The winner. I wish designers would stop pursuing styles & fads and instead pursue results. Stop worrying what's best for looks or minimalism and start caring about usability and predictability.
Someone rebelled and wrote a blog how skeuomorphs are bad, put some pictures of leather textures up for everyone to laugh at. The next thing you know, you get OS UIs (Windows 8), websites and a whole bunch of other interfaces where you have no freakin' idea what to click. It all looks flat and so I end up mousing around elements on the screen like a drunk person stumbling in the dark trying to find how this thing works.
How about a little drop shadow on that button so it looks like, you know, a button? "Oh but it looks like a real world button and we shouldn't have to mimic the real world...blah blah.." -- I don't care about the philosophy of design or whatever the latest thing came from Apple labs, I want to get my stuff done and just knowing what is clickable is helpful.
I have now put my SIM card back in my two year old iPhone 4 since, although the interface looks a bit daft these days, it has good usability.
(On live tiles: they are cute and give a personal touch to your phone, but they are to small to be informative for many applications.)
It makes it impossible to create a taxonomy, because the only thing you can do to organize them is put them in groups.
In Microsoft's defence, Apple haven't done anything to fix the problem of people with several screens of apps, which is basically impossible to navigate enjoyable. I almost always use Spotlight to open apps that aren't in the first two screens nowadays.
Those two sentences contradict each other.
I am not aware of a UI idiom that would provide access in a way you imply.
Since doing this, my experience finding apps has improved significantly. It does mean you have to be frugal when installing new apps (add one, delete one sometimes). But then you're forced to keep only the stuff you use.
I haven't looked into fixing it, but I have way too many apps for my own good anyway. But even so, I'd still have a lot of apps on my phone.
That's why I'd like to be able to hide them somehow, for instance by tagging them and only make them appear, if I want something in Games or such. As it is, I have one or two screens full of games.
This is a per-device setting that allows you to prevent the device auto-downloading new music, apps and books.
There are actually three different tile sizes. You may be thinking of iOS.
Windows Phone barely gets any attention, so the apps that get written for the platform use all the stock UI widgets, making everything look boring and bland. Plus XAML has a pretty steep learning curve if you try to do anything outside of the simple templates Microsoft provides.
The problem I've found with Windows 8 is that there is no visual difference between clickable text/icons and nonclickable text icons. The whole experience comes one of trial and error where you tap on random things like an idiot to see what elicits a response and what doesn't.
The web's way of solving this problem is by underlining text that can be clicked. HN violates this in many places, but at the very least text links underline when moused over - not ideal, but works, and is something that doesn't exist in touch-land.
Ditto, we've been using rollover effects for years to demarcate clickable icons from the unclickable. This entire strategy is now kaput thanks to touch.
We don't necessarily have to have drop shadows, but what we do need is a consistent and unambiguous language that clues the user into how the UI operates. Windows 8 currently lacks this in a really, really bad way. We can do this without skeumorphs, but we still need to do it.
And therein lies the greatest problem with this flat design trend - many designers are going flat without remembering that skeumorphs carry a lot of user hinting that you have to replicate.
I remember initially HN didn't strike as a particularly intuitive site. It worked and I am using it because of the community and the content, I am used to it by now.
Ok maybe there some value in having users slowly discover cool features by randomly trying to click things. I don't know. But at least it, seems, the core functionality should be somewhat obvious.
Buttons on the web for every link don't work, but I like some special markup to show links (traditionally it is the underlining but anything else can work as well).
To me there is often a tension between making something looking cool and making it functional. I'll admit the look of the flat interfaces maybe cleaner (whatever that means...) but unless it is meant to just be looked at, it also has to be functional.
Thank you! I feel like nobody is allowed to say it on the internet, because Microsoft finally released a phone UI that isn't objectively terrible, but I find Metro goddamn confusing on a phone. The "People" app is a disaster. Little bits of text hanging off the side of the screen, no indication about what's clickable anywhere. My mom is supposed to use this?
By way of example: one of my favourite skeumorphs is Apples "head shake" when you enter the wrong password to unlock a Mac.
Flawless execution.
I know that something went wrong, I know what went wrong without ever reading a manual, it's friendly and gets the point across without big red Xs and intrusive DONGGG!! noises.
The fake leather stitcing stuff is dumb. I think that there are many designers who are guilty of throwing the baby out with the bathwater though.
My Ski jacket from about 10 years ago still works really well. At the time it looked great, but now it's outdated in style, although it still works great.
So as a designer, yes I worry about trends, because if I don't then you'll end up picking a jacket that works and is on trend over a jacket that just works (other things being equal like price etc).
Design is not a single input discipline. Many factors go into making a design for a product... including trends and fads.
The problem is that sometimes (usually?) it's 99% fashion, 1% usability studies....
Frivolity has it's place in life. But it is only a subset of design.
Therefore, I think it's ok to disparage articles on the silly aspects of design, when posted to HN, especially when they're met with religious battle type fervent loyalty.
When I'm asked to design something of course I test and make sure it's functional. But I equally make sure it's current and appeals to whoever it should be selling to. Both are important - neither are frivolous.