
Flat Design vs. Traditional Design: Comparative Experimental Study (2015) - karmakaze
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281628009_Flat_Design_vs_Traditional_Design_Comparative_Experimental_Study
======
amluto
As a personal anecdote, I've spent quite a bit of time watching toddlers
interact with the world. In my experience, if it looks like a button, a
toddler can tell it's a button and will be interested in pushing it. (And
might even say "button"!) If it looks like a switch, a toddler will be
interested in switching it. If it looks like a button on a touch screen, a
toddler might still think it's a button. If it's a flat blob that looks like
every other flat blob designed by that designer (but looks nothing like a flat
blob by other designers!), toddlers don't recognize it as a button. Shocker, I
know.

Obviously, the majority of computer users aren't toddlers, but I think there's
a lesson here. I really miss the old Windows 3.1 / 95 / 98 days when controls
were more or less standardized and you could reliably tell which were buttons,
which were radio buttons, which were okay buttons, etc.

~~~
ericol
When my youngest daughter was still a toddler, she would try to swipe on our
32" bedroom TV that was more or less at her height. What I'm trying to say is
that your mileage might vary. I think it all depends on their experiences.

If something looks like a button and they try to push it, is because in real
life buttons have a certain look and feel.

But I'm pretty certain that if you teach them at an early age to discern what
does what in a flat UI, they'll have no problem switching from one UI to the
other (I actually learned _from her_ that in the Android YT app you can swipe
those pesky lower right corner videos to make them go away). And we're still
to try flat in real life ;)

~~~
chrismorgan
> _And we 're still to try flat in real life_

Plenty of appliances have electronic buttons, which are close to flat (though
definitely not flat) and commonly paired with a flat visual style on top of
them. They work pretty well, in that context.

And now plenty of appliances have capacitive controls, which are in my
experience normally a _disaster_ and literally _never_ good (I exclude
situations where a screen is involved; those are hit and miss). To take an
example, microwaves: almost without fail, I find that the newer it is, the
harder it is to use—though the old dials were only easier to use in certain
ways, lacking precision. I now have one with a capacitive touch surface, and
it’s very hard to use unless the room is brightly lit, at which point is’s
merely quite painful unless I want to turn it on for exactly 30 seconds.

Decide for yourself whether these things are “real life”.

~~~
seandougall
My brand new (just arrived today!) stove has these capacitive buttons, and in
terms of visual style it does indeed function perfectly; it's entirely clear
which parts of the interface are buttons, even though most of them have only
unadorned text.

But I think that analogy falls short in one major way, which is that these
buttons are logically grouped and evenly spaced across a surface that consists
of _nothing but_ buttons. If there's silkscreened text there, you can press it
and do something. The visual display of information happens in an LED display
set aside in a well-defined area, so things to look at and things to press are
100% clearly delineated. In a desktop/mobile/web app, where content and
interactive elements are interspersed, you lose that obvious context clue.
That inevitably adds cognitive load, even if the interface is still
technically usable.

~~~
samatman
An additional problem for capacitative buttons in the kitchen is that my
fingers are often moist or even wet, and this is a disaster when it comes time
to punch cap. buttons.

Not only do they not work, no only do they sometimes trigger adjacent
controls, but to get function back I now have to dry both my hands and the
control surface.

I will never purchase a kitchen device with capacitative controls, but I run
into them enough when traveling to experience this frequently. It's a mess.

~~~
solarkraft
This _is_ bad, but then again they will be easier to clean.

~~~
samatman
The old paradigm of sealing a rubber dome button under an unbroken sheet of
plastic worked just fine, my folks had a microwave for 20 years that worked
that way with no switch failures.

------
aasasd
Nielsen Norman Group have also ran a study, with results similarly unfavorable
for flat design: [https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flat-ui-less-attention-
caus...](https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flat-ui-less-attention-cause-
uncertainty/) (Possibly it's not the only study of theirs on the topic.)

Notably, NNG uses a more 'real world' methodology, testing realistic user
tasks in browsing websites. For the unfamiliar, 'Nielsen' is Jakob Nielsen, an
authority on usability, working and writing on it for two decades now, and
he's a big advocate of usability testing in design process. (BTW, “Designing
Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity” of his is an excellent writeup on
how websites should function—I'd bet it's as valuable today as it was in
mid-2000s for me, because the functioning of _humans_ doesn't change.)

They also noted that flat design has made some steps back to the immediate
recognition of the olde pseudo-3d interfaces, notably with 'Material design':
[https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flat-
design/](https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flat-design/) But not many steps.

------
DenisM
It's remarkable how UI design followed architecture (as in: buildings) down
the dark alley - both went on a crusade to expose inner substance of things by
cleansing it from "redundant ornamentation", both ended up steamrolling over
the ergonomics, the human comfort, in the fight for the inhuman ideal.

This is what I see when I look at the web (+Electron) today:
[https://www.google.com/search?q=modern+architecture&tbm=isch](https://www.google.com/search?q=modern+architecture&tbm=isch)
[https://www.google.com/search?q=brutalist+architecture&tbm=i...](https://www.google.com/search?q=brutalist+architecture&tbm=isch)
This is what I would prefer to see:
[https://www.google.com/search?q=victorian+architecture&tbm=i...](https://www.google.com/search?q=victorian+architecture&tbm=isch)

~~~
kevinlou
There has to be a better approach than to just settle on one of the two
extremes: what architecture styles have a mix of moderate ornamentation, but
with straightforward and utility-driven design?

~~~
barbecue_sauce
McMansions.

~~~
kevinlou
Oh my.

------
emn13
One possibly explanation for these results which would be less interesting
that their suggested conclusion: bigger items with smaller margins are better
than smaller icons with larger margins.

The difference on the icon results were particularly large and convincing, and
if you look at their example icon stimuli, clearly the flat icons are simpler
(as expected) and presented with more margins (perhaps also as expected in
flat design), but that also means to get the same number of icons on screen,
the icons were smaller.

I think it's at least worth considering whether that might explain a large
part of the difference.

Another limitation is that tiny and non-diverse sample size, and the fact that
it's a few years old. They had just 20 students, almost all male, Russian
university-student-aged - it's just not a huge or diverse sample; and the
experiment was run in 2014; people have a few more years of flat design
expectations under their belts now.

Looks pretty decent, those results, but I still think it's a little early to
draw solid conclusions based on this alone.

~~~
frereubu
To back up your more skeptical points, and to hint at the linked study being a
symptom of the file drawer problem, here's a study that cites the linked one
and which finds no statistically significant difference using a more diverse
set of subjects (although still only 21 of them):
[https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326069864_Affordanc...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326069864_Affordances_and_Metaphors_Revisited_Testing_Flat_vs_Skeuomorph_Design_with_Digital_Natives_and_Digital_Immigrants)
It does commit the fingernails-down-blackboard sin of talking about "trends"
for non-significant results, but otherwise seems relatively sound.

Here's another that effectively finds no significant differences, while
subjects perceived flat design as more usable (although full text isn't
available so I'm not sure about the methods):
[https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325563195_A_Compara...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325563195_A_Comparative_Study_of_Skeuomorphic_and_Flat_Design_from_a_UX_Perspective)

Caveat - this is just from a quick search through studies that cited the
linked article. There may be more robust studies around.

------
H1Supreme
When I worked in design, I was always a fan of clean, modern, Swiss inspired
design. But, that was mostly print (magazine ads, direct mailers, etc). When I
moved into GUI design (early 00's), I went overboard on beveled, 3D, overly
ornate designs. As did many people.

"Flat" design was a natural response to the endless bevels. Which, was also
taken to an extreme. iOS 7 was, imo, the worst representation of this. The
icons, the palette, and especially the entirely-too-thin font weights were all
awful.

I think a flat base design, with dimension added in appropriate areas is a
happy medium for GUI's. I'm still on MacOs 10.12.6, which I think represents
this pretty well. As does the the Material Design widgets. Even if I think
they're a little boring stock.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
I'm a fan of _clean_ design, which is most definitely not flat.

The trouble is UI and UX stopped being anything about productivity and became
simply empty fashion.

iOS 6 was an excess of 3D shine and starburst effects, and skeuomorphism
excess like news looking like a set of library or newsagent shelves. Mitigate
some of that and the UI would have been lovely. _And finished._

Since iOS 7 the excess flatness detracts from usability and discoverability. I
still feel the camera icon looks annoying wrong and bland, as do settings,
photos, calendar, passbook, compass, safari. Games and Passbook are
determinedly unrepresentative of _anything at all,_ just random blobs of
colour conveying nothing at all.

Still, on the plus side MacOS and iOS have not followed through with the
excess of bland extreme flatness that is Windows 10. That still seems to want
to push the propaganda of a phone GUI on the desktop that started in 8.
Several years of regular use and I still hate it at every touch. Even adding
every tweak I can find to make it more like 7 and it's still a significant
step back from 7, and two headed in typically Windows fashion in that settings
are partly in apps partly in old control panel. Usually control panel is
required for basics that for some reason aren't felt necessary to allow
configuration of any more. Never a complete transition from one to other.

After all this progress? I find the app based settings worse in every respect,
and perfectly typifies the ethos. Fixing a ton of things that were not, in any
respect, broken. I guess they knew that or they'd have continued to permit
theming. :)

~~~
atombender
The News app didn't exist until iOS 9, and was never skeuomorphic. Maybe
you're thinking of iBooks, which had the bookshelf.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
Used to be called news stand, and had a picture of some empty shelves as the
icon. Was replaced by, or renamed news.

~~~
atombender
Replaced by. Completely different app. Newsstand was really a wrapper around
the App Store, in that every "magazine" you could buy or subscribe to were in
fact actual iOS apps, which were only visible within Newsstand, and they each
provided their own way of reading a digital copy (usually just PDF version of
the print version) if the magazine. The News app has none of that.

------
interlocutor
Here are some examples of how flat design has made things worse in MacOS and
iOS: [http://uxcritique.tumblr.com](http://uxcritique.tumblr.com)

~~~
andyidsinga
I really like that site and the concise descriptions of the problem. ..it's
also a little madding to read for too long as one starts to ask themselves
"why did they do that" over and over again.

~~~
phkahler
Why? Because design.

------
rayiner
> Our results suggest replacing the flat style user interfaces with interfaces
> based on the design principles developed over decades of research and
> practice of HCI and usability engineering.

Apple should just revert HEAD to the iOS 6/OS X 10.6 branches and back-port
any bug fixes. Almost all of the last near-decade of work in UIs has been a
mistake.

~~~
pcwalton
> Almost all of the last near-decade of work in UIs has been a mistake.

You keep saying this, and it's just not true. The extreme skeuomorphism in the
older iOS versions was just as maligned as flat design is today. I wouldn't
mind adding some more shading to buttons to make them more easily
identifiable, but let's leave the cheesy leather textures in the Calendar app
dead and buried, please.

I'm not a fan of the Windows 95-era design either. As an example that comes to
mind, traditional menus have atrocious usability. Ribbon-like interfaces that
feature actual buttons you can click or tap on, with more important buttons
larger and/or highlighted, have been a huge improvement over trying to wade
through a sea of identical-looking pull-downs full of text. It's important to
remember that the move away from pull-down menus _was_ informed by a good deal
of end-user research, a lot more than this article.

Regarding iOS, I'd like to see this study try modern UI fonts like San
Francisco. There's a reason why Apple, Google, and Microsoft invested in new
fonts, and that's because faces such as Helvetica (which, by the way, was used
in iOS 6) that weren't designed for screens are harder to read.

~~~
marcosdumay
How do you navigate the Ribbon using a keyboard? How do you learn about
shortcuts now that they are displayed nowhere?

The Ribbon traded a bunch of text pull-downs for a bunch of icons pull-down
that you have to hoover to discover what they mean, it kept the "multiple
levels of pull-downs" problem, but now the extra levels have no icon or text
with even more levels because each one has a limited space, and threw away the
icon toolbars that had a much larger density of icons.

~~~
mbel
> How do you navigate the Ribbon using a keyboard?

Mostly the same way as you used to do with pull-down menus. Press alt to
display tooltips with shortcuts over ribbon buttons. Then you do bunch of alt
+ [letter] to get the option you want. The underscored letter in traditional
pull-down menus in my opinion was similarly non-obvious.

~~~
jimktrains2
Menus show the hotkey by default. Needing to know a hotkey to figure out what
hot keys are seems backwards.

And I don't mean the underscore, that was for fast access in the menu. Most
menus would say actual hotkey on the right side of the menu by default.

But even the underscore gives a default visual clue that you can do something
with that letter, and you can then ask what. If you're new to computers, the
concept of anyotkey may not be obvious to even ask about.

------
bsenftner
I was one of the original beta Mac developers, back in '83\. Before the Mac
was released. The idea then was to visually duplicate real world interfaces,
and I gotta say they are easier for everyone, across the board, to grasp.
Still, to this day, there are many people who do not use computers on an
hourly basis, and they certainly do not get familiar with flat interfaces.
However, the much maligned over-done interfaces are grasped immediately.
Imagine that. It is because the software operates to mimic a real world item
that person of many is familiar using already, without software. It is as if
the entire reason for the UI is being missed by modern UI "experts" because
duplicating real world objects and their innate feedback is too boring, or
something. Imagine it as a stepping stone to n augmented reality where you are
mimicking real world items, if you must. Real world mimicry is intuitive, and
that is hands down easier. I don't need a study.

------
discreteevent
Flat design is form over function and this study appears to prove it. Usually
in design there's a reaction against the tyranny of the mainstream. I never
liked flat design, even just aesthetically, and I've been waiting for the
backlash in this case, but when will it ever arrive!

~~~
renox
Never? 1) Users didn't ask for flat design 2) There's absolutely no evidence
that flat design are better and there are evidence that they are worse

Yet I don't expect that UI will go back to 'classic UI', many of those who
create UI care more about being perceived as modern (or more accurately not
being perceived as outdated) than efficiency, so flat design will probably be
replaced by another 'fashion driven design'..

~~~
jonhendry18
Just like the current inexplicable vogue for illustrations of humanoid figures
with bizarre body forms. Which designers seem to love and be very proud of
using.

------
Epskampie
I feel like I experience the downside of flat design daily while using the
gmail and google calendar interfaces. Finding items and discerning the
different areas seems to take longer than it used to. N=1, so your mileage may
vary.

~~~
laurentdc
When I use Safari on macOS I find myself misclicking tabs more often than I'd
like to admit. It's like I have to stop and actively process what I'm
selecting, which has never happened to me before in a browser. The all-gray UI
is such a downgrade for me. [0]

[0]
[http://uxcritique.tumblr.com/image/107150709190](http://uxcritique.tumblr.com/image/107150709190)

~~~
dehrmann
What bugs me more is how Apple removed scroll bars. It's left me staring at a
Finder window thinking I'm going crazy because ls said there's a file there.

~~~
Oreb
In case you didn’t know: You can choose to always display scroll bars in the
macOS system preferences.

------
progfix
Rant:

Everyone who has put at least a little bit of thought into UI design knew from
the beginning that flat design is bad.

But no, it is 2019 and we still have scrollbars and buttons that are barely
visible. Just because Google and Microsoft unreasonably decided to do it that
way and every other one blindely copies that (because how can a those big, big
companies be possibly wrong?). Fuck accessibility, even though we serve
billions of customers on a daily basis.

~~~
solarkraft
Simplification. I know what my scroll bar looks like and prefer it not to have
multiple borders and shadows. It's easier on my eyes and mind.

(I don't love everything about "flat design", but not everything needs to be
super skeumorphic)

~~~
stinos
Makes sense: a scrollbar is super common and isn't something you interact with
directly that often because there are alternatives (swiping, or on a pc the
scroll wheel, up/down, pg up/down). But most other controls don't have that
many alternatives and/or don't nearly always appear in the same position so
then some actual visual recognition is needed. Of which the results are
described in this and other papers.

~~~
solarkraft
Agreed. There is some value in slight hints through gradients or borders.

Ideally we could all choose our preferred themes like we can with GTK.

------
dehrmann
When Apple did the flat redesign of iOS, it caused a lot of problems for my
grandma who could already barely tell something is a button. I know I've
struggled with toggles and check boxes that don't make it apparent they're
active.

------
c3534l
Minimalism is one of those things where simplicity is the goal, but not the
measure of success. It seems many people (I'm looking at you Windows 10)
forget the design part of flat design. Making all the icons indistinguishable
general forms is simpler, sure. This study makes the same mistake: it finds
removing indictors of function make things harder to read. But they forgot to
indicate function in other ways to compensate. It's as if you intended to
prove goto isn't bad by removing it from a language without break, return,
continue, or loops.

~~~
jonhendry18
I often have a hard time finding an app I want to use on my iPhone. And I
don't even have that many apps. Either I'm finding it hard to distinguish the
icons from each other, or the icons aren't distinct enough for my brain to
firmly associate an icon with its app.

------
buboard
We shouldn't have to rely on post-hoc science to tell us that. Designers
should not be allowed to execute in counterproductive ways in the first place,
and there was nothing non-obvious about this. We have rules about how road
signs should look. How are we going to get back the time lost now?

~~~
zanny
> We have rules about how road signs should look.

Probably a bad example because its signs on public, state owned roads. Private
roads don't have signage requirements, you can even have your kids drive your
cars without a license on private roads.

However we do have building code and more importantly the ADA which sets
standards for businesses (like, ya know, websites) to meet minimum
accessibility standards.

The problem is I don't see any congress where the average number of
mathematicians within their ranks is within a margin of error of 0 or rarely
enough scientists to fill counting on one hand being capable of writing
actually good regulation in this or any software related regard.

~~~
buboard
I believe most big companies employ psychologists or at least someone with
knowledge of how psychophysics and human perceptual systems work. None of them
would have approved "flat" as a sane choice

------
anilgulecha
A question to any design enthusiasts and experts here: What currently
maintained web/CSS framework has not gone the flat-design way, is inline with
HCL guidelines, and has a reasonably complete widget set.

~~~
news_hacker
I enjoy Palantir's Blueprint.

[https://blueprintjs.com/docs/](https://blueprintjs.com/docs/)

------
zoom6628
If I wasn't a grumpy old product manager, I would be tempted to get cynical
and say that flat imposed higher cognitive load which keeps you on the page/UI
longer which gives more time for other things to get your attention and create
the mental lock in thru mix of attraction and sunk (time) cost...i.e.ive spent
so long to figure this out I may as well stay and look around.

Another Responder pointed out that material design is better. Maybe I'm
ignorant but I don't see how. Perhaps icon quality/diversity is better these
days but the basic premise of 2D facsimile for real world 3D objects is still
there.

Personally I prefer that UI things can be easily and uniquely related to
action. This can be achieved by education I. E. sliders now look like nice
rounded corner progress bars of yesteryear but we have gotten used to them
thru their imposition on us by G and A.

That said I have used a few very old GUI programs and their look now is
jarringly uncomfortable even though the tools are great and the UI is clear.

Progress?

~~~
saurik
> Another Responder pointed out that material design is better. ...I don't see
> how. ...the basic premise of 2D facsimile for real world 3D objects is still
> there.

Material design uses shadows to add a third dimension. The shadows cause
boundaries and can help indicate parts of the interface that can move
independently.

I would definitely not claim this is much better, but it is at least a little
bit better.

------
karmakaze
A related thing is contrast ratio of text on background. I try to test on at
least a few computers/displays and when choosing between two almost equally
subjectively good pick the one with higher contrast.

------
wilde
I expect that they would see even stronger results if their population were in
a developing country. Flat design shifts the processing load for the user
interface from the designer to the user, and it depends heavily on the user
being used to computing interfaces so that they can guess correctly.

------
alkonaut
> Our results suggest replacing the flat style user interfaces with interfaces
> based on the design principles developed over decades of research and
> practice of HCI and usability engineering.

This feels like a straw man argument. Of course nicer _looking_ design is
usually worse for _function_. If nothing else, just sticking to ONE type of
consistent design lets all users rely more on memory. They seem to assume that
user interfaces are designed with the sole goal of being usable. Have they
seen any modern furniture?

When they say "our results suggest that" they don't mean that the product
(e.g. a web site) would be _better_ in some sense such as making more money
long term. They say it would be _easier to interact with_. I completely buy
that. But that's the easy part of the equation to prove! The hard part is:
does a site that's nicer looking according to a majority of users but 5%
harder to interact with get enough extra business to offset the more difficult
UX? Does the company valuation or other metrics such as ease of attracting
talent improve? This is the similar to the question "would a furniture maker
sell more of this chair if it was 10% more comfortable but a bit uglier?".

~~~
neuronic
Since when is relying on memory exclusively a good thing? It has downsides as
well, particularly blind flight when using software. Sometimes a user should
be required to think at least once before clicking, for example when sending
money. In this case, UX should cause him to do exactly that.

Pavlovian responses to interface design play into malicious actors hands after
all.

------
sgt101
Good to read this work, more work like this is needed and the design community
needs to pay attention to it.

Watch a six year old try to use google for the first time; results are swamped
by a blizzard of ads and maps and diversions. This is design driven by greed
and a/b testing at it's worst - our tools are only just fit for purpose and
the costs that that imposes on us are hidden and absorbed personally.

------
tmcw
The results are reported, but the inputs - the websites and screenshots used
as test data - are conspicuously absent.

------
stevebmark
Flat design was a mistake. I correctly called this out years ago. It's a
horrible choice Johny Ive was only able to poison the world with once Steve
Jobs wasn't there to force good design guidance on him. Everyone followed suit
and the pendulum has swung _hard_ towards the objective failure of flat
design. It's slowly swinging back. Look now at how you reacted to it and
analyze your choices. This is a good exercise in realizing an industry trend
was a terrible idea and making sure you learn from it if you ever thought flat
design was a positive move.

~~~
zapzupnz
I thought the world had gotten beyond "Steve would be rolling in his grave".
Apart from anything, Windows Phone and its flat design came out in 2010, three
years prior to iOS 7. Windows 8 came out in 2012, one year before. Please
don't pin an entire phenomenon on one man, especially the wrong one.

~~~
jonhendry18
That's the saddest thing. Apple copying flat UI from Windows Phone, which is
dead now.

~~~
zapzupnz
I don't think Apple copied the flat UI from Windows Phone. It had already
become a trend by that point, and OS X had started to move to lighter
gradients and flatter buttons in 10.7, released in 2011. I'm sure the web had
already started getting flat by then, too.

------
tribby
design is about solving problems given constraints. flat design is oftentimes
(more-so in the past than right now) a reasonable solution _for the web_ , due
to constraints related to latency (sending graphics over the wire) and the
computational cost of rendering complex graphics/interfaces. from that
perspective, flat design makes total sense to me, even if I don't always care
for it personally. browsers can't even agree on how to render vector graphics
or what falls on CPU vs GPU. projects like pathfinder[1] are sorting some of
that out, but we've got a long way to go. flat design is only a very small
percentage about aesthetics.

IMO, flat design takes the "best for the most for the least" approach of
charles and ray eames (and so many others who followed the same ethos but
maybe stated it less eloquently), and perverts "the least" to mean least
amount of effort/money for the _computer_ (or, cynically, the _designer_ as
well), rather than for the _user_. it either skews the idea of a design
constraint, or highlights problems with the web as a platform. whatever flat
design accomplishes, it isn't perfect for all cases, but it isn't necessarily
bad, either. we just have to remember that as technologies mature, it's always
possible we're designing for constraints that no longer exist.

I say this a lot, but when talking about web design, in retrospect, flash was
like future alien technology that got taken away from us. although I
understand the attack surface that came with it and why it had to go.

1\.
[https://github.com/pcwalton/pathfinder](https://github.com/pcwalton/pathfinder)

~~~
karmakaze
It seems like you've made an reasonable explanation but it doesn't follow the
timeline of how things happened. Flat design has been coming about recently
_after_ significant increases in hardware and network capabilities. Current
web apps that use flat designs are just as heavy as any other.

~~~
tribby
> Flat design has been coming about recently after significant increases in
> hardware and network capabilities

sorry, I should have emphasized the web/browser part of my explanation more.
the chip in an iphone could support these things, but could safari? we didn't
even have a <video> tag back then. 3D transforms in CSS were brand new (i.e.
unusable if you wanted to support legacy browsers), same for WOFF files,
requestanimationframe, drop shadows, and so many other modern conveniences. 4G
was also brand new -- and uncommon. the web was going through some serious
growing pains, and that's just in the highly developed world -- this doesn't
really touch on the global availability/use/implementation of the tech we're
talking about. it's possible my timeline is off, but designers were still
constrained by those doing the engineering during this time. maintaining web
apps with hacks to support as many browsers as possible was a nightmare. and
so compromises were made -- clearly. and I think flat design came out of that,
for better and for worse.

> Current web apps that use flat designs are just as heavy as any other.

that's what I was getting at toward the end of my comment with regard to
observing constraints that may no longer actually exist.

~~~
karmakaze
Yes, and I was suggesting that the motivation was not due to constraints as
the trend emerged degree after these constraints were long since relevant. I
tend to agree with other comments here that it has come to serve as fashion
(different for its own sake) rather than any UI/UX benefit.

~~~
tribby
ah, yes, I agree with you on where we're at now, it's not coming from any sort
of necessity currently. my initial comment was only meant to say "there's a
time and light in which this might have made some sense."

------
sologoub
Nice to see this type of research coming out of МГУ (Lomonosov Moscow State
University)!

Haven’t gone through the study, but seeing the examples wondering if there is
also selection bias - many older Russian sites still look fairly dated and
users may be more used to that look, finding it more familiar and easier to
navigate.

------
z3t4
I think the extra brightness and contrast of modern screens has something to
do with the UI design "fashion". It's now possible to use contrasts instead of
3d/depth, and it's even more effective then print as the contrast on (new)
screens are much higher.

------
Wildgoose
I remember trying out an Android sleep app that had a "flat" design. It never
worked. On the last day of the trial I realised why - part of the flat
"design" was actually a button that I also needed to press. I was so annoyed I
deleted the app.

------
linuxblender
Flat Design seems to take its cue from advertising (instead of editorial). Ads
(especially in magazines) often look great - clean, elegant - and editorial
designers can be envious. But some hoariness is not only functional, but helps
offset substance from marketing.

------
sheeshkebab
I tried to read this, but the ads and spam for random crap is all over the
site... how did this even make it to HN top page?

------
revskill
Typical example is iOS design (Traditional) vs Android (Flat). Android design
is a mess. Learn from iOS instead.

------
vbuwivbiu
the paper is unconvincing and doesn't control for bad design vs good design

The argument that interactive elements must be skeuomorphic doesn't work today
since _every_ element is interactive

~~~
buboard
our perceptual system hasn't gotten any faster just because designers wished
so

~~~
vbuwivbiu
in real life everything is interactive - that's the environment we evolved in

------
bbertucc
“19 female and 1 male university students” participant is a laughable small
sample group. How can any insight be drawn from that?

~~~
Rexxar
All depends on the effect you are measuring. 20 can be enough if the effect
measured is big (if you test an ebola cure on 10 contaminated persons and 10
of them survived, you have with a very high probability found something
great). The real question is "Is the effect measured big enough to be
signifiant with a sample size of 20" ?

------
kobrad
This is all in all a bad way of talking about things. Flat vs. traditional is
in the title. I think this can't be taken seriously, and that you all should
know better. No time to read this in full, but they start by comparing windows
8 and windows 7 - so the problem is not the functional redesign, no, the
problem is that it's flat? What is this

