the right thing with his trembling finger and without his reading glasses.
I'm still not sure whether it's the blue blood that gives him the ability to find where things can be activated vs not. Maybe it's his advisers, or maybe he just pokes everywhere, swearing, until something happens.
At least, that's what the emperor would command, if he was like my uncles.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 11 2019, @06:12PM
Except it ain't the "oldsters" that invented flat design.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 13 2019, @09:41PM
You nailed it in the second sentence. This study is hardly unique. Clueful people have been pointing out how bad the flat design trend was pretty much since it started. Unfortunately, as you observe, they -- the flat-backers -- are, indeed, too stupid to listen to common sense. They've dug their hole and, despite the fact that the sides are clearly falling in, they'll be damned if they're going to stop digging.
(Score: 0, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 11 2019, @06:56AM
There. FTFY.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by ilsa on Monday February 11 2019, @10:23PM
Because the old way is old and clearly inferior. And we can't make new things look like old things because then people will think the new things are also old, and thus also inferior.
So it is imperative that we throw the baby out with the bathwater, give the basin a good scrubbing to make sure they didn't miss any baby, and then rebuild that baby from scratch using whatever they happened to find in the room at the time.
And then of course, go out of your way to ignore all the flaws you introduced, and fan yourself with a copy of the Dunning-Kruger study.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Monday February 11 2019, @10:26AM
OTOH HCI studies start from the flawed premise that the interface should be made as clear and palatable as possible to facilitate the work of the user. I have found no evidence whatsoever that this is the case and plenty of evidence to the contrary. In fact I find a waste of time to enumerate user hostile projects.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by MostCynical on Monday February 11 2019, @03:47AM (6 children)
on one hand, simple can mean clean.
On the other, eventually, simple removes everything useful, so users end up either pressing/clicking/poking everywhere to try and make something work, OR they find work-arounds of varying levels of technology (most recent example: Screen shots of a status page to use as file note, uploaded into the same system that runs the approvals workflow)
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 5, Insightful) by hendrikboom on Monday February 11 2019, @04:02PM (1 child)
As usual, things should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Saturday February 16 2019, @04:14AM
Thanks for moderating me insightful, but I can't take all the credit. I believe the statement originated with Albert Einstein. My insight was only in applying it to the present discussion. Truly, I stood on the shoulders of a giant.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by tangomargarine on Monday February 11 2019, @08:39PM (3 children)
Have you ever heard the bit of programming advice, "Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler."
Most problems with software UI were solved decades ago; it's just the latest generation of people making the UIs now are ignoring the prior accumulated knowledge of how to do it properly.
Or the "Principle of Least Astonishment" and discoverability. Controls should not be hidden until I wave my finger at a certain part of the screen, which I have no visual cues is a special area. I fail to see what is wrong with traditional pull-down menus. "Oh I have to go 3 or 4 levels deep"...and? So fucking what?
Damn kids, get off my lawn
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday February 11 2019, @08:43PM (2 children)
Whoops, somewhat redundant beginning. Oh well.
I wonder if this has to do with the thing where humans have both eyes on the front of our heads, which makes us better at telescopic vision, for hunting. Prey species like rabbits tend to have their eyes on the sides of their head so they have a better view all around themselves, in order to spot predators better. Which would make sense that our depth perception may be better, hence 3d buttons and stuff "popping"
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday February 22 2019, @04:16PM (1 child)
Except that 3D buttons on the screen are all at the same distance from the eye, namely the distance from the eye to the screen. It's not binocular vision, but 2D clues like shadows, that gives us the 3D effect.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday February 22 2019, @08:40PM
It's simulated 3D rather than real 3D, yes, obviously.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 5, Interesting) by krishnoid on Monday February 11 2019, @03:58AM
All along I thought this was something being taught in design schools as (ostensibly misguidedly) newer and better from an interface design perspective, which is why everyone was using it. It didn't seem right, but I thought there was at least *some* research/testing behind it. I guess this also explains why I have to scroll down past two pages of mostly whitespace to see balances on all of three investment accounts.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by darkfeline on Monday February 11 2019, @04:36AM (6 children)
What's the definition of traditional design? Designing for functionality? No wonder then that it outperforms designing not for functionality.
1. Design something that works well.
2. Need to justify paycheck
3. Create new designs every year that by definition are not the best functioning design, since that was already done in 1.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 11 2019, @04:56AM
IIRC, there are old books about design that are backed up by usability research from the 70s-80s that apparently is long forgotten, or just _flately_ ignored probably because it's old so it's useless or that people before were dumb, something close.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by c0lo on Monday February 11 2019, @08:46AM (4 children)
A design in which the function of UI elements are clear just by looking at them.
You know? Something like a button and a hyperlink looking different, and both of them different from a rectangular area with a text and background colour.
Imagine trying to pilot your 75+ yo parents, on international calls, through the new flat-with-not-always-visible-icons-sometimes doubling-as-buttons Skype UI
- "Now press the Call button"
- "But... there are no buttons"
- "Ah, shite! Put the mouse over that circle with my initials in the middle of the screen, but don't click. Done? Ok, you should see now some icons visible below that big circle, right? Yes, they weren't there before, that's fine. Now, one of them looks like an raised up old phone speaker, in a smaller circle. That's the button, believe me it IS a button. Click on it'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 11 2019, @09:11AM (2 children)
I had to use someone's work phone to get a number and make a call. On an iPhone. You know, I've heard so much about how great iPhones are over the years. So. I had to get help. From someone in the office. Who uses an iPhone. FFS.
I have used an android and previously a Nokia for years.
I almost got on the net to look up how to do it. Intuitive my ass. I did not have time to screw around. I needed to use the phone.
The person who helped me said that just about everyone needed help.
Seriously, wtf.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday February 12 2019, @01:32AM (1 child)
You're holding it wrong
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 13 2019, @01:32AM
When all you have is an iPhone everything looks like a nail
(Score: 3, Insightful) by hendrikboom on Monday February 11 2019, @04:04PM
Navigation by dead reckoning.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 11 2019, @04:38AM (5 children)
There's a good reason why iphone jailbreakers have been producing a shitload of themes and skins, most of which aimed at reproducing, with more or less success, the skeuomorphic design pre-ios 7.
I recently pulled out my old iphone 4. It was still on ios 6. My God, the instant you start interacting with the interface, you immediatly realize how superior it is to the new flat design post ios 7. Your eyes are litterally drawn to the proper visual cues, your fingers instantly fall in the right place. I had completely forgotten how ergonomic the skeuomorphic UI is. The experience is simply impossible to describe. And then, you realize immediatly how the modern flat user interface sucks. Big time.
I have absolutely no idea what's wrong with Apple's design team. The only explanation I can offer is that they never actually use the interface they created.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Monday February 11 2019, @02:11PM (4 children)
Flat looks like Star Trek TNG UI. Looks nice on the big screen, sucks to actually use. Kinda like being a Trek red shirt; handy to have them around on screen to soak up incoming rounds; being one IRL would suck.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday February 11 2019, @02:13PM (2 children)
There's a lesson I forgot to mention that usability and appearance are uncorrelated or possibly anti-correlated in UI work. The ideal UI to actually use is a nice incredibly unflashy and unimpressive CLI. Hollywood UIs always look cool but are essentially unusable in practice.
Note that the people making UI decisions are the same idiots that cut productivity by 75% by implementing open office work plans to be stylish. Given that you can assume UIs are also designed without any adult supervision.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by fyngyrz on Monday February 11 2019, @06:10PM (1 child)
Ah, no. I'm a CLI user, and a fairly heavy one at that. It took me years to learn all that stuff, and what I know isn't a 1:1 overlap with the next CLI user, either.
A good user interface presents relevant choices in an obvious and accessible manner. A great user interface covers all the use cases that way. Either one should be learnable very quickly. That is not a metric that will apply to any CLI.
The CLI hides everything that you don't actually bury in the prompt.
I'm with you in that the CLI is the most powerful and flexible UI; but ideal? Not even close.
--
Keep electing the rich.
Keep wondering why tax laws screw everyone else.
It's a mystery!
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday February 11 2019, @07:00PM
Historically it seems proven based on examples that discovery can be much better with CLIs. CLIs are usually more consistent and less surprising. Certainly to be usable at all it has to be localized and internationalized.
Certainly CLIs are more reproducible and easier to talk about, being in the form of words rather than pictures and shapes and abstract art and movement. We simply can't talk precisely about how to do stuff in CKII (a GUI game) but we can at least in theory talk about how to do stuff in Dwarf Fortress CLI (vaguely similar game... in a VERY vague sense)
CLIs, much like written language, seem more intuitive and easier to learn. Anybody can talk about words and use words. Anyone can write a BASIC program to count to ten; I don't think anyone off the street can build an eight bit binary adder in minecraft redstone. Its kinda like how everyone can use MSword at some level but only a tiny minority of the population can constructively use CAD programs.
Imitating a human conversation works well for CLIs we're programmed to communicate that way. GUI are a little too abstract and imprecise. How would we translate this entire conversation into GUIs if we couldn't use text? Emojis are just a cheat code for text. I suppose the above paragraph in GUI would be rotate some 3-d object to an abstract art depiction representing my points, then cycle thru as many symbols per minute as I can read, while hamsters perform an interpretive dance of my punctuation. Even meme pictures with words on the bottom are cheating the concept. I'm sure there's some widget on the app ribbon that accurately represents my feelings in the above paragraph; good luck finding it.
It may be a side effect where GUI of similar quality to a CLI takes 1000x more effort and historically managers / developers have only put in 20x the effort, leading to awful GUIs.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday February 11 2019, @04:59PM
Very interesting thought.
Consider even newer Hollywood craptastic movies.
They design some fantastical UIs that look amazing on the big screen in a movie -- where nobody actually has to use them. Those UIs just have to look good. Like Apple, like Fashion, like many artificial things.
Now imagine: Some manager realizes "hey this designer designed that great holo-3D floating movie UI, and won an award for it . . . we need to hire that designer for eight figures to redesign all our products!"
Is that inconceivable?
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 11 2019, @04:39AM (3 children)
Recently Google Image Search started to serve me a new style. Instead of results organized in lines, with preview opening a new horizontal block, it now shows multiple columns of different height items and the preview on the side and sticky, leaving less columns as scrollable. With first click it even had to "reload" (white flash) and rearrange everything. And again if you close that panel. Bang, white flash to the face over and over, with high CPU load, if you want to have more results in view again. Use of tabs for previews becomes a must, not an option.
So for something you are supposed to scan side to side, then next line, it became a game follow the shaky lines up and down. That or we are supposed to scan one column all the way down, then go back to top and scan the next. It reminded me of something, and confirmed it, same layout than Pinterest (which I avoid as much as possible). I even tried to resize the window to make it single column, like if I had a spyphone, but now way, it gets horizontal scrolling with 4 columns minimum in GIS and 2 in P. Retarded in all cases.
The end of scourge design is not near. *sigh*
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday February 11 2019, @08:49AM (1 child)
Yes, it can be much worse before it gets better. A pity we won't get to the better times
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 4, Funny) by cmdrklarg on Monday February 11 2019, @07:00PM
Erhman's Commentary: "Things will get worse before they will get better? Who said things would get better?"
The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
(Score: 2) by Hyper on Monday February 11 2019, @01:39PM
https://duckduckgo.com/?ko=-1&q=soylent+green&ia=images&iax=images [duckduckgo.com]
Have you tried duckduckgo? It's like Google used to be. Simple, straight forward, trustworthy.
I appreciate what Google has done for the Internet. For a while now I have strongly suspected that they have lost the plot. It started with Gmail. When they screwed with the interface too much - something about emails should be only short and floating and attachments should be hard to view - I left. Since then I have not looked back. Their captcha and need to serve every single javascript library they can blows but that's a small thing in the scheme of things. Give ddg a try?
(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]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by fennec on Monday February 11 2019, @07:30AM
I think flat design is meant to guide you and control what you're seeing. If there is nothing to "distract" you from the content you spend more time being brainwashed. If you can't find options anymore then there is no more customisation to support. It's not the interface that is being dumbed down but the users. We, old farts, know that there is a better way, but new generations will be used to it and will have no choice...
(Score: 5, Interesting) by choose another one on Monday February 11 2019, @10:19AM (6 children)
Going back to skeuomorphic UI design, will fail. Why? - because the hardware / physical world stuff has also all gone "flat" ("but it looks good"). Of course it doesn't work so well there either...
Even in hardware, buttons are not buttons any more, they are not raised, they do not move when pushed, they do not "click", they are indistinguishable from their surroundings.
My heating thermostat thing has a "touch ring" (really) that you have to sweep your finger round (sweep your finger round the ring, yes really...) to set time or temperature. It doesn't work anywhere near as well as a rotary knob or a pair of up/down buttons which would have been simpler, and taken up less space.
My oven turns on with two rotary control knobs - twist one to set the mode, one to set temperature, done (timers and stuff are another set of buttons, but that's complicated). My in-laws have a new oven, top of the range, touch screen control. Really. To turn it on you have to touch a blank featureless screen somewhere in the right place (and then listen to it play a tune while booting up), but that doesn't turn the oven on, oh no, for that you have to first scroll left and right through dozens of options to find and select "oven", then you have to scroll and select to set the temperature, then I think there is another stage I can't remember, then you have to scroll to select "turn on now". I think. In reality, I can't use it. I don't think they can really either, and they've had the full training course. Oh, and the oven has already needed multiple engineer visits and a full replacement control unit when less than a year old. But it was really expensive and looks really good... honest.
Today's software copies today's hardware - stab randomly at a featureless area that may or may not be the controls and wait for something to happen because there won't be any instant feedback on what, if anything, you just did.
[sigh]
All this of course was prophesied long ago:
[... 3 minutes later ... ]
(Score: 2) by fadrian on Monday February 11 2019, @02:02PM
for that you have to first scroll left and right through dozens of options to find and select "oven"
That's so the manufacturer can use the same UI on the combination oven/refrigerator/freezer/food dryer. Remember! Software is expensive!
That is all.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Monday February 11 2019, @02:29PM (4 children)
Eh ... no. When my current home depot range croaks I'm buying my wife a Vulcan restaurant grade. Kinda like buying a speed queen commercial grade clothes washer, aesthetically speaking the UI for big box stores has little to do with UI for professionals.
As a bad SN automobile analogy its kinda like tools, in that J Random Consumer should be milked of $20 annually at Harbour Freight to buy a shitty screwdriver set made of undercooked pasta noodles that bend in use but have a pretty spray paint finish that lasts about five minutes of use, whereas the "real pros" buy German made Wiha (and be careful not to buy the licensed name Chinese trash...) that only last 3 or 4 generations.
As you'd expect you can buy a home depot stove that you gotta replace every three years for $500, or one that'll last a decade for $1000, or a Vulcan for $10K that'll last at least a century, but its not entirely the finances but also the annoyance and the experience of using quality tools rather than trying to duct tape and bailing wire crap into working.
As a large overall group, nobody pays more for cheap shit that doesn't work, than the American Consumer.
(Score: 1) by SomeGuyOnTheInterwebs on Monday February 11 2019, @10:36PM (3 children)
Seriously. I managed to snap the end off a Harbor Freight box end wrench while removing a stuck pedal from my GF's bike. I stood there looking at the broken bit on the ground with my mouth open, thinking; How do you fsck up a box end wrench, fer crissake?
-- Just SomeGuyOnTheInterwebs
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday February 12 2019, @02:00PM (2 children)
I unrolled a walmart twist drill once.
Some products are so bad that no matter how much you need to buy a "X" it turns out buying a substandard one is a waste of time.
I had some old craftsman chinese screwdrivers with mushed up philips heads ... for years until I chucked them, every time I used them it was a PITA.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 12 2019, @09:35PM
I've learned that the best use for such things is to cut off the handle, plug it into a power drill and use it as a drill bit.
Best use, mind.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 13 2019, @01:39AM
You know those small screwdriver sets, sold for a couple of bucks at$2 stores?
I've lost track of how many I have gone through.
Fix glasses? Sure.
Anything harder? Nup. Busted. Buy a new set.
Now I am thinking that if I had just purchased a decent set years ago. . I would still have it.
The Vimes theory of boot economics I suppose