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Comment by kingsidharth | Hacker News Reader

Add flat UI to the list. The only thing that's saving it is better typography and better sense of spacing (since designers are more involved now).

It's a step back in terms of usability as well. In flat UI, clickable and unclickable often look the same and several other problems.

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Very interesting that you should bring flat UIs up. I monitor my father's inbox[1]. I noticed earlier today he got an email to confirm the creation of a Microsoft account he needed. Instead of clicking on the flat blue "Verify xxxx@gmail.com" button to confirm his email address, he replied to the email saying "verification". It then bounced, predictably, and confused him even more.

I haven't spoke to him yet, but I'm guessing that the flat blue button with some text, in the email didn't seem "clickable" to him.

Flat UIs do indeed seem like a serious step backwards in usability.

[1]Phishing protection

What I find funny is that now, when we finally have a proper CSS support for gradients, shadows, rounded edges and so on, we're going into design style that could be easily achieved in the '90s :)

Although not a designer, I have a suspicion that the ability is precisely the driver of flat design. When gradients, shadows, rounded edges, etc, were HARD, then using them showed a degree of effort and technical capability.

In other words, gradients, shadows, rounded edges, etc were a form of credential.

Now that they're easy, they've lost that credentialing effect and (over)using them is akin to a 90's myspace page with an abundance of glitter and flashy clipart.

I personally would like to see a middle ground with tasteful use of gradients and shadows as opposed to the flat design. But then, there's a reason I'm NOT a designer (for example, I like skeuomorphic design, I think it's fun and playful)

This is just wrong, without CSS3 Flat UI would be limited to plain squares and rectangles, even if you hate the style you must at least admit there is a lot more to Flat UI than that.

We're back to mystery meat navigation. That is Web 1.0. I would also argue that a lot of designers implemention flat ui do not have an augmented sense of typography and layout to compensate.

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