iPhone iOS design used to be excellent. Since Apple switched to flat design, it was very clear that they were heading toward this path. I wrote about it in 2016: “ I predict that the technological disparity will increase dramatically. Most of the efforts that Steve Jobs put to “push the human race forward,” by making tech products easy-to-use to everyone, will be wasted.”
https://medium.com/@maram5/could-the-iphone-sales-decline-be...
To be honest, I would bet that the if younger demographics are reading less paper books it’s because they’re reading less generally rather than switching to digital.
Especially engineering.
Tried conducting an open book test this year and was met with consternation. Had to go with an open laptop test instead.
The human mind is always building models in our minds, based on observations of how things look and work, and then using those models to predict behaviors of things that we are yet to explore. For this to work well, appearance has to imply behavior. Instead of starting with a clean slate each time it would be helpful if we can leverage the mental models we have already built of the physical world. This is where skeuomorphism is helpful.
Personally, as much as I like the convenience of digital books, there's nothing quite like the reading experience that comes with a printed physical book.
I spend an inordinate amount of time either turning lights on an off or trying to use the not quite sufficient tablet screen to do stuff.
In my experience, what makes a digital reading app pleasant to use are other things: Responsiveness, choice of default fonts, whether or not it allows the publisher to apply ridiculous style overrides (e.g. forcing the background to be light grey even in night mode), not losing track of pagination at chapter boundaries (so that flipping back across a boundary, paragraphs don't mysteriously shift up or down half a page)...
I'll take a reading app that does these things well, but only uses a simple slide animation over one that imitates a perfect page flip, but otherwise botches the concept of a "page", any day.
Reading from a book however is a better experience than a lit up screen. Audiobooks However have a place as less and less people have the attention span to physically hold something and read it.
I don't know if it's nostalgia or what but the flat design seems charmless compared to the Forstall-era skeuomorphic design. And the vanilla sameness and uniformity makes it harder to distinguish things. It reminds me a bit of shelving books by size and color rather than by content.
I recently noticed a bunch of electric street lamps that are clearly modeled on gaslamps - they appear to have little chimney vents as well as wide pipes for the nonexistent gas, and they seem designed to shield the LED/CFL/etc. fixture from wind and rain. Mostly non-functional design elements, and I've only seen a few dozen actual gas streetlamps in cities, but I still find them charming.