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Comment by ilrwbwrkhv | Hacker News Reader

Can the flat design trend end now and go back towards skeuomorphic when UI designers actually needed some talent?

I really do hate how it's just assumed we know what's clickable and what isn't.

That‘s a weird desire. A good app doesn’t need talent in illustration, it needs platform consistency and UX. Flat design can deliver on both and at a lower cost (in DOS era every UI was flat and that was cool). If anything did ruin the UX, it was the migration of print designers to UI/Web with font explosion, element-specific styles etc. They added some fun, but totally killed consistency and accessibility.

> Flat design can deliver on both and at a lower cost

I suppose it technically can, but this assertion makes me ask: why haven't we seen this actually happen? I mean yes, we got consistency -- but at a pretty serious cost in terms of usability.

We haven’t seen this happen because there’s generally huge underinvestment and labor shortage in UX _AND_ exponential growth in Web, not because flat has serious usability costs. Even now most people in industry have no idea about various specializations in design and hire designers with nice-looking portfolios on Behance who were trained for print media in art schools instead of hiring UXD who can think in terms of customer journey.

From this article:

These findings also confirm that flat or flat-ish designs can work better in certain conditions than others. As we saw in this experiment, the potential negative consequences of weak signifiers are diminished when the site has a low information density, traditional or consistent layout, and places important interactive elements where they stand out from surrounding elements.

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flat-ui-less-attention-caus...

And this is what has happened. All over the modern web and applications there is a low information density which means I need to carry more context around as I browse through things.

The article goes into it more in depth but flat design is bad in almost all regards apart from one: anybody can be a designer now.. the barriers to entry are that much lowered.

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