

Skeuomorphism is the easy way out - dko
http://blog.wells.ee/skeuomorphism

======
crazygringo
Skeumorphism is no more an "easy way out" than black Helvetica on a white
background is an "easy way out". They can both be used appropriately, or used
badly and in excess.

The address book in OSX is an example of bad skeumorphism -- it's a fake book
with pages that don't actually turn, trying to shoehorn "advanced" computer
technology into a visual representation that doesn't work. It's a bad
metaphor, a bad analogy. It confuses more than it helps.

The "Notes" application on OSX is a fantastic use of skeumorphism. The legal-
pad look shows us at a glance that it's for taking notes, which a plain white
background wouldn't do. The analogy between individual note documents and
pages is perfect. Anyone can use it instantly, without worrying where
documents are saved or anything like that.

The fundamental question is, are design choices helping or hindering
understandability and usability? Apps and the web have evolved conventions
like share icons and tabs and underlined/colored links, etc. which people
understand. Skeumorphism just adds vocabulary from the physical world to the
toolbox.

And in the opposite direction of skeumorphism, I think the SVBTLE blog
platform itself goes too far to the minimalist. I can't tell people's blogs
apart, because they all look virtually identical -- that's bad design. And
what the heck is the "kudos nipple"? Why do you hover instead of clicking? A
simple thumbs-up icon would be understandable by everyone, which is almost
skeumorphic in its own way, since it refers to a physical thumbs-up...
Reference to the physical world can be a very useful thing.

~~~
simonrobb
I'd agree that the address book skeumorphism is a pretty terrible option -
seems to be more about design bling than addressing usabiblity. OTOH the
"head-shaking" of the OSX login window when you enter a bad password is some
of the best skeumorphism I've seen, and yet there are no visual design
elements (like putting ears on the window or something.)

~~~
aufreak3
That .. and the sleep LED that "breathes". The lock that shows in system
preferences that need admin permissions is also a good one I think.

------
eyevariety
Bashing skeuomorphism is the easy way out.

Non physical affordances don't come easy, and like it or not our brains are
trained in a world of 3 dimensions made of matter. Dieter Rams built things
around their functional components, the materials available and the other
constraints given to him by a physical world.

Edward Tufte preaches that content rules and all else is extra. We can
certainly minimize everything that isn't the focus, we should, after all. But
abandoning the lessons from skueomorphism really means you are throwing out
every hint of natural world affordances in your interfaces. The first 3
dimensional shading or shadow and you have veered into the land of
skeuomorphism - and that's ok, because a world of flat squares with Helvetica
labels takes a whole lot more mental cycles to process than that beveled 3d
button, and it always will.

I look forward to seeing what you are doing with kicksend- with or without
hints of the physical world.

~~~
zevyoura
"...a world of flat squares with Helvetica labels takes a whole lot more
mental cycles to process than that beveled 3d button, and it always will."

Do you have a citation for that? I'm genuinely interested in reading more
about it, because it seems somewhat counter-intuitive. The idea that simpler
shapes would be harder to process visually is very fascinating to me.

~~~
eyevariety
Its not that a simpler shape isn't easier to process, its that its harder to
infer purpose when there is so little information (like in the case of Metro).
A button is something that needs to be 'pressed' so it should look like it can
be- and by doing so you understand that it is a button much faster.

Donald Norman and Jakob Neilsen have long preached this and they have a bunch
of info on affordances and why they work:
<http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/affordances_and.html>

More recently see Steve Krug's "Don't Make Me Think"

~~~
zevyoura
Interesting, though I have to wonder if that's necessarily true; it seems that
you could designate a button using only rectangles and solid colors in a way
that would be clear and unambiguous (e.g. Google+'s buttons). Either way,
interesting application of Norman's ideas of 'affordances.' DoET is a
perennial favorite of mine.

~~~
panacea
>(e.g. Google+'s buttons)

They actually have slightly rounded corners, an outline and subtle gradient
going from top to bottom that hint at three dimensionality and offers
affordance. There's also a slight darkening on mouse-over which suggests
they're interactive and can be pressed in.

------
bitwize
No.

No, no, no, no, no.

Idiotic design decisions like this are why computers have long been the
province of mathematicians, scientists, programmers, and other eggheads.

Sheuomorphism is the RIGHT way out -- if you are designing for the general
mass of human beings. I happen to know personally the designer of one of the
first pieces of personal finance software -- "Electric Checkbook" for
Macintosh. (There's a site going by that name that appears to have been
started by his son.) It was the template from which Quicken was largely
derived, but that's a long, sad, and dirty story.

The advantage of Electric Checkbook over any of the competition, its creator
told me, was implicit in the name: it literally worked just like a checkbook
with on-screen checks you fill out and an option to print your electronic
checks as real checks. It was far easier and more comfortable to use than any
of the professional accounting systems out there because it offered the
average user the comfort of the familiar.

That Apple successfully deploys skeuomorphism in order to make its average
user base feel at ease is a big part of why they're so much better than any
other tech company out there. So what if iBooks looks just like a bookshelf,
to no functional use whatever. It helps avid readers get into the reading
zone, giving them a bit of the joy of perusing their favorite real
bookshelves. And that's an edge over the competition.

And no, Microsoft Bob didn't lose because of skeuomorphism. Microsoft Bob lost
because it was tacky.

~~~
chongli
Skeuomorphism unnecessarily constrains software design to the realm of real-
world analogue. It completely breaks down when applied to concepts which do
not fit. How do you create a skeuomorphic interface for something like Git?
The answer is: you don't.

------
bane
"Skeuomorphism helps people misunderstand the capabilities and limitations of
digital products based on their understanding of a physical analog."

Right. Nothing sets hard limits in a user's mind then guiding them to use a
piece of software through a terribly flawed metaphor. My father learned to use
computers in the mid-90s when he was in his 60s and his chosen tool was MS-
Excel as it most closely represented the ledger system he used to keep his
books with (which is of course what spreadsheets were intended for in the
first place).

His world turned upside-down when I showed him that he could also do his
production planning (he ran a small manufacturer) with it. Instead of
painstakingly drawing the production schedule grid for the next day by hand,
moving jobs from one day to the next, assigning employees to tasks and
machines, etc. Spending 6 out of his 12 hour work day on it. He could do the
entire job in an hour in Excel, and it was more flexible and he could make
mid-day changes and print the schedules out with just a few minutes of moving
cells around.

It blew his mind. He had been thinking of Excel only as a digital ledge, but
now he thought of it as a giant grid. Soon he was mocking up purchase orders
sheets, tracking suppliers, handling expense reports, doing inventory
management, past-job database (with prices and pointers to physical samples in
an organized warehouse) and other sorts of probably inappropriate tasks that
simply required a grid layout and some basic content to frame the use-case.

What was important was breaking him out of the metaphor and suddenly he found
a kind of self-actualization that freed him of hours and hours of hand written
paperwork. It transformed his business and allowed him to handle quite a bit
more business than he could before. His digital records were so good that when
he sold his company he figures that it added 20-30% to the asking price for
the company. If Excel has been even _more_ skeuomorphic of a book keeping
ledger, with stitched binding and a traditional two or three column ledger, he
may never have been able to break free of that metaphor and realize his other
efficiencies.

[http://chestofbooks.com/finance/banking/Money-And-Banking-
Ho...](http://chestofbooks.com/finance/banking/Money-And-Banking-
Holdsworth/images/Three-column-Ledger.png)

~~~
eyevariety
Did he use grid paper to do the schedule? Excel is really not very
skeuomorphic. One variation on being _more_ skeuomorphic would be that it came
with various templates one of which looked like a typical work schedule sheet,
but leveraged excel's strengths of automatic calculation. That skeuomorphic
move would have helped him realize the possibilities and he could have
achieved self actualization and gotten that extra 20-30% without your help.

~~~
bane
Originally he did. It was a large format, expensive custom grid paper designed
for the kind of old fashioned production scheduling he used to do.

In general it was a grid, but the cells weren't square, they were wider so
that there was more room to write, and along the top and left side were
various specialty cells for tracking schedule numbers, days of production,
reference numbers, various call-outs and along the left side room for specific
machines and machine operators to be inserted. He used a fairly sophisticated
color coding sytem to show linked jobs as they moved through the queue and
hopped machines, so a red diagonally striped cell on one machine represented
the same job later in the day on another machine also using a red diagonally
striped cell. It basically allowed him to plan execution of production
pipelines similar to thread execution on a modern day processor.

He had to hand draw the legend on every sheet and all of the setup. And since
it was all pens and markers and such, a small mistake meant redrawing the
entire schedule. I remember growing up watching him sit in front of the TV
working on his production schedules late into the night.

I agree that Excel in general is not terribly skeuomorphic, but like I said
elsewhere in this comment, skeuomorphism is a gradient and Excel was just
similar enough to a paper book-keeping ledger of old that he thought that it
would only be useful to him in that sense never realizing it could replace the
custom production schedule grid he managed until quite a bit later.

 _edit_ it was not too entirely different from this

[http://preoccupiedbymoonlight.blogspot.com/2010/06/productio...](http://preoccupiedbymoonlight.blogspot.com/2010/06/production-
schedule.html)

only quite a bit more complex and larger format, and in the end looked almost
calico colored there were so many production pipelines at once on it (vs. this
example with only one real pipeline)

------
gdubs
The designer / minimalist half of me eschews ornamentation – I'm a big fan of
the "swiss style". But, for all the recent ragging on skeuomorphism, there are
times when it is appropriate. When we released polychord 2 with its dark
leather and chrome look, it was in response to feedback from lots of our users
who wanted something that fit in with their studio gear. We resisted the urge
to use 'knobs' and other physical gadgets that would mess up the UX. It's just
a skin, but it made a lot of our users happy. I also observed that the new
physical hints made the app less threatening for new users to jump in and
start playing around.

~~~
MartinCron
I just looked at some Polychord screenshots and it looks great, nothing like
the bizarre garish skins of iPad contacts or iMovie.

Good work.

~~~
gdubs
Thanks! We hired Jonas Eriksson (<http://erikssonjonas.com/>) to do the
redesign.

~~~
MartinCron
It seems like the lesson here is that Skeuomorphism is OK if you're modeling
it after something that is gorgeous and tactile to begin with. Not all real-
world objects are things that I even care to interact with in the real-world.

------
ricardobeat
Ah, the old HN switch-a-roo! Everybody loves skeuomorphism right now.

Skeuomorphic designs certainly have their place and help affordance and
recognition, and the author seems to acknowledge that. The point he is trying
to make is that skeuomorphism is an easy way _to make a UI look good_ , and
toss more functional concerns aside; I agree completely.

------
jongold
Hit the (skeuomorphic) nail on the head.

There are many forms of skeuomorphism, and it's important to distinguish them
from each other. Visual kitsch is cheap in a different way to outdated
metaphors that hold back the possibilities of digital product design; a well-
used affordance should not be dismissed because of its visual design and
neither should a beautiful piece of 'Photoshop art' be allowed to get away
with broken & confusing metaphors.

\- Visual kitsch the crap on Dribbble that throws in random textures for the
hell of it, no match-up to a real-life object. No particularly jarring
interactions, just looks tacky. I guess Find My Friends goes here?

\- Visual kitsch, broken interaction iCal, iBooks, Address Book etc - visual
kitsch and an interaction skeuomorph. Pages not swiping properly in
Contacts/Address Book (and having scrollable UITableViews on a piece of
'paper'), full stack of pages left at the end of an iBook, iCal 'tearing pages
off' but then they're still there when you swipe back etc.

\- No visual skeuomorph, just interaction skeuomorph (not so bad) Google
Calendar - one month per page rather than an infinite scroll (ala Calvetica).
An easy 'affordance', but holding interaction design back nonetheless.

\- Visual kitsch, non-broken interaction skeuomorph Remember that hyper-
realistic eBook reader a couple of months ago? Relative to iBooks the
interactions actually matched up - the stack of pages on the right hand side
of the page decreased the further you went into the book. It afford
familiarity without being damaging and confusing like iBooks and Contacts, but
it was still a weak grasp at the past.

\- Outdated metaphors Newsstand on iPad upsets me. We have a fantastic
platform capable of totally redefining how we consume content and we present
magazines & newspapers as 1:1 icons of their printed counterparts on shelves?
I wrote more about this here: [http://designedbygold.com/2011/10/the-
metaphors-breaking-the...](http://designedbygold.com/2011/10/the-metaphors-
breaking-the-future/)

This isn't to say die-hard modernism is the way forward - I have my doubts
about Metro too. It's just posturing; even Jan Tschichold said that typography
should bear the hallmark of it's age (and strict Swiss design definitely isn't
a product of 2012).

This does mean that skeuomorphism and as-it-was-in-print modernism are both
wrong, but I think we knew that anyway. What we need is an appropriate visual-
and interaction-design language for the times. One rooted in tactility; one
that learns from the past but doesn't replicate it.

------
lazylland
I love this about designers - they are so passionate and so _convinced_ about
the latest design fad, when in reality the only constant is change.

People just like "new" things ... one season its faux leather, another season
its gray Helvetica on stark white.

~~~
tb303
best comment in this entire thread. thanks.

------
thebigpicture
Using a computer to do the things we normally do, e.g., sending bits to each
other, requires that we adopt metaphors. Even something as basic as a "email"
is a metaphor.

How long does it take to learn a new metaphor? How difficult is it?

It's far easier to just stick with the metaphors you already know. And that
is, I think, what "most" people do.

This applies to more than just computers.

"Some" people might like to keep trying new metaphors every week. Who knows?

One thing is for sure. Everyone learns the "email" metaphor.

Not just some people. Everyone. Food for thought.

I think the author is spot on when he says that in this context (computers)
metaphors create limitations rather than educating people about what computers
can really do. I even see this among developers who, one would think, are the
people resposnible for enabling users to unlock the full potential of their
computers. They are stuck on certain metaphors which limit what they can
imagine and therefore implement. Independent thinking and striving for
originality are in short supply among developers. The attack of the clones
never ceases, in case, clones of whatever developers see other developers have
done.

However, as insightful as the reference to "skeudomorphism" may be, it's clear
the author's goal with this post is trying to downplay Kicksend competitors.
Maybe ones that are styled like Instagram? (Polaroid metaphor?)

How many hoops does someone have to jump through to use Kicksend versus using
something like Instagram/Facebook (for lack of better examples)? And do they
have to pay for the "service"? Maybe that could be a factor?

~~~
evilduck
I don't think everyone learns email as a metaphor though.

While I'm old enough to have sent and received paper mail as a means of
communication, it's highly likely that my toddler will have sent email (and
internalized the concept) before having interacted with physical mail systems.
It's a metaphor for _us_ to call it email but it's a vestigial name to the
younger generations.

Think of the floppy disk being a metaphor for saving a file. Few people
younger than 15 have used a floppy drive but manage to save files regardless.
I also understood radio buttons on web forms as exclusive selections as a
young person even though I didn't know it was a metaphor for real buttons on
old car radios until a couple of years ago.

~~~
thebigpicture
But a floppy disk is not a metaphor. The metaphor is a "file" as a description
for a series of electromagetic charges on a floppy disk.

It is indeed interesting that children may likely interact with email before
postal mail. But postal mail shows no signs of disappearing anytime soon.
Probably not during your lifetime and the lifetime of your startup while
you're acquiring a critical mass of users.

Do you think it will be possible to conduct 100% of your affairs in life
without ever sending or receiving postal mail? That postal mail will never be
used by anyone you transact with?

No doubt we may someday reach a "paperless" world where all your affairs can
be handled without every using postal mail. And where people never ever use
postal mail and have no reason to even know of its existence. Maybe your
children may see this come to pass.

But for the purposes of your startup, is that day something you should be
concerned about? Is your target market toddlers? Or people old enough to have
credit cards, today? People who know how to use email.

~~~
comex
I also started using radio buttons long before I learned that they were based
on car radios, and once I did so I didn't suddenly start thinking of the
buttons as metaphorical; it's just an interesting fact to me. And though I did
use floppy disks when I was younger, the idea of a floppy disk no longer even
enters my mind when I look for the floppy disk icon; it's just an arbitrary
recognizable shape. (The metaphor is "save to floppy disk" as "save to any
drive".)

This matters mainly because I won't be bothered if either control starts
acting in a way that breaks the metaphor, like a save icon that saves to the
cloud (no need to carry a disk around) or a radio button with a design that
looks nothing like a car radio (like the current design, as best as I can
tell). And it's not black and white: though I've always known a folder is
based on a filing cabinet, I've never been bothered that they can be
infinitely nested. The more people are familiar with the "metaphor", the less
it's necessary to stick to purely metaphorical elements.

~~~
thebigpicture
I think icons can be arbitrary. That's because I've seen some that are so
obviously idiosyncratic to the developer; they bear no relation to the
function that I can decipher. Some of them I can't even tell what the heck
they are. "WTF is that supposed to be?" It's like your example of the floppy.
It's a rectangle. It means save. Does it matter if no one even knows what the
heck the icon is supposed to represent? If it's not intuitive? For the first
few minutes perhaps until I figure out what the program it represents actually
does it matters. Maybe it gives me a clue maybe not. From then on, once I
figure it out, it's irrelevant.

This is one of the 1001 reasons I think GUI's are a waste of time. I can just
as easily tell a user to hit a particular key (i.e. a tactile button) or type
"save". Goodbye ambiguity.

Are icons metaphors? Or are they just symbols?

I am not a linguist but I think that you may be stretching the definition of
metapahor if you are thinking of icons as themselves being metaphors.

What is an icon? A button with a superimposed symbol?

Now, if you are saying buttons on a computer screen (which do not necessarily
need any symbol superimposed on them to work) are metaphors for physical
buttons, e.g. like your example of radio buttons, then that seems a little
more reasonable.

I've seen early TV remote controls, 8-tracks and various other old things
having push-in buttons just like car radios. I'm not sure car radios were the
first to have these. Maybe early radios, before TV, were the first to have
push-in buttons (or whatever the proper name for them is)?

~~~
UnFleshedOne
Typing "save" is very far from being unambiguous though. Should it be "save",
"store", "write down", "file away", "preserve" or another one of a few dozen
ways an unsuspecting person could come up with? Should you type "please" too?
At least with GUI there is a button that semi-obviously can be clicked, even
if it is unclear what it does. Discoverability is way better with GUI.

~~~
thebigpicture
What you find ambiguous may not align with what others find ambiguous. You, as
a nerd, know there are many options that "save" could entail. Does everyone
else know that?

What if a user has no idea about "save options". To them "save" might just
mean "save". That is, they want to be able to retrieve it later.

If I say to you "Jump!", you might ask "How high?" Others might just jump.
Should we enlist some participants in a study and see what most people do?
Let's ask people what "save" means. Then let's show them a button and ask them
what it means.

Why does some software have an option to "show button text"? Why would anyone
want to see text on a button? Why would anyone want that?

I wish there was a way I could post to HN in a series of buttons, like
hieroglyphics. It would be "way better" than using words. You could click on
them and they would bounce up and down. Way better than reading.

------
aufreak3
At this point, I get the feeling that "skeuomorphism" is a broad sweeping
category label created without enough cohesiveness within the category. Doing
so urges discussions to assign properties to "skeuomorphism" (is bad, is good,
is the way, etc.) without mention of the context in which a designer chose the
approach in a particular case.

Such a category label not only results in quick evaluations of the kind "x is
skeuomorphic and skeuomorphic is bad design, therefore x is bad design", it
also urges analytical errors of the kind "design x isn't working, x is
skeuomorphic, x is probably not working _because_ it is skeuomorphic".
Enthusiasts may also tend to use "no true Scotsman" kind of arguments to
evaluate whether a design is _really_ skeuomorphic.

What would serve us better is to catalog designs that are considered
skeuomorphic, evaluate each based on whether it works for the user, and then
evaluate whether the category label is worth the number of letters in the word
or whether its definition needs to be narrowed in order to make it useful in
design discussions.

------
suprasanna
I'd argue that people generally have an underlying expectation that they'll be
able to do far more on the internet with web apps than with physical mediums.
If that is true, then having elements from the real world into web apps _does_
promote a sense of familiarity and an intuitive understanding of, at the very
least, how to get started.

------
kayasuma
There's bad skeuomorphism, and there's good skeuomorphism. In the end of the
day, it's a personal option, and it really depends on the type of
product/site/interface you're designing.

I've designed a mobile application that is skeuomorphic, with the intent to
resemble the original one, being this one of the goals of my client, and I
justify it well enough to make sense. Even though it's a skeumorph looking
app, not really a skeuomorph interface.

But you must admit, skeuomorph isn't that bad when used properly and with
caution. There are some good uses to it. And I don't like extremes, I'm not
with the "Skeuomorph all the things" team, and neither with the "Skeuomorph is
evil", because I believe there's a time and place to everything, but it must
be used with obvious moderation.

------
pirateking
Skeuomorphism is important, necessary even. The issue is that people are
conflating it with nostalgia.

An interface can be considered skeuomorphic if it provides affordances that
are useful in the physical world - shadows, shapes and animations based on the
laws of physics. Such an interface provides the necessary clues to tell a user
_how_ to interact with its elements.

Nostalgia serves another purpose. It creates an association between a common
old interface, and the new one. It provides the clues as to _why_ the user
should interact with its elements.

I would argue that skeuomorphism is not the easy way out, its the right way.
Nostalgia is a much more likely candidate for being the path of least
resistance. Because the alternative is education.

------
InclinedPlane
TAKE THE EASY WAY OUT.

Have you ever watched a show like Kitchen Nightmares (or the many other
variants now)? It's a show where a famous chef (Gordon Ramsay) comes into a
restaurant in trouble and rescues it. Easily 90% of the stuff he does is just
the basics. Clean things up, keep the decor up to date (and also clean), keep
the menu small and packed with high quality items, etc. None of it is rocket
surgery, but so many restaurants fail at such things.

And the same is true everywhere. Whether it's in online businesses, the UX for
applications, or software architecture.

I highly recommend to everyone to take the easy way out first. Keep things
simple, keep things clean, do the obvious thing at every step. Chances are
this will lead to success and it will give you the ability to maybe try some
less obvious things in the future.

------
taligent
I think he misses the point here that 'people like to have fun'. We know that
skeumorphic designs aren't the most efficient and in some cases may confuse
the user. But these apps aren't being used to control a spaceship. They are
often used in the 5 min gap between meetings or on the train where a tiny
sliver of fun is perfect.

Whereas when I look at something like Kicksend it's just another boring, stale
and uninspired photo site. And yes, it may 'get the job done' better but if I
am not enjoying using it then why not use something that does.

And that really is the crux of the argument here. You have a tiny window of
opportunity to convince a person to keep an app before they will simply delete
it and find something else.

~~~
enra
You can maybe lure people in with nice marketing, packaging or a fun
interface, but in the end you want users who stick around.

If you think about apps the most every day, they're quite plain or unfun.
They're maybe pleasant, probably effective, and you use them to get things
done.

