[HN Gopher] The UI future is colourful and dimensional
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The UI future is colourful and dimensional
Author : giuliomagnifico
Score : 180 points
Date : 2025-05-27 01:23 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.flarup.email)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.flarup.email)
| bitpush wrote:
| What's old is now new again. The fashion industry has known this
| for decades, and the tech industry is catching up to that.
|
| You know what comes after "dimensional" design? Radicial
| minimalism.
|
| "Once you strip away everything extra, everything ornamental,
| what remains is the truth, and nothing more" There, I wrote a
| tagline for design trend of 2030.
| 1shooner wrote:
| But my calendar app would be so much easier to use if only the
| UI included stitched leather.
| aleksiy123 wrote:
| What else is there?
| Avicebron wrote:
| "What was once considered truth in the design sense has been
| replaced with complacency and a stifling regression towards the
| mean. What we offer is an alternative; boldly intricate
| designs, showcasing skill, attention to detail, and a human-
| first detail orientation unmatched by the AI systems flooding
| our daily lives" There's 2035's
| GenshoTikamura wrote:
| A future like this would definitely be worth living through
| the current bullshit
| BobbyTables2 wrote:
| Fluxbox will make a comeback?
| dkdbejwi383 wrote:
| It never left my heart
| terribleperson wrote:
| Hasn't minimalism been the dominant trend for well over a
| decade now? Surely it'll need more than five years to cool off
| before it makes a return, assuming it even leaves.
| hliyan wrote:
| Just a minute ago, I clicked a "Transfer" button on my online
| banking UI. It's a beautiful button with an appealing font and
| a subtle, pleasing background gradient. But when clicked, it
| shows no indication that it was depressed, and I have to rely
| on the appearance of a modal spinner to know that I have
| actually pressed it. For me, peak UI was Windows 89/2000 --
| largely uniform and monochrome, but just enough detail in the
| third dimension to know where to click, and what to expect when
| clicked. Also: keyboard shortcuts.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| In a desktop application, if a button stays in the pressed
| state when you let go of the mouse button, it means that the
| developer was lazy and is doing work on the UI thread. In a
| classic Windows UI, the transfer dialog would be closed, or
| it would disable all controls until the operation completes
| and then show a confirmation message.
| thyristan wrote:
| Well, kind of.
|
| Actually, the developer should really do some work in the
| UI thread beyond just sending out a "button pressed"
| message: When I press the button, I need immediate feedback
| that it was pressed and that pressing it had an effect,
| that things are now happening. Too many UIs, especially in
| the web where round-trip-times can be long, rely on just
| firing of a message or a network request. The response to
| the user, by displaying a spinner, progress bar, modal or
| new page only happens asynchronously and after a
| comparatively long delay. This means that users will
| sometimes repeatedly click because "nothing happens",
| leading to multiple messages, leading to multiple actions,
| leading to a big mess.
|
| So the UI thread should synchronously trigger user
| feedback, take a lock or other measures to prevent
| unintended repeated actions and start a timeout callback in
| case the triggered action doesn't happen in a sensible
| timeframe.
| dkdbejwi383 wrote:
| This is what actual UI design is supposed to encompass.
| Making sure the software behaves in the way the user expects,
| effectively communicates state, etc. Not just fussing over
| icons and colours.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| It is perhaps a problem that there are a lot of visual
| designers around, because that is something for which a
| classical education exists and which has a certain
| prestige, and very few UX designers, for which no classical
| education exists and which seems to have little prestige.
| Good UX design is usually _not_ fancy, form follows
| functions isn 't flashy, and the whole thing seems kinda
| nerdy (not cool).
|
| About the return of skeuomorphism, I do believe it's
| happening because people are fed up with flat everything in
| two colors, but I wish there was less oscillation around
| the center. As many have mentioned, Win2k was very good,
| and it _was_ a middle ground between the extremes we 're
| seeing today. Actually, it was extreme in one way: you
| could tell what a UI element was going to do without trying
| to click every pixel and seeing what happens.
| kccqzy wrote:
| Users' expectation changes. You ask someone who grew up
| with Windows 98 and they will tell you that d'oh of course
| onscreen buttons should have a depressed state to indicate
| they are pressed. You ask someone who grew up with Snapchat
| and the entire idea of having buttons is optional: tap on
| this area of the screen for this functionality, tap on that
| area for a different functionality, and swipe left for this
| swipe right for that with no indication that the UI is even
| swipeable.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| > For me, peak UI was Windows 89/2000 -- largely uniform
|
| The UI back then was sometimes janky, but it was so much more
| useful. Icons were meaningful and easy to recognize despite
| the low resolution. Quite often interfaces were customizable,
| they were not afraid of users becoming power users. Peak UI
| for me was probably Winamp 2.
|
| Nowadays it is just a bunch of flat glyphs, things hidden in
| hamburger menus, arcane submenus, etc. Probably done to
| increase "engagement" or whatever bullshit metric they want
| to minmax for.
| SebastianKra wrote:
| It's not a loop, it's a spiral. Each idea brings a (partial
| over-)reaction to the last one.
|
| For example, flat monochrome icons emerged, because previously
| the UI was massively overshadowing the main content [^1]. So we
| traded the recognizability of icons for a better overall
| hierarchy in the UI.
|
| Now that this problem is solved, designers are looking to
| reintroduce recognizable icons without sacrificing the previous
| goals. In the AirBnB app, you'll find that the busy icons are
| only used when they're the main focus. Auxiliary icons remain
| flat.
|
| [^1]: https://www.geeky-gadgets.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2011/09/fac...
| layer8 wrote:
| Flat, monochrome icons emerged due to the hardware
| requirements of mobile devices with wildly differing DPI.
| SebastianKra wrote:
| There can be multiple reasons. But iOS went 6 years with
| skeumorphic icons (post-iPad, post-Retina) so mixed-dpi
| screens probably weren't the only factor.
| layer8 wrote:
| At that time iOS had the luxury that its higher-DPI
| variant was exactly twice the original resolution, so up-
| or downscaling of non-vector graphics worked well.
| (Similar for macOS.) Moreover, the original iPhone
| resolution was already relatively hi-DPI, meaning that
| accuracy on the individual pixel level wasn't as
| important as on the typical 96-DPI desktop screen.
| agumonkey wrote:
| It's so weird to realize that the 2000s that I considered
| advanced were in fact just another segment in the timeless
| cycles of fads
| raincole wrote:
| a.k.a. People are using whatever Dall-E 3 give them without
| curation and believing they're designers.
| kaibee wrote:
| Yeah, but isn't text to image kinda the perfect tool for
| creating certain UI? The point of an icon is to
| compress/transform some idea/action/whatever into an image that
| communicates exactly what it does/what it represents. And often
| the thing you want an icon for isn't some concrete concept you
| can represent with 5 lines, but a label that language has
| converged on to describe a broad but fuzzy category of stuff.
|
| Like, if you have an eCommerce store and you want an icon for
| mops, doesn't it kinda make sense to take your top 100 selling
| mops and blend them together into an icon?
| skydhash wrote:
| Not really, because in this case, it's better to just use the
| word "mops" and be done with it. You use icons when people
| are familiar with them. You do not invent them on a whim.
| 1over137 wrote:
| Stop letting graphics people decide these things by aesthetics.
| There is hard data from people that actually work in usability on
| how UIs ought to be built.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Yes, but those usability people have a tendency to design
| interfaces for the lowest common denominator. This often ends
| in disaster as the lowest common denominator often cannot even
| navigate a "usable" interface. Meanwhile, those who aren't in
| that group feel almost infantilized.
|
| I will take my extremely dense UI over an accessible interface
| that shows only 10 rows on a spreadsheet in 24 point font.
| Think of those with low vision!
| Avicebron wrote:
| > Yes, but those usability people have a tendency to design
| interfaces for the lowest common denominator. This often ends
| in disaster as the lowest common denominator often cannot
| even navigate a "usable" interface. Meanwhile, those who
| aren't in that group feel almost infantilized.
|
| I fully agree with you. But ...
|
| > I will take my extremely dense UI over an accessible
| interface that shows only 10 rows on a spreadsheet in 24
| point font. Think of those with low vision!
|
| You will be Ctrl + FrontMouseScrollWheel to read your 3rd
| monitor too eventually.. be nice on HN.
| croemer wrote:
| > You will be Ctrl + FrontMouseScrollWheel to read your 3rd
| monitor too eventually..
|
| I'm failing to parse this
| nick__m wrote:
| I parsed that as: one day, you will have to use the zoom
| too.
| dotancohen wrote:
| Ctrl-+
| dkdbejwi383 wrote:
| Just because one doesn't need accessibility features now,
| doesn't mean you won't ever. A little bit of empathy
| would not be a waste.
| rambambram wrote:
| > Meanwhile, those who aren't in that group feel almost
| infantilized.
|
| For me, the perfect examples of feeling infantilized (I like
| that word) are the following: I feel infantilized by
| government or hospital illustrations that are meant to convey
| a simple message to the lowest common denominator. I feel
| infantilized by Youtube videos and TV ads that use these
| happy but annoying 'toddler' sounds in the background.
| grimpy wrote:
| I think it's inevitable (and fine) that aesthetic trends
| influence UIs, however, what is terrible (and already
| happening... again) is that people will create all kinds of
| faulty reasoning and justification as to why the new trend is
| empirically better UX when what likely is at play is a tiny bit
| of innovation and a lot of novelty.
|
| IME, there could be a lot more clarity in product and UX if
| more people were honest with themselves and others about just
| wanting "better" looking UI.
| melagonster wrote:
| Every day, there are so many comments complaining about the
| open-source/free software they tried being too old and the UI
| being stale. I never notice someone offering the example of
| their modern UI. "But the UI is terrible!" maybe graphic
| designers are needed.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Windows 8, 10, and 11 are good examples of modern UI being
| over-refreshed and receiving hash feedback by their users.
| TheFragenTaken wrote:
| There's also hard data suggesting the perceived usability is
| higher when the user interface is aesthetic. So it goes both
| ways.
| dartharva wrote:
| Graphics people have been deciding these things ever since
| personal computers became mainstream. You are almost three
| decades too late to preach this.
| Tokkemon wrote:
| Care to share said hard data?
| recursivedoubts wrote:
| flat, minimalist design has been a disaster for the human race
|
| if designers need the AI hypetrain to bring back drop shadows and
| the basic usability affordances we had for the 30 years before
| they ruined things, so be it
| abraxas wrote:
| As much as they were a disaster for computing interfaces what
| they did to architecture is so much worse and so expensive to
| fix. So many cities are semi-permanently scarred by outrageous
| creations of "starchitects".
| recursivedoubts wrote:
| i am in violent agreement with you
| afavour wrote:
| Not a new thought but it always surprises me how much groupthink
| applies in these situations. Airbnb announced a new design and
| we've all just collectively accepted that it's the future?
| ...what?
|
| I don't hate the trend but I am underwhelmed. Just loaded up the
| Airbnb site and... it's new icons. The actual UI I'm interacting
| with hasn't changed a jot, though. Google's Material UI stuff
| from a few days ago felt much more interesting.
| hoseyor wrote:
| I also get this weird sense that besides seemingly just having
| changed 4 icons, as far as I can tell, it really feels like
| they're just dusting off three dimensional icons that existed
| back in around about the early aughts ?
|
| I'm not convinced either.
| sixQuarks wrote:
| It's so stupid. I get the emperor has no clothes vibe from
| all of this
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Your just noticing?
|
| Most of the stuff on HN isn't exactly written by super
| geniuses, especially for blog posts without some kind of
| analysis.
| valianteffort wrote:
| This post was more about some midwit trying to coin a
| phrase than a breakdown of future design patterns one
| could entertain. Clout chasing nonsense.
| boxed wrote:
| Which emperor though? Flat design or 3d design?
|
| I do agree with the article that before the iOS 7 flat
| design rush the barrier to entry for indie app developers
| was super high because it's damn hard to make the iOS <7
| style look good. Flat is easy though. But with AI tools,
| the old style is suddenly available to lots of people
| again.
| Tokkemon wrote:
| Those 3D icons were always ugly, we just didn't have the
| maturity to realize it at the time. :)
| pglevy wrote:
| Definitely slower loading and jankier scrolling on my phone.
| tsunamifury wrote:
| Because it's nonsense from a "performative" wannabe design
| team.
| vijayabaskar56 wrote:
| yeah , I too like the new Material UI , the suttle physics
| effors are awasome.
| throw310822 wrote:
| Aha, yes, it's a grand total of five icons (that I've managed
| to see so far) mixed in with a lot of flat icons. And they look
| ugly AF, it looks like a blast from the early 2000.
| rchaud wrote:
| It does look like Office 97 clipart, or something from those
| 5000-piece icon CDs from the '90s.
| wooque wrote:
| Yeah new icons are ugly and looks like they are ripped from
| Sims 1. It's just designers trying to justify their existence
| in the company.
| karaterobot wrote:
| > Airbnb announced a new design and we've all just collectively
| accepted that it's the future?
|
| Don't overindex on one guy with a newsletter. My read on this
| article was this is someone trying to be the guy who called the
| next trend. He cites no evidence supporting the claim that it's
| the next trend, he's just trying to be the guy who puts a name
| to it so that he's an influencer if it does.
|
| He also mentions how he's been designing icons in this style
| for decades, which should make a skeptical person wonder
| whether there might be some wishful thinking going on here.
|
| What I can tell you for sure is that, as a professional
| designer, I have not received any memos mandating the use of
| this style of icons. I'll let you know when I do.
| Nullabillity wrote:
| > Just loaded up the Airbnb site and... it's new icons. The
| actual UI I'm interacting with hasn't changed a jot, though.
|
| Don't undersell it. It also manages to run like ass on a
| desktop with a modern gaming GPU, and takes 5 years to load on
| a gigabit connection.
|
| _And_ got my location wrong. _And_ decided to machine-
| translate everything _away_ from my native language.
| taimurayaz wrote:
| This is fueled more by nostalgia than usefulness. That game
| example is horrible. It draws attention to icons more than the
| content itself. Makes the whole experience fatiguing.
| barrell wrote:
| Surprised there aren't more comments about the game example. I
| found it so bad - takes up so much space, provides no value,
| color schemes all over the place, every "icon" had wildly
| different rotations/perspectives.
|
| Was it a little fun? Sure? Maybe? It was cute for a moment or
| two. But "near production ready"?
| forgotoldacc wrote:
| As someone who grew up with Nesticle and ZSNES as a kid and
| now uses OpenEMU, the icons and visual flare are big reasons
| lots of people use specific emulators. ZSNES is still used by
| a lot of people because it's "comfy" despite the accuracy
| being poor.
|
| Kids downloading emulators today and experiencing 40 year old
| consoles like the NES and 50 year old consoles like the Atari
| 2600 for the first time don't want an all text UI. They want
| a picture of that ancient hardware. It makes their experience
| feel more real. In contrast, Retroarch is that it's an
| emulator frontend designed that has no frills in its UI, and
| it's designed with a mindset that everything doesn't take up
| much space, everything provides value, and color schemes
| aren't all over the place, and there aren't really any icons.
| And because it's the ideal HN emulator, it's difficult to use
| and ugly.
| barrell wrote:
| Oh I'm not arguing for minimalism or all text uis - I agree
| with the article in the sense that modern uis are boring
| and we need something fresh. It just seems like a very
| shoddy example to run a victory lap with. Design is
| subjective, but I don't think many people would see that
| and think "yes this looks finished / is the future". Which
| seems to fly in the face of the article and the point of
| including it
| hoseyor wrote:
| So diamorphine is an alt. for heroin. Just saying
| ketzo wrote:
| While this article is a little fluffy and overstated, I do share
| the overarching sentiment -- UIs for the vast majority of
| products should be _at least a little_ fun.
|
| "Delightful" UI/UX has become a cliche at this point, but it
| really does make me happy to see an element of craft and
| intention in the software I use, and stuff like these detailed
| little icons accomplishes that well!
| echelon wrote:
| The main point / takeaway I had wasn't whatever UI design is in
| fashion right now, but rather the treatment of AI tools for
| design:
|
| > I treat AI as just that: a tool, not a shortcut to the final
| result--then there's still a lot of room for craft, taste, and
| care.
|
| I wholeheartedly agree with the author here.
| constantcrying wrote:
| Aesthetics or fun _needs_ to be secondary to usability. If
| making something "fun" comes at the cost of making the design
| less usable, it should be avoided.
|
| Obviously companies need to define their own image in design,
| but that is not an excuse for bad design.
| ketzo wrote:
| I agree, and one issue for developers and designers alike is
| that often, it's more fun to make a UI fun than it is to make
| it work really really well.
|
| But that doesn't mean we should lose sight of fun completely,
| which I think in many places we have!
| nosefurhairdo wrote:
| I'm unconvinced. The article cites Airbnb and "the internet" as
| evidence:
|
| > After Airbnb showed off their redesign, the internet exploded
| with soft, dimensional, highly detailed icon sets prompted into
| existence using generative AI tools.
|
| One company's redesign + random proofs of concept does not
| indicate a real trend, and the idea that LLMs make designing with
| dimensionality in mind more accessible is dubious.
|
| Good design requires consistency. High dimensionality makes
| consistency harder to achieve. LLMs perform better when there are
| fewer design nuances to consider. Additionally, we can expect
| LLMs to reinforce existing trends, as they're all trained on what
| exists today.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| Gee great, the designers got bored again
| chank wrote:
| How are we not full circle back to the early 00's with this
| design? It didn't really catch on then. Maybe this time? Wasn't a
| big fan of it then. Still not.
| choxi wrote:
| There are some other interesting dynamics in UX that aren't just
| cyclical trends:
|
| - Natural language interfaces. You can now communicate with your
| computer with language, voice or text. There are some situations
| where this is an improvement, but others where it's not. It'll be
| interesting to see how interfaces are designed to combine the
| best of both worlds.
|
| - Adaptive interfaces. The UI/UX of the last period of computing
| is largely a solved problem. There are standard UX solutions for
| most types of problems. It's also become significantly easier to
| build these interfaces, and LLMs are pretty good at writing basic
| declarative UIs. I think the bar will be raised such that users
| expect their interfaces to adapt to them, instead of a one-size-
| fits-all solution.
|
| - Immersive interfaces. This might be similar to "dimensional"
| but more about the actual UX instead of just how 3D the buttons
| and icons are. I think using 3 dimensions is a natural solution
| for expressing higher information density. VR and AR will
| eventually catch on in some form.
| richardanaya wrote:
| I can't be the only one who thinks these look ugly. Material
| Design Expressive feels more future forward.
|
| https://design.google/library/expressive-material-design-goo...
| echelon wrote:
| These modern designs feel so antiquated. Like being stuck to
| musty magazine pages.
|
| Bring me back to the era just after Geocities 1999. That pre-
| web 2.0 world saw some real futurism, before all the flatness
| took over.
|
| Even Frutiger Aero was more forward thinking than Material.
| terribleperson wrote:
| I miss the gradiented/pseudoreflective UI elements. It made
| it very easy to visually distinguish elements.
| dotancohen wrote:
| I'm waiting for the LCARS UI to catch on.
| barrell wrote:
| I find it very interesting the praise Material Design
| Expressive gets. Perhaps it's just because I've always been on
| iOS, but every iteration of Material Design seems so much more
| foreign to me. I'm not really criticizing it, but personally I
| find it to be extremely confusing to visually process.
|
| It feels a lot like language divergence. iOS and Android
| started at the same place (same language), then became
| different accents, different dialects, and (soon/now) different
| languages.
| int_19h wrote:
| The overall feeling I get from this is "form over function" and
| specifically "look! look! we can do fancy typography!".
| notnullorvoid wrote:
| AirBnB's redesign isn't a indicator of design trends changing.
| Most of the app remains minimal and "flat", the dimensional
| flares are mixed inconsistently throughout. The app could more
| easily flop back to fully minimalist than it could into a fully
| 3d design language.
|
| Also dimensional icons have existed within flat UIs as app icons
| for quite some time, though some platforms have had periods of
| both flat icons and UI. In a sense they are adopting them in this
| existing usage as sub-app icons.
|
| The oddest thing is the glossy "new" tags, they are the only tags
| within the UI which are glossy. Having them mixed with flat tags
| and flat buttons is honestly confusing, they look more like
| buttons than the actual buttons do.
|
| > Back in the early 2000s, UI design like this had a high skill
| ceiling. It took years to master lighting, materials, and depth.
| Now? That level of craft is often just a prompt away.
|
| Mastering any design style takes time, and the skill ceiling is
| not meaningfully different if there even is one. I'm also highly
| sceptical that AI would be able to be consistent enough whether
| generating flat or 3d icons.
| pavon wrote:
| Yeah, the icon style is the part I care about the least when
| taking about flat design. It is the fact that it removes all
| visual affordances that something is interactive. Clickable
| items that don't look like buttons or hypertext, they just look
| like the rest of the page. Scrollable regions that don't have
| scrollbars or any other visual clue that there is more content
| below or to the right, unless some of that content happens to
| be cut off by the invisible region boundary. Windows whose only
| indication of which is selected is the title goes from dark
| gray on light gray, to medium gray on light gray.
| dataviz1000 wrote:
| I don't think it is 2D vs 3D, but rather 2D and 3D vs 4D which
| probably has these guys a little worried. The human interface is
| still the same but now instead of something that responds
| instantly or deterministically like the doorbell interface which
| has tactile input and auditory output, the output is automated
| actions in time. This is what the thinking output in LLM
| interface is. I don't know if the language and semantics allow me
| to say this but the LLM output is more than a 2D screen, it is
| also in time. That is the fundamental change.
|
| This might not be different from say ... clicking a button
| causing a massive Rube Goldberg machine to take money out of my
| bank account, send emails about my booking to all interested
| parties with signals moving across continents before in some time
| in the future sending me a confirmation message when everything
| is finished. People are beginning to think in terms of the output
| of the action of pressing a button to book as automation instead
| of just output on a screen that says successful or failed attempt
| to book.
|
| (If anyone from the Airbnb design team reads this, please,
| please, please, work on making sure that the absolute important
| information about a booking in text messages are visible in the
| text message. And that the page before booking does not hide
| information about the booking on an iPhone 13. You do not have
| control of the thousand different combinations of phones,
| operating systems, ect so when the information has be presented
| in only words it has to be done in a way that people understand
| them.)
| lxe wrote:
| I do miss IconFactory, Everaldo's Crystal Clear Icons, Tango,
| Longhorn, and other trends from the beginning of 21st century.
| anthk wrote:
| Tango it's still my icon theme (Tango2). Clear outlines.
|
| On the theme, Zukitre it's flat but it has contrast.
| ookblah wrote:
| nice. so basically we are so "back" to the icons i saw from my
| packard bell desktop shitty navigator OS like 30 years ago lol.
| everything is truly cyclical (also in fashion like what gen-z is
| wearing) and i'm old enough now i guess so it a little jarring to
| see these things playing out before my eyes.
| paul7986 wrote:
| The future is less UI and tons more interacting with AI right
| from your personal AI mobile device's Lock Screen.
|
| It will do everything for you that you do now using the web
| ..we'll be opening less apps and web browsers in a few years or
| less.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Even after all this time I don't like it. It looks like 90s
| geocities icons on modern flat iOS design. Going by feel, it
| looks dumb
| fxd123 wrote:
| ...except Airbnb's redesign is still extremely flat. Three icons
| that have 3-D shadows is not groundbreaking
| efortis wrote:
| In 2009, I recorded a few Flash websites with 3D, videos, and
| parallax motions.
|
| Here's an inspiring one:
|
| https://x.com/efortis/status/1879712687896289471
| nssnsjsjsjs wrote:
| That animation is cool but the end result is still as flat.
| ddingus wrote:
| About damn time!
| WhereIsTheTruth wrote:
| "I did a quick mockup"
|
| Sure you did.. https://openemu.org/
| diiiimaaaa wrote:
| I think we're in a loop guys
| District5524 wrote:
| We ARE a loop ourselves:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Strange_Loop
| pier25 wrote:
| So we're going back to Aqua from 20 years ago?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_(user_interface)
| kmarc wrote:
| While just because a company wants this, I doubt this is the
| future, however...
|
| Just a couple days ago I was thinking about this (and in fact,
| started exploring icon packs for my desktop) that all the UIs I
| use are reduced to "black and white" icons and widgets. Colors
| are missing, sophisticated shapes too. Sometimes I am actually
| wondering what an icon is meant to represent.
|
| At my new gig I have to use web Outlook (not allowed to use my
| finger-memorized mutt setup), and I must say it's a pleasure to
| look at the UI. Still line drawing icons, but and elegant play
| with colors at least. Similar to how some LibreOffice Icon packs
| look like.
|
| I rather hope this is the future. Use colors as accents, leverage
| a "grouping" functionality with them.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| > At my new gig I have to use web Outlook (not allowed to use
| my finger-memorized mutt setup), and I must say it's a pleasure
| to look at the UI. Still line drawing icons, but and elegant
| play with colors at least.
|
| What do you mean "colors"? I have been using Web Outlook for a
| while, and everything is blue black and grey with a ton empty
| space.
| kmarc wrote:
| Here is an example. The toolbar has subtly colored icons:
|
| https://www.windowspro.de/sites/windowspro.de/files/imagepic.
| ..
| calmbonsai wrote:
| I'm not convinced. Show me the results of A/B study along any set
| of UX metrics you'd like to measure. The author uses the term
| "performative" without any performance metrics.
|
| Going all the way back to Parc, pre-OSX Mac OS, VRML, OpenStep,
| and countless widget and windows managers for Linux (anyone
| remember Enlightenment (https://www.enlightenment.org/about.md ?)
| we've _had_ deep dimensional design, animations, and heavy-weight
| skeuomorphics multiple times and have always returned to
| _shallow_ static dimensional design for mass /generic
| applications.
|
| I suspect it amounts to less overall mental effort which improves
| workflow speed and, thus, a greater perception of interactivity.
|
| Maybe deep dimensional design will return when cheap and
| ubiquitous AR (augmented reality) or VR becomes a...reality, but
| I don't see it happening with 2D displays.
| atoav wrote:
| As someone who worked in IT support icons can be award winning
| and you'd still find people who will have a hard time
| understanding their meaning when there is a label written
| underneath them. People are lazy and don't read text in
| computer programs. Sit next to a user who clicked away a
| warning and ask them what it said.
|
| As a former freelance graphic/web designer I'd argue that the
| style of icon is much less important than the organization of
| those icons. E.g. some software will put 50 icons seemingly
| randomly into a toolbar and let you play a game of "find the
| right one". The quality of every single icon becomes utterly
| meaningless then as the organizing principle is wrong.
|
| That means first an icon bas to be the right choice and be used
| in the right context, then we can talk about readability and
| how well it clicks and stylistic questions come dead last. Some
| people think graphic design is about coming up with cool
| looking styles. That is literally the opposite of what good
| graphic design is.
| anthk wrote:
| Between current flat turds and Keramik/e16 there are sensitive
| settings:
|
| -Motif UI
|
| -Plastik
|
| -Platinum
|
| -GNUStep/NextStep
|
| -BlueCurve
|
| All of them have clear outlines and contrast.
|
| On Icons, Tango and Tango2 from Gnome are unbeatable. Maybe
| just Haiku/Be icons can truly be over Tango.
| int_19h wrote:
| Win7 was pretty decent, as well.
| rchaud wrote:
| Any A/B study would look at conversion metrics ("did people
| spend more money?") rather than user enjoyment. People don't go
| on Airbnb to browse or hang out, they book a room, pay and
| that's it.
| tsunamifury wrote:
| You can't be serious that this guy is acting like he just
| deactivated skuemorphism.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| I like skeuomorphism, I hope it comes back.
|
| But the best UI is custom. It would be better if apps had
| themable UIs so users could apply custom themes if they want to
| make all their apps have a particular style (e.g. metal, sepia,
| colorful, modern). Because then the UI can be skeuomorphic or
| minimal or anything else.
|
| Apple has recently been adding more UI customization. There were
| custom lock screens in iOS 17, custom app icons in iOS 18, and
| something's planned for iOS 19. It hasn't gotten much attention,
| maybe in part because there's still a lot you can't customize
| (especially in most non-Apple apps), more likely because Android
| is still even more customizable (especially because it's not as
| locked down). But Apple doing it is significant because they
| could start a more widespread trend.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| Arbitrary system-wide themes are hard to code against. You
| could make a dark theme for Windows 9x, but you might end up
| with black/dark text on a black background, because the
| developer changed the text colour, but left the background the
| default colour.
| johng wrote:
| Those icons are great, that's the type of look that I love. I
| still love the look of BeOS and it's icons..
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| Finally. I'm so sick of the flat design.
| jazzcomputer wrote:
| Flat silhouetted icons have a more versatile set of contexts -
| much like flat text does. Sure, you can express a lot in an icon
| that's 3D and whatnot but it needs its own stage to 'act' and
| really come alive, or else it'll just look a bit small, hard to
| read or a set of them will look too dense and over-egged on a
| shelf. Maximalism is visually demanding, and whilst it'll look
| cool, the context is too small for those kind of gaudy claims of
| some huge game-changer in aesthetics.- It's not I don't welcome
| them, as I do like diversity, but this is not gonna be some game-
| changer like when skeuomorphics was binned by Apple.
| skydhash wrote:
| Most people issues with flat design are the mixing of context.
| Buttons and icons are not the same. Just like normal text and
| links are not. And a button that have state (bold button in
| word processing) shouldn't behave like something that doesn't
| have one (flip button in image editing). Whether you like
| minimalism or not, these are constraints that impact usability.
| A lot of current designers eschew them.
| 0dayz wrote:
| I'm surprised no one talked about Samsung, their new oneui has
| moved in a hybrid direction.
|
| In other words it reminds me more of early android design.
|
| I like it.
| simultsop wrote:
| Back then, all sorts of designs made the web a marvel. Until
| algorithms kicked in. We stripped the design in favor of machine-
| understandable information composition. So our thing would be
| most recommended by AD-pumped services/listings/directories. At
| the end, outreach mattered more than an elegant product.
| Unfortunately still does.
| rchaud wrote:
| In addition to that, Apple and Google started enforcing style
| guides for apps, so a lot of the unique UIs that came about in
| the early days of the app store died out in favour of soulless,
| boxy designs that would scale well on mobile and tablet.
| politelemon wrote:
| > It's not meant to be a grand rebrand of design. A completely
| invented word. A working title for a style that embraces depth,
| texture, and light. Not to mimic the real world, but to create
| something that feels native to the screen. Something expressive.
| Playful.
|
| I loathe this kind of self serving pseudo humble talk. It's like
| trying to make or validate something out of its minuscule value.
|
| I don't agree with the author either. If anything Google's
| material themes have become the defacto trend setter for a while
| now, and I only know it by the way it "infects" my web usage over
| time.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > I don't agree with the author either. If anything Google's
| material themes have become the defacto trend setter for a
| while now
|
| Well, yes. _Right now_ that 's the trend. The author is saying
| that he's seeing a change _now_ that indicates the coming _end_
| to that trend, not that the trend itself has ended.
|
| FTFA:
|
| > It's always hard to pinpoint when a paradigm shift happens.
| Usually, you only recognize it in hindsight.
|
| I don't read that as _" The trend has ended"_, I read that as
| _" In the future (i.e. hindsight) we are going to see these
| events as the beginning of a new trend"._
|
| Whether or not I agree with his position, to me, _that_ is what
| he is saying.
| card_zero wrote:
| Oh OK. _We can see with foresight, that in hindsight, we will
| see these things happening now that are currently
| imperceptible._
| lelanthran wrote:
| > Oh OK. We can see with foresight, that in hindsight, we
| will see these things happening now that are currently
| imperceptible.
|
| Let me rephrase - the author is presenting speculation as
| ... speculation.
|
| This is why I say that, even if I disagree, I don't see the
| harm in this sort of speculation.
| Aziell wrote:
| I'm not a designer, but I've been around UI long enough to notice
| the shift. This new move toward more color, depth, and
| personality feels like a step in the right direction. It's not
| just about things looking nicer--it actually makes digital spaces
| feel alive again.
| GenshoTikamura wrote:
| So the industry first squeezed talented designers out of the UI
| business by shoving that ugly ass flat style down everyone's
| throat, and now they're proposing to cycle back to skeuomorphism
| which the former were capable of and replace all remaining human
| designers with AI.
| keyle wrote:
| Yep this is a good summary.
| forgotoldacc wrote:
| I was ready for flat design to die 10 years ago. It's
| astonishingly unintuitive, ugly, the opposite of style, and
| straight up anti-human. There are still abstract icons in some
| apps and UIs that I can't wrap my head around and I have to
| just click and hope I'm right. There are things that I cannot
| figure out whether they're interactive or not unless I just tap
| randomly. There are so many occasions where I can't find what
| I'm looking for because some goober decided contrast and color
| coding is a sin.
|
| Flat design stands against every single principle of proper
| design. All I can hope is 40 years from now, there isn't some
| "retvrn to tradition" BS where a new wave of the youth decide
| we should return to the "cool classic style of the
| 2000s-2020s". Let me be an old man and die with the software
| around me looking beautiful.
| anthk wrote:
| Proper semiflat design worked well under System7 and AtarI
| GEM.
| ranger207 wrote:
| Proper flat design worked great under Windows Phone 8.
| Still the best phone I've ever used
| mangecoeur wrote:
| This will happen for sure. Designs are fashions that come and
| go, like jeans that go from skinny to baggy and back again. I
| don't think anything is absolute, tastes change and people
| get used to just about anything, and will mainly gripe when
| anything changes.
| vachina wrote:
| This is how you keep another generation of techbros fed and
| hired. Functionally, things have been stagnant for what felt
| like decades.
| ben_w wrote:
| I look forward to the ultra-skeuomorphic future where our AR
| glasses deliver notifications rendered as fully realised Art
| Nouveau-era bellboys handing over telegrams.
| DemocracyFTW2 wrote:
| This already happened in R W Fassbinder's Welt am Draht
| (1973) where when you are visiting the hotel in the
| simulation and your time's over, a bell boy with a chalked
| notice on a portable blackboard will walk through the hall to
| alert you to answer the phone in a specific telephone booth.
| We had a future to look forward to!, and now it's come to
| this--flat interfaces.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Renders as dotmatrix printer paper out of your virtual fax
| machine.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| I'm a big fan of the "Fukauffen Diamorph" school of design.
| Vinnl wrote:
| Well, not sure if "the industry" is proposing this yet, or if
| it's just this one person and the Airbnb guy.
| PedroBatista wrote:
| There have been rumblings and attempts years prior. Now it
| only takes another attempt, an industry darling ( it used to
| be Apple) and a big hype boom on the Internet.
|
| There is one problem tho: flat design is cheap to produce.
| Not sure if AI is there yet to be capable to produce good
| enough slop to become an industry trend that sticks.
| soco wrote:
| I'm not sure "good enough" was even a thing lately - all we
| do must be cheap while anything else is secondary. And AI
| can totally do cheap.
| evilfred wrote:
| Airbnb is an industry darling? in 2025? lol
| DemocracyFTW2 wrote:
| > shoving that ugly ass flat style down everyone's throat
|
| the correct term is ugly flat ass actually
|
| That and the other thing I hate / despair over is the
| monumental space they now leave between list items. In some
| applications I get scrolling drop-down menus because of that.
| Yes, they'll rather have users scrolling through a menu that
| doesn't fit on the screen rather than compressing space between
| items.
| soco wrote:
| I think that comes from the horror period called "mobile
| first". Okay maybe I exaggerated a bit, not everybody called
| it horror. Some called it garbage.
| neepi wrote:
| This reminds me of something that happened to us recently. So
| one of the internal things we have is a giant turd that sits on
| top of some Oracle/SAP mess. The user interface is circa 2001
| and hasn't changed really. Looks like a cross between Motif and
| GTK1 it's that bad. The icons are off the shelf ones from some
| clip art collection.
|
| So they need to rewrite it and got a consultancy to do it. The
| whole UI got rewritten using react and used an off the shelf
| flat design. A week after launch they sent out a user survey
| and nearly every respondent complained about the flat UI. So
| they made it look like the old one again very quickly.
|
| So now we have a shiny new React app that looks like something
| from 2001.
|
| I have to wonder if anyone likes flat user interfaces or just
| user studies are broken.
| williamdclt wrote:
| They actually polled for user feedback, listened to it and
| acted on it quickly? That sounds like a great consultancy!
|
| TBH I'd guess that people would have complained whatever the
| new design was, people hate change. But yes, flat designs are
| often on the worse end of the spectrum
| neepi wrote:
| No we dug out a faculty statistician and did the analysis
| and paid them even more money to fuck it off.
|
| The consultancy resisted this horribly because the tech
| lead is a performative bullshitter and it doesn't look good
| on his portfolio page that it looks like something from
| 2001.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| He should show both the prettier and the ugly version
| side by side and give it as an example of him being
| adaptable and willing to please his client instead of
| himself.
| mrweasel wrote:
| > I have to wonder if anyone likes flat user interfaces or
| just user studies are broken.
|
| My impression was that it was an attempt to get engineers to
| be able to do the design, rather than involving graphic
| artists.
|
| I also think that we often conflate pretty with usable.
| There's nothing more interesting than these user interfaces
| that has grown organically for 20+ years. They look "bad" or
| at least old, but that doesn't mean that they necessarily
| have poor ergonomics. Some people, myself included, have
| tried to force that old-school, hodgepodge look, but you
| can't really do that either, it doesn't work. You just end up
| with ugly and confusing. Those interfaces has to evolve
| organically.
| giva wrote:
| Sane people don't want to invest time learning a new UI just
| because it's prettier.
| esafak wrote:
| But it might improve the UX for others. You can't please
| everyone.
| RajT88 wrote:
| > So they need to rewrite it and got a consultancy to do it.
|
| Why? Was it broken?
| cardanome wrote:
| I think modern UI is mostly optimized for onboarding new
| users. For that it makes sense to have a more minimalist UI
| that doesn't make the user think too hard and does not
| overwhelm them.
|
| But if you need to do actual work you want maximum
| information density. You want icons that are easy to tell
| apart by color, not some sleek minimalist grey in grey.
|
| If you use a tool every day for multiple hours your UI needs
| will be vastly different. We have forgotten how to build
| tools for power users.
| kunzhi wrote:
| _> But if you need to do actual work you want maximum
| information density. You want icons that are easy to tell
| apart by color, not some sleek minimalist grey in grey._
|
| IMHO Photoshop is still the classic example of this. The UI
| can feel overwhelming at first, like dropping into a
| helicopter cockpit. But once you start getting a hang of
| what you're doing, anything more "minimal" just feels like
| dumbing things down for the lowest common denominator.
|
| From what I've seen in large enterprises, it's also why OG
| users are so attached to their mainframe terminal UIs. Yes,
| it's very hard to learn, but once you've developed some
| facility, everything else feels unusably slow.
|
| I've never had a bad experience designing like I respect
| the users intelligence. Humans are insanely smart and
| capable, treat them that way and good results occur.
| rondini wrote:
| How is photoshop a classic example when all of the icons
| and controls are quite literally grey in grey like the
| person you quoted was denouncing?
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| because of the information / functionality density and
| the fact that it's optimized for power users
| skydhash wrote:
| It's not grey on grey. It has cleanly delineated section,
| and most of them has been in the same place for ages. And
| there's thing like tooltips that help.
| falcor84 wrote:
| > Humans are insanely smart and capable, treat them that
| way and good results occur.
|
| My experience isn't quite that. While _most_ humans _can
| be_ capable when they _want_ to, in typical situations
| they often don 't and aren't. People who have put in
| years to become proficient in mainframe terminals aren't
| representative people in a typical situation; most people
| (myself definitely included) perform most daily actions
| on autopilot.
| skydhash wrote:
| And autopilot rely on consistent environment. Full focus
| isn't sustainable. Training and practice rely on this
| capability, ingraining something in muscle memory so you
| don't have to pay that much attention. When someone wants
| to fill a form or process some data, the less he/she pays
| attention to each action, the better it is.
|
| EDIT
|
| And that's why I like Vim and most TUI that much. I don't
| need to follow the cursor or wait an abitrary amount of
| time because "reasons". It's all muscle memory, and my
| attention is more on what I'm trying to do than how I'm
| doing it.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| GIMP's icon redeisign and new tool layout were a massive
| mistake IMO, first thing I do on a new install is disable
| tool groups and change the color scheme to "legacy"
| starkparker wrote:
| > Humans are insanely smart and capable, treat them that
| way and good results occur
|
| Obviously, maybe more obviouisly now than ever in
| recorded history, not all humans are smart or capable.
|
| Regardless of capability, however, many humans excel at
| memorizing complex routes across obscure paths that they
| experience through spaced repetition, which research
| suggests can alter memory pathways in the brain to
| facilitate easier recall[1] and also engages memory
| functions in our nervous systems beyond our brain.[2]
|
| Any UI, including bad ones, can foster efficient
| workflows in any user _if_ it accomplishes things
| compatible with repetitive use:
|
| - the UI's behaviors and interactions are minimally
| interally consistent
|
| - the UI has pathways from a starting point to a result
| that are discoverable through those behaviors and
| interactions
|
| - the UI's reactions to input are sufficiently efficient
| to avoid arbitrary or dynamic pauses, which can disrupt
| effective repetition
|
| - the UI's interactions are minimally accessible to
| people; if they use buttons, shapes, colors, sounds,
| controls, etc., a person can consistently distinguish
| between and physically access them when necessary
|
| - a person interacts with the UI long enough to find
| those pathways from starting points to results, and does
| so repetitively over long time spans
|
| Modern UI design often attempts to reduce the time to
| value for users at arbitrary experience levels, at the
| expense of maintaining the consistency of pathways that
| reward longtime users who have accumulated training.
|
| The only people using the UI when the change happens are
| people with a non-zero amount of accumulated training.
| Any change disrupts consistency. It's a net negative to
| the people who are around to complain about it, and also
| resets the often competitive field of users; not only do
| experienced users have to relearn their workflows to
| avoid committing errors or wasting time, they also have
| to compete with new users who have easier access to
| results that previously required experience through
| repetition to efficiently reach.
|
| For example, a UI designer might change the UI to surface
| a feature that they want users to access more easily by
| making it require 1 or 2 interactions to reach, but a
| veteran user already has "easy" access to that feature
| even if it takes 6 or 7 interactions to reach it, some of
| them obscure. If the change removes the result from the
| end of the old pathway and moves it to a new one that
| experienced users don't know, the new UI becomes less
| efficient for them no matter how smart or capable they
| are (or aren't). Both the new user and experienced user
| might be smart and capable or stupid and incompetent; the
| differentiating factor is experience.
|
| Arguably, the "smart and capable humans" who use complex
| UIs are either the ones who achieve a level of power to
| prevent UI changes that degrade consistency of existing
| pathways to preserve their productivity at the expense of
| less-experienced users needing more time and training (at
| which point they probably don't need to use that UI
| anymore anyway, and the act mostly rewards other
| experienced users), or the ones who divert time that
| might be spent complaining about UI changes toward
| adapting to the new UI's pathways.
|
| The truly disruptive UI/UX changes for repetitively used
| workflows are the ones that introduce unpredictable
| delays between interactions. Repetition rewards rhythm
| and consistent feedback, and unpredictable interaction
| delays destroy both.
|
| 1: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07425-w
|
| 2: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-53922-x
| neepi wrote:
| The mainframe terminal user interface was shown to me in
| all its glory by Italian gate staff at the airport in
| Rome. Literally hammered through a security check after I
| was flagged as having two return flights. It was no less
| than a form of kata.
|
| I can imagine how shit it would have been if you have to
| log into windows and open a web app and use the mouse and
| stuff to click through a web form hacked up to do the
| job.
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| > IMHO Photoshop is still the classic example of this.
| The UI can feel overwhelming at first, like dropping into
| a helicopter cockpit. But once you start getting a hang
| of what you're doing, anything more "minimal" just feels
| like dumbing things down for the lowest common
| denominator.
|
| while i agree, i wish more dense applications like
| Photoshop took the Rhino3D approach of integrating a CLI
| directly into the interface. yes, you can click the icons
| or select tools from the menu, but being able to just
| type a command and arguments (or have it prompt for the
| arguments ex-post-facto) feels just incredible in an
| otherwise-GUI application, in a way that memorizing
| keyboard shortcuts just doesn't compare.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| It's worse - modern UI is for onboarding new customers. The
| calculus of what to prioritise should change when your
| customers aren't your users.
| dahjelle wrote:
| > I have to wonder if anyone likes flat user interfaces or
| just user studies are broken.
|
| I don't have any experience in running user studies, but it
| sounds difficult separate the momentary frustration and drop
| in efficiency that a change in _familiarity_ brings from an
| actual difference in long-term _usability_. Do you know if
| the user survey the consultancy did tried to account for
| this?
| gherkinnn wrote:
| Familiarity bias and coping mechanisms.
|
| https://xkcd.com/1172/
| KronisLV wrote:
| > A week after launch they sent out a user survey and nearly
| every respondent complained about the flat UI.
|
| When have most users ever enjoyed a new UI in a system that
| they're used to? Genuinely asking, because while I enjoy
| things like new icon themes and even the UI of Windows 11,
| most of the time I've seen people complain about any new UI
| that displaces something that they're familiar with.
|
| If I'm wrong and it's _just_ the flat design that is the real
| issue (which might also be true), then wouldn 't the solution
| be to pick any other modern look and feel, instead of
| necessarily reverting to the very old one? Not that there's
| necessarily anything wrong with the more old timey UI design,
| I think that Windows 9X versions had really good design,
| perhaps despite some usability issues like no proper fuzzy
| search in the actual OS etc.
|
| I quite like how themable PrimeVue/PrimeReact/PrimeNG is and
| swapping themes _shouldn 't_ be something impossible, though
| I don't doubt that with many of the libraries out there that
| ends up being the case: https://primereact.org/inputgroup/
| (click the little palette in the corner to switch themes)
| skydhash wrote:
| Flat design doesn't help with discoverability, because
| you're never sure what's an icon and a button, and if it's
| one, what it is for. But familiarity is another constraint,
| especially spatial relations and action flows.
| neepi wrote:
| Well the problem was that they got a new UI anyway when
| they didn't need or want one.
|
| I think that was the problem.
| cardanome wrote:
| > When have most users ever enjoyed a new UI in a system
| that they're used to?
|
| Blender.
|
| Is has seen some drastic changes in UI but barely any
| backlash. Even holy-cows like right-click select got
| mercilessly slaughtered and I am not even mad about it, in
| fact I love the changes.
|
| The main thing is that they are focusing on providing value
| to users and are dog footing their own software to create
| movies.
|
| But yeah, generally people hate change and you should avoid
| changing things as much as possible. Sadly that doesn't
| work with the way incentives in most companies work.
| nkrisc wrote:
| Doing a proper, unbiased usability study is difficult. I only
| worked at once company that had a dedicated user research
| team. The rest the time we designers had to run remote
| usability tests ourselves, for our own work, which is of
| course a pretty poor way to get any kind of objective result.
| No one wants to say, "hey, I tested my design and it _sucked_
| hard. Can I have another four weeks to try again? "
| Furthermore, we often didn't really have much of a say in the
| fundamentals of the visual appearance, we had to follow the
| brand standards and GUI pattern library that was chosen by
| other people. The brand guidelines were often delivered from
| on high from an outside consultancy, while the GUI pattern
| library was often produced in-house and robustly tested, but
| never perfect.
| hulitu wrote:
| > Looks like a cross between Motif and GTK1 it's that bad
|
| You should see Material design or Windows 11.
| xandrius wrote:
| Sounds like a win for the tech team at least.
| bazoom42 wrote:
| The best UI is the UI the users are already familiar with.
| poulpy123 wrote:
| I really prefer reasonably flat style UI (i.e. as long as the
| parts are easily differentiables) than the skeumorphic one.
| raincole wrote:
| Flat design is great. I'd probably use my phone much less if
| apps started using a skeuomorphic menu icon (that resembles a
| physical menu in restaurant) than 3-dot or 3-bar.
|
| The problem is designers who take 'flat' as 'literally
| nothing indicating its interactivity.'
| a022311 wrote:
| I can't believe I had to scroll so much to find a positive
| comment about flat UI design. If it's disliked so much, we
| should have moved away from it ages ago. Yet, we are where we
| are and that means something.
|
| I personally like the current idea of "modern" UI, although
| it does tend to get too bloated at times. I generally prefer
| something minimal compared to old designs which weren't
| consistent, made heavy use of shadows and were pretty
| chaotic. Don't try to tell me old UI was playful (although as
| evidenced in the post, skeuomorphic UI _can_ be).
|
| The point about some interfaces' usability being hampered by
| flat UI is valid. Complicated applications full of buttons
| with single-color icons are very hard to navigate. I find
| this especially true for GTK apps where the design system
| enforces a very specific icon style. Example: Pinta was
| designed to be very close to paint.net, but due to its flat
| design, it is very hard to navigate. On the other hand, while
| paint.net may look a little outdated, the design is
| consistent and optimized for efficient workflows.
|
| I think the ideal design is somewhere in between flat and
| skeuomorphic. IMHO programs like Office and Inkscape make UI
| elements clear, while maintaining the ability for efficient
| workflows. Icons are simple, but a touch of color makes it
| trivial to distinguish between them.
|
| Not every UI design is perfect for everyone, but interfaces
| should be designed with different needs in mind. "Power
| users" most likely just need better keyboard support and care
| less about how the UI looks.
| cainxinth wrote:
| This is broader than UX. Many trends are cyclical. So don't
| throw out your skinny jeans!
| allears wrote:
| Not a problem, I just bought a couple of new pairs. I lost a
| bunch of weight recently and can't resist showing off.
| jerf wrote:
| It seems like there's a lot of people in this conversation on
| HN still operating on a dichotomy between "skeuomorphism" and
| "flat". But "skeuomorphism" really ought to be reserved for
| those UIs that have an excessively-strong physical metaphor,
| tied to the real world. That's a restricted set of interfaces.
| They've never really been that popular. It's not likely to make
| a "comeback" and it's debatable whether they were ever popular
| enough to be characterized as making a "comeback" at all.
|
| Both skeuomorphic UIs and flat UIs are particular points (or
| small regions) in a much vaster design space and we should not
| speak as if we are obligated to cycle between those two
| particular points, because it will become a self-fulfilling
| prophecy. There's many, many, many options beyond those two.
| philistine wrote:
| People are too hung up on the look of the interface when they
| talk about skeuomorphic design.
|
| It used to be that on iOS the bottom tabs would get indented
| when they were selected. That Z-axis intent, that apps would
| have even when they weren't very skeuomorphic, that I hope it
| returns.
| jerf wrote:
| I kind of get that sense too. Sure, a "button" may be
| "skeuomorphic", but it's also a perfectly sensible
| graphical indication of a place that can be clicked, and
| only a small minority of "buttons" in the real world ever
| looked like a UI button. The UIs as a whole shouldn't be
| classified as "skeuomorphic". That generation of interfaces
| did a lot of other things that were only vaguely related to
| the real world... we have tabs, but tabs don't act like
| this. Looking up at my tab bar right now, they aren't even
| styled as "tabs", and nobody cares because that was never
| the core part of the appeal. Non-flat design had IMHO a
| much richer design language than flat design ever
| developed. Missing that design language and being forced
| into baby-speak for so much UI, when GUIs are already baby-
| speak themselves in so many ways (yes, the old UNIX hacker
| still sees the world this way) is very frustrating.
|
| Even just a couple of layer's worth of visual depth, that
| ".5D", is so very useful.
| hauxir wrote:
| the middle ground is commonly called Neumorphism
| jayd16 wrote:
| Icons are a small part of the flat design issues. I still don't
| see button borders and clear touchable sections in around these
| icons.
| dusted wrote:
| I want to be excited about this, I _HATE_ the flatness of
| android, windows 10/11, even macos.. but I'm afraid they'll fuck
| it up.. the 3D objects will be actual objects, everything will be
| crufted on top of the bloated dumpster-fire that is "modern" UI
| "frameworks". If git had been with us since the 00s, we could
| just do a hard-reset down to the latest commit before it became
| flat and ugly.
| JR1427 wrote:
| Good UI and UX isn't about which icons to use etc, it's about
| making the user's journey through an app match how they're
| thinking about the problem.
|
| In my team we spend so much time picking icons, and checking that
| we are matching the design patterns of other apps (yawn...), that
| we have just ended up with a UX that doesn't prioritise the
| number one reason people use our app.
| rambambram wrote:
| This. And I'd like to add: sometimes the best icons are these
| little characters called the alphabet. Combined they're very
| powerful and are called 'words'.
| XorNot wrote:
| This was how I did my car PC decades ago.
|
| Just big buttons with words on them. Words become symbols and
| do at a glance you could still easily tell what everything is
| even if you wouldn't actually read it when using it.
| pona-a wrote:
| And then they became featureless monochrome blobs because
| that's the new trend, and now words are again needed to
| tell what each is supposed to mean.
| blueflow wrote:
| Characters are also easier to learn than emojis and
| iconographs because there are less of them.
| powvans wrote:
| There are thousands of Chinese characters and thousands of
| Kanji. Maybe we are destined to replace all existing
| written language with 10's of thousands of emoji?
|
| I'll be illiterate in that world, but my kids seem to grok
| it.
| skydhash wrote:
| AFAIK, Chinese characters are words, not a more basic
| unit. The thing with emoji is that there's no easy way to
| use them without typing their associated terms.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Wouldn't this be closer to hieroglyphics?
| raincole wrote:
| Chinese characters can be used as a writing system
| because they're actually highly abstract. They don't look
| like what their ancestors were supposed to represent.
| That's a feature, not a bug.
|
| The issue with emoji is that they're very literal.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| The irony is that I think Jiong is the only emoji that
| is allowed on HN. Seriously, though, there are plenty of
| very old out of use characters that can be used as emoji,
| and modern use of Chinese characters in new words is
| increasingly phonetic.
| dnpls wrote:
| So you believe it's easier to learn which combination of
| letters in the context of a given interface means "home" or
| "chat" than an icon? You don't understand how the human
| brain works, it's much quicker to discern an icon as you
| glance at a screen then find a word and get your brain to
| interpret their meaning. There are 26 letters in the
| English alphabet, an enormous amount of dictionary words,
| but it very unusual to have a single screen containing more
| than 10 different icons.
| blueflow wrote:
| To understand icons, they must resemble something you
| have seen before. If you were born in 2005, you won't
| know what the button with the floppy disk on it does
| because you have never seen or used a floppy.
|
| Or a cloud to mean "upload", or a thin moon crescent to
| mean "sleep".
|
| These are things that don't derive from the real world
| (any more) and must be explicitly communicated.
| __m wrote:
| words are good to understand the meaning of the icons if they
| are more abstract, but once you know the meaning it's easier
| to scan a list of icons than a list of words
| OskarS wrote:
| I was just having a discussion with our customer support
| manager for an coming update to our software. He made this
| point, "I really like it when buttons have names. Then I can
| tell the customers 'click the EXPORT button' instead of
| 'click the little button that kinda looks like a square with
| an arrow pointing out of it'".
|
| It really is a very good point.
| zppln wrote:
| Icon selection definitely plays a part. Flat, monochrome icons
| are just garbage. A particularly bad example is editing a page
| in Confluence where you know there should be a button for e.g.
| fill color but you can't find it because every single icon
| looks the same.
| simgt wrote:
| So, same as every other kind of design: form over function and
| cycle in-between various styles to keep on selling. Except here I
| guess what's being sold is the time of the designers inside corps
| who need to keep on changing things to have a job. Just give me
| old Airbnb, old Slack, old iOS, old Google Maps, I could find my
| way through it just fine.
| drooopy wrote:
| Can the UI future be Mac OS 9 platinum with 265-colour icons
| again, please?
| anthk wrote:
| System 7 was cleaner.
| drooopy wrote:
| I would be OK with that as well.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| Diamorphism already has a meaning:
|
| https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dimorphism "the
| existence of two different forms (as of color or size) of a
| species especially in the same population. sexual dimorphism. b.
| : the existence of a part (such as leaves of a plant) in two
| different forms."
| card_zero wrote:
| That's di-morphic. Di- means two. Dia- means across, or
| between. I suppose the idea is a middle style.
|
| Unfortunate similarity to _diamorphine_ though.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| You are right. Thanks for the correction. The fact that they
| are so similar still makes it a bad choice though IMO.
| constantcrying wrote:
| There used to be a school of design which understood that design
| first and foremost is _pragmatic_ and that it needs to be
| understood as a form of communication. Very few people care about
| design as such, they care about the functionality.
|
| For decades I have seen a bizarre iteration over various
| "aesthetics" of interface design, each successive step having
| been hailed as a new, better way to interact with our devices.
| Consistently each step has made interacting with devices more
| tedious.
|
| Design isn't about how colorful your icons are or how many
| dimensions they have. I think it is very clear that the quality
| of the work designers do has drastically declined, especially the
| focus of aesthetic experience over usability has been an absolute
| disaster.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The style of user interfaces has gotten more colorful and
| dimensional, but the actual user interface has generally gotten
| worse.
|
| For example, I just bought a new scanner. It has a hot mess of a
| user interface. It mashes together all kinds of selection
| schemes, with little rhyme or reason. You just have to randomly
| click on things, navigating up and down, until you eventually
| find, say, the destination folder to write the scans to.
|
| Just the other day I installed Pandora on my phone. I had to ask
| grok how to close the app, as it has no X button. Blarf. Probably
| somebody got an award for this.
| Designhub wrote:
| I think its look like the gradient type of things getting better
| instead of the solid color.
| mtaras wrote:
| I hate those Airbnb icons. They look like nothing, just objects
| in a somewhat cartoon-y style. I much prefer where both Apple and
| Google move UI design.
| agos wrote:
| if you really want to laugh, check out who is the person/firm
| behind this whimsical, tactile, colorful redesign. I won't spoil
| you the fun of guessing.
| vijucat wrote:
| Designers are so out of touch. That whole criticism of Comic Sans
| is one example. Slowly, I'm coming to the conclusion that
| designers should never be employed, only consulted on a per-
| project basis. If they sit around 8 hours a day, they end up
| changing something or the other to justify their existence. But
| human beings are not used to change at such a rapid cadence.
| Humans take time to settle into a design and establish patterns
| of usage.
| ho_schi wrote:
| You sound like someone purchasing a new ThinkPad and
| "Why they added a camera bump? Sticking out of display lid. A
| thing nobody ask for".
|
| followed by "Why the made the base flat. But
| removed the rounded palm rest? Adding a sharp corner."
|
| followed by "Why the removed the dent which
| allowed to open the display lid, which didn't protruded out of
| the device?"
|
| I appreciate nice design. But if it doesn't follows function,
| it is harmful.
|
| PS: I'm frustrated about the new ThinkPads with a camera bump
| sticking out of the display. Everybody hates camera bumps. The
| display lid is broad and provides much space for adding
| multiple cameras, microphones and sensors of all kind. I
| know...this topic is about software UI. The change for the sake
| of the change itself is not beneficial.
| tiborsaas wrote:
| Out of all the things, you brought up Comic Sans, which is
| really hard to defend other than ironic use cases and no,
| there's no proof either it helps dyslexia. Even if it does,
| there are also better alternatives in the accessibility space.
|
| How many designer friends do you have? Do you know what they do
| daily? We know your preconception that regardless of company
| size and product they are just counting beans.
| ehecatl42 wrote:
| Comic Sans has an excellent, unironic, track record as an
| assistive tool for young kids struggling with dyslexia.
| tiborsaas wrote:
| You can do better. This was the first Google result:
| https://dyslexiefont.com/en/
|
| But there are plenty more. Why settle on the worst one?
| entuno wrote:
| Are any of those other "better" alternatives installed by
| default on Windows?
| moooo99 wrote:
| Maybe because it's that Comic sans is widely available
| and preinstalled on many systems as a ,,good enough"
| option while others are very costly very quickly
| vijucat wrote:
| > which is really hard to defend
|
| Can you please tell me your thoughts on how it is "hard to
| defend"?
|
| My thoughts: How can designers criticize the use of Comic
| Sans? If users use it where it's connotations (childlike,
| casual) are appropriate, such as birthday parties, and love
| it, who are designers to comment on it? I find this
| indefensible, as if design sensibilities have a foundation
| very much like mathematics or physics and there is a clearly
| Universal litmus test of good design and bad design. There
| isn't. In fact, arbitrary mores of fashion such as "Comic
| Sans is uncool" are the very tell that design has foundations
| as strong as a piece of string in the wind. The disdain for
| Comic Sans reeks of elitism, where designers gatekeep "good
| taste" based on arbitrary conventions.
| levmiseri wrote:
| Designers don't critize Comic Sans's usage when it's
| appropriate. It's when it's not. Like a funeral service's
| signage. Or a lawyer. And the massive amount of such
| objectively wrong usage in the wild is where you see
| designers crying about it.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| Sure, but then why pick on Comic Sans? Lots of fonts get
| used inappropriately.
| vanviegen wrote:
| It's just the most common example, as thanks to Microsoft
| it comes preinstalled on just about any computer. Given
| the typically short list of fonts to pick from, many
| people will (would?) pick Comic Sans when they want their
| text to look a bit 'different'.
|
| However, I _do_ agree that making fun of people picking
| the wrong font is a bit elitist. At least Comic Sans is
| easy to read, so one could do worse.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I think you'll find Comic Sans in second place behind
| Papyrus.
| allears wrote:
| Now you're talkin' my language! I use Papyrus for
| everything
| xandrius wrote:
| Definitely the best font on Windows and no designer told
| me about it!
| adastra22 wrote:
| Why are those usages inappropriate, if people like it?
| tiborsaas wrote:
| Nobody cares about using comic sans for a children's party,
| are you making a straw man argument?
|
| > ...good design and bad design. There isn't.
|
| It's called good taste. It's not science of course, good
| design is organic, it evolves, it converges. See
| carcinisation.
|
| > The disdain for Comic Sans reeks of elitism, where
| designers gatekeep "good taste" based on arbitrary
| conventions.
|
| Kinda true, get over it. Trust the people with good taste
| and if you want to do great, pay them to do this work for
| you.
|
| But if you have an uncanny love affair with Comic Sans, no
| force in the Universe can stop you, have fun with it, you
| are free to ignore everybody.
| immibis wrote:
| Comic Sans was proven to be objectively easier to read.
| That's why it was designed.
| adastra22 wrote:
| It was designed to mimic comic book lettering.
|
| But yes, comic book lettering is done a specific way for a
| reason.
| constantcrying wrote:
| Designer right now value aesthetics over usability. If your
| design starts out from the question "how do we make this more
| user friendly", you will arrive at a totally different answer
| than when you ask "how do we make this look like everything
| else, but also stand out".
|
| Aesthetics are essentially worthless for a user interface and
| should always be a secondary concern. But clearly designers
| have elevated aesthetics over usability, hence the numerous and
| constant redesigns of everything.
|
| If you care about usability you know that a redesign
| necessarily comes at a great cost, since you are breaking many
| of the mental connections of your users. It is only justifiable
| if there is some serious gain by doing that.
| mrweasel wrote:
| > Aesthetics are essentially worthless for a user interface
| and should always be a secondary concern.
|
| That is one of my random thoughts: Windows could have kept
| the Windows 95 look and been perfectly usable. Sure there
| might have been a need for certain UI tweaks, but for most
| office/home use there was no reason to change it.
|
| The whole "let's make it friendly" is annoying. If it's a
| tool make it practical. If you need to write a manual because
| of that, then please, go right a head and do that.
| floating-io wrote:
| The problem is that design tends to be driven by the
| marketing department...
| levmiseri wrote:
| With such a strong opinion on designers and design as a
| discipline, I got curious and had to peek at your other
| comments and -- even though I'd normally hate to do this -- the
| irony was just too strong with this one from only few hours
| ago:
|
| > ... Lesson: people with grave incompetence at programming
| feel completely competent to judge what programming is and
| should be.
|
| Your own lesson applies here perfectly, only substitute
| programming with design.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| I'm not sure how that is relevant. Pulling up someone's
| unrelated comments because you disagree with the current
| discussion is discouraged at best.
| floating-io wrote:
| Do you think that "being competent at design" is the only
| requirement for designers?
|
| I would say that it's more important to be competent in
| determining how design is going to be understood and used by
| users in their individual workflows. Few are more competent
| to judge that than the users themselves.
|
| I'm pretty sure most folks have seen and experienced the
| negative impacts of designers changing things for the sake of
| change (or to justify their paychecks).
| levmiseri wrote:
| Being competent in determining how design is going to be
| understood and used by users IS being competent at design.
|
| There is a massive amount of bad design out there -- made
| by designers. There is a large amount of bad software
| implementations. By programmers. And awful chairs, food,
| and ...
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Most designers don't do that, and are plenty overworked in most
| organizations that they don't have time to gratuitously fiddle
| with new UI trends anyways. In fact, these kind of things
| usually come from non-designer VPs or SVPs who are trying to
| "spice" up the product much to the chagrin of designers on
| staff (I'm married to a UXD and this comes up often).
| lippihom wrote:
| Interesting - wrote this a few days ago about information
| density: https://www.lippihom.com/blog/designing-for-cognition-
| the-en.... Lots of overlap with how it seems like "old" UI
| elements are coming back.
| layer8 wrote:
| The article really is just about using AI to create non-flat
| icons. The rest of the UI is still flat and hasn't changed.
| sd9 wrote:
| The new Airbnb icons perform horribly on my 2019 Macbook.
| Interacting with the tabs is something like 5fps.
|
| Performance aside, the author's game selector design is so much
| nicer than Airbnb's implementation.
| seabombs wrote:
| Terrible performance for me too. Firefox, 3600X and 6800XT.
| Especially as the header morphs when you scroll down.
|
| I don't mind the icons and general aethetic direction, but
| seriously undermined by the very noticeable, janky performance.
| Makes it feel cheap.
| pzo wrote:
| I'm not a fan o this design - UX is worse and everything seems
| like screaming for attention. I like flat design because it's
| easier to guide user into the most important part of the screen
| and avoiding distractions. I could understand maybe 3d animation
| so you can embed somehow more information what this icon do but
| making this everything so colorful is distasteful for me. For
| desktop I still prefer to have just on hover have text to tell
| what icon do.
| virtualritz wrote:
| I disagree in part.
|
| For the reason that in flat design, what is an interactive
| element and what is text or even decoration, is not clearly
| separated.
|
| Especially people who are older and do not spend crazy amounts
| of time on their smartphones, since forever, struggle with flat
| design.
|
| I could see this happening with my parents when the 3D UI
| buttons of the 80's and 90's and the skeomorphic design trend
| of the first decade gave way to flat design.
|
| It's just not clear where a text ends and something that can be
| clicked or tapped on starts. When all you have to distinguish
| them is a change in background color or some flat frame.
|
| You need to grow up with this tech or have an intricate
| understanding of digital interfaces to find this easy and/or
| natural.
|
| I agree as far as using 3D objects goes. This is just a gimmick
| and a bad idea.
|
| Any icon should be as simple as possible to convey meaning.
| Abstract; so it can be rendered in many adverse conditions
| without requiring change in shape or shading.
|
| The icon sets in that blog post are the opposite of that.
| mangecoeur wrote:
| "The future is..." well it might be until the next fashion change
| comes about.
| rchaud wrote:
| "Digital Design" has been fully subsumed by the needs of business
| for a long time now. When smartphones were new, an argument could
| be made that HCI was just as important as content in onboarding
| users to a new type of device with different levels of
| information density. There were developments like double-tap on
| to center a text block in the viewport, pinch to zoom, pull to
| refresh, swipe across cards to switch apps (WebOS came up with
| that one).
|
| Now? It's completely flatlined, the changes are incremental and
| made only in the service of getting you to buy more, view more
| ads and hide fees until the last possible moment in the checkout
| funnel.
| p3rls wrote:
| The PC mouse wire looks like garbage, throw it out and do it
| over.
| deforciant wrote:
| as a primarily backend developer I find cursor and chatgpt/grok
| (for more compelx components) totally amazing. I can finally
| build UIs that I want for my projects :) I think I have good
| taste (lol) I just could never spend those hours and days
| polishing.
|
| Now I can ask it to do some frontend while I focus on backend in
| the meantime.
|
| We just need the sales agent now.
| garylkz wrote:
| So a full circle from colorful design to simplified design to
| flat design then to colorful design again.
| nottorp wrote:
| All I see is annoying pointless animations.
|
| Are they part of the actual airbnb "new site" or just the
| article's vision?
| breadwinner wrote:
| A while ago I read this news about Microsoft bringing back 3D and
| skeuomorphism:
| https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/20/24249735/microsoft-fluent...
|
| Then it turns out Microsoft brought back 3D in the worst way
| possible: The non-interactive parts are now 3D -- and look
| interactive -- while the interactive parts are still flat like
| before.
|
| I am trying to find examples, here's one:
| https://imgur.com/a/8tjT42h
|
| Notice the top part has a 3D graphic which invites clicking...
| but it is dead. And the live parts look dead and don't invite
| interaction.
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| I'm not convinced.
|
| Unlike fashion, where self-expression is central, UI/UX design
| isn't driven by aesthetic cycles - it's fundamentally about
| function. The goal is to disappear, serving as a seamless bridge
| between the user and the task at hand.
|
| Skeuomorphism had its moment because it provided familiarity in
| the early days of digital interfaces, helping users transition
| into a new paradigm. But that need has passed. Design has
| evolved, not cyclically, but linearly - toward clarity,
| efficiency, and minimal cognitive friction.
|
| What we're seeing now may be visually novel, but I don't believe
| it represents a true paradigm shift. If anything, it's a
| stylistic flourish layered on top of the same core goal: helping
| people get things done as easily and intuitively as possible.
| mmooss wrote:
| > Back in the early 2000s, UI design like this had a high skill
| ceiling. It took years to master lighting, materials, and depth.
| Now? That level of craft is often just a [AI] prompt away.
|
| That is very interesting: Modernism and its descendents were very
| much about minimalism - how much could you do with minimal
| components. It applies to visual aesthetics (including much of
| abstract art), writing (e.g., Hemingway), architecture, and much
| else, even some music (singer-songwriters, Philip Glass). It's
| democratic - anyone can do it, or far more than can design
| complicated aesthetics. There have been other trends since, some
| rejecting that concept, but you can see that minimalism
| everywhere, in clothes, in industrial design, and even in HN's
| design. 'Great designers', you may have heard, 'focus not on what
| to add, but on what to take away'.
|
| AI enables maximalism; it could transform aesthetics in
| everything. It enables complexity - including in fashion, in
| architecture, in writing, almost everywhere.
|
| This theory is that AI removes the issue of efficiency for the
| creator: AI allows people to create maximalist, or non-minimalist
| design easily. Still, minimalism's value is very much about
| efficiency for the user, including focus. Excess design is a
| distraction and is generally not productive - how does
| distracting us with detailed icons help us? What is the value?
|
| I love that efficiency in modernism. HN takes the minimalist
| approach, iirc, in part to attract a community that is focused on
| its content and not bells and whistles. And I worry that in
| broader society, as people now routinely hide from very serious
| dangers (to freedom, to peace, from climate change, etc.), this
| new trend will be more circuses to distract us.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| I think it's important to mention the two main underlying
| streams of thought in functional that contribute to minimalism:
| Louis Henry Sullivan's maxim "form follows function," and
| Adolph Loo's Ornament and Crime[1]. Both of these made
| ornamentation unjustifiable, either that ornamentation doesn't
| have a function, or that it is a product of uncivilized
| impulses.
|
| What's left is that every design choice must be functional
| leaving minimalism as the bleached bones of design - the only
| thing left after everything has been stripped away. I want to
| be clear that functionalism and minimalism are not synonymous,
| but one's impact on the other is rarely overstated.
|
| 1. https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Ornament_und_Verbrechen
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| I want a flat, low bitrate, low color, easily re-identifiable
| icon that, when 'clicked', depresses in a perfect square
| footprint to indicate that I have done an action. What is shown
| here is the exact opposite of what I want in a GUI.
| yapyap wrote:
| ah yes of course
|
| - a shift happens when someone says it'll happen
|
| AND
|
| - big businesses have such a love for color and dimension and
| have not been dulling everything down except for your
| personalized feed for years now
|
| /s
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| I mean this is interesting in ways, but I don't really care which
| particular form of soullessness is used to advertise products I
| wish I didn't have to use. It's a marketing movement more than an
| artistic movement.
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| The UI PAST was colorful and dimensional
| pie_flavor wrote:
| The first time I visited https://svelte.dev , the non-flat-vector
| banner instantly won me. It just stands out from the world around
| it. I just sort of assumed the engineering was superior to the
| competition if they were going to lead with crimped metal (and
| was right).
|
| Flat design has always struck me as an extremist response to an
| issue. Windows Vista required everyone to be on the same page
| design-language wise in order to look good, but can the same be
| said of Windows XP? You can make just a few parts of your app
| drop-shadowed, you can add some slight reflection gradients while
| keeping the whole thing matte, you do not need to get rid of all
| visual depth just to avoid the feeling of zeerust.
| robertoandred wrote:
| Why are people still making 2MB animated gifs...
| ferguess_k wrote:
| Can we just have UI that is intuitive? Like, a button looks like
| a button, sort of.
| thepryz wrote:
| What I find interesting is the author neglects to mention that
| Jony Ive was responsible for both introducing the flat design in
| iOS 7 they seem to lament and the AirBnB redesign they're
| praising as a positive paradigm shift.
|
| In my opinion, a lot recent UI/UX and visual design has become
| less about seeking to understand and improve the way we interact
| with machines and more about promoting a digital form of fast
| fashion full of trends that everyone is expected to follow -
| change for the sake of change. This post only provides more
| support for that.
| dogleash wrote:
| >a lot recent UI/UX and visual design has become less about
| seeking to understand and improve the way we interact with
| machines and more about creating a digital form of fast fashion
| full of trends that everyone is expected to follow - change for
| the sake of change
|
| In undergrad I took a course in Human Computer Interaction. It
| was a bunch of glorious retro materials from all the actual
| hard research done in the 20th century. After graduating and
| entering industry the most effort I've ever seen
| "professionals" put into HCI (and not just graphic design) is
| to recognize some interaction might be confusing and just go
| copy whatever apple does.
| thepryz wrote:
| My experience mirrors yours, and to make matters worse, even
| Apple has forgotten their roots. The changes Apple has made
| to Mac OS and their apps have consistently been for the worse
| and I no longer consider Apple to be the pillar of good
| design that they once were.
| constantcrying wrote:
| Exactly. Even much of the discussion here misses the point.
| Whether design is flat or has depth is totally irrelevant, when
| it isn't first and foremost focused on enabling humans to
| interact with computers.
|
| The debate about aesthetics just hides the ever declining
| usability of interfaces. Constantly redesigning _everything_ so
| that it fits some global aesthetic mould is destructive to
| usability.
| gadders wrote:
| This is all just fashion, right? None of this makes the apps
| easier to use.
|
| I get that EG you might find it hard to sell a green-screen app
| on an iPhone, but I don't see this diamorphic stuff adding much
| value.
| marcellus23 wrote:
| > Those aren't my words. They're Brian Chesky's, CEO of Airbnb,
| after what can only be described as a landmark redesign of the
| platform. A redesign full of whimsical, animated, 3D icons and
| warm, tactile surfaces.
|
| I just opened the app and, aside from the animated tab icons
| shown in the article (which are super laggy on my device), the
| app looks exactly the same as always. How in the world is this a
| "landmark" redesign?
| mNovak wrote:
| Lots of people talking about how this looks like 2000's clipart,
| (and I'm not here to disagree) but seems like no one is talking
| about how these appear to be full 3D models that can be
| manipulated. AirBnb is actually being fairly subtle (small
| spinning animation on load) considering how over the top that
| could get, quickly. People have been doing small versions of this
| with 3D css transforms, but this is a step further.
|
| Inevitably these things are fashion, and big companies want to
| have just slightly unique experiences. Usually that means doing
| something hard that the average site will struggle to replicate
| for a while, be that squishy UX animations, elegant minimalism,
| now 3D.
| samgranieri wrote:
| I actually liked the skeuomorphic UI that Apple had. I miss the
| aqua interface. Buttons as buttons and not text. And also, god
| help me, brushed metal.
| HellDunkel wrote:
| Firstly- the airbnb redesign is still flat and minimal. Only the
| icon bar is different- but not in a good way. The design is too
| heavy, unclear and does a bad job adding to the rest. Of course
| the ceo is trying to paint the redesign in the best light
| possible but there is little reason for praise here.
| whytaka wrote:
| "The best design is design that gets out of the way" as a maxim
| will probably hold.
|
| Users may state a preference for "delight" and claim to be
| delighted by maximally rich graphics but I doubt it'll move the
| needle as a business priority.
|
| As more AI slop pollute our digital consumption streams, my bet
| is that these attempts at simulacrum will quickly turn garish.
| evolve2k wrote:
| I saw AirBNB's current ad that's all AI "aesthetic" and I
| figuratively puked in my mouth. We've reached corporate AI slops
| bleeds into design systems.
|
| Hard no from me.
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