

Beyond Flat - fairydust
http://jackg.org/beyond-flat

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bsenftner
Flat is poor design, the fad of the moment, and will hopefully be gone in
short order. If anything, Flat as a design trend is elitist: it creates
"secret knowledge" of how to operate a visually unhelpful interface, enabling
"those who know" to help those confused by fucking awful design.

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josho
I agree with your point. Not sure why the down vote, so I'll add to your
thought stream…

I dislike Flat design because it removes visual affordances that help novice
users navigate a new interface. I loathe Google Maps on iOS because it is
unclear to me that certain icons act as both buttons and draggable inputs.
I've been casually using the app since its release, and I continue to be
frustrated by it today.

While the original iOS design provided visual embellishments that served two
purposes. First, textures provide familiar context giving new users a sense of
immediate understanding. Second, basic features were obvious to intuit. It was
clear what was a button and what was interface chrome. The same cannot be said
with iOS7. Yes, it's easy to learn that colorized text is a button. But, it
must be learned, and is easy to miss when quickly scanning the interface.

For these reasons I believe the parent's points are valid. I do not however
want to abandon flat design, but personally hope that we find a balance
between styles rather than adhere to flat design orthodoxy.

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pdenya
I've heard a lot of complaints against flat mentioning novice users
specifically and I have 2 things to say to that in regards to iOS7:

1) It's a tool people use daily that they'll get used to quickly, I don't mind
if new users have a slightly higher learning curve (in theory, I don't concede
that it's actually the case here).

2) Anecdotally it seems to not be difficult to figure out. My 3y/o has had no
additional trouble navigating my iphone/ipad since I upgraded to iOS7. Neither
has my wife or my 4y/o.

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josho
The key point is flat tends to remove visual affordances. E.g. The iOS6 video
player has a bright blue 'done' button. A quick visual scan finds that button
immediately. iOS7 foregoes the button for just the text, so now it looks like
every other UI control, requiring the user to now read instead of scan. Yes,
it's small, but I've noticed that since using the iOS 7 betas I feel a little
less connected to my phone for lots of small reasons like this.

Regarding your second point, it is still quite easy to figure things out. But,
I'd contend that it is harder than before. I just wish we could have a balance
between extreme skeumorphism and flat designs.

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pixelmonkey
Great article, though mis-titled.

A more appropriate title might be something like, "iOS vs Android native app
design, similarities & differences".

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tpetrina
This failed to go beyond Flat UI concepts, it merely compared iOS and Android
guidelines. It's more of a "contemporary Flat UI design".

When viewed that way, it actually is a good article.

~~~
mortenjorck
I was expecting something more along the lines of this post that I wrote a few
months ago: [http://interuserface.net/2013/05/flat-is-not-the-opposite-
of...](http://interuserface.net/2013/05/flat-is-not-the-opposite-of-
skeuomorphic/) One of my draft titles for it was "moving beyond flat and
skeuomorphic."

~~~
mbq
Yeah, I smiled looking at first screen-shot of "overskeumorphic" iOS 6 which
shows both flat-designed and double skeumorphic power level indicator (;

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Pxtl
If you're going to discuss flat UI and compare the major platforms, omitting
WP8 is absurd. WP7 jumped straight into the deep end of modern flat design,
and WP8 continued the trend - some of the new iOS screens look like palette-
swaps of Windows Phone.

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ch0wn
How is omitting WP8 in an article like this "absurd"? The author shares what
he learned from designing for the most popular platforms. WP8 isn't among
them. I prefer having a well researched article where the author obviously
deeply analyzed the nuances instead of some random collection of differences
someone found comparing screenshots.

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mscottmcbee
Good comparison, but I found the point about the back button being needless
and confusing a bit weird. Using Android as my primary mobile OS, I feel like
someone's cut off a thumb whenever I use iOS devices. The back button, to me,
is fairly critical.

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XorNot
The point about the back button was just weird. It's a button, which is for
going "back". In literally every app with multiple screens this is a fairly
obvious concept, but on Android you have the benefit of not having to allocate
screen real estate to it, and having the button conveniently thumb-reachable.

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movingahead
I have only used Android as my primary phone. But, I am still confounded by
the back button. For example, I am using twitter and get a notification ( from
say Facebook ) and jump in to the app from the notification drawer. I see the
photo, like it and want to go back to the twitter app. I hit back expecting to
go to Twitter but it takes me to the facebook feed. This is not "wrong" but
seems messy.

I wish that Android makes it more clear to app makers what the back button
should/can do, and then make them adopt a similar behaviour.

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csomar
_Skeuomorphism used to be a huge red line that divided iOS and Android design_

Not true. The original Android design was not flat. It's WP7 that introduced
flat design; and Android basically copied it.

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harpastum
I'm not sure how the passage you quoted is in disagreement with your comment.

Sure, WP7 was the first major phone operating system to go flat. However, that
doesn't have anything to do with the fact that a major design difference
between iOS and Android in the last year or two has been that Android is
'flat' and iOS is not.

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waqf
This site went out of its way to give me a bad experience on mobile (bad
enough that I didn't finish reading the article): the page I received on
Android/Chrome was so narrow that I couldn't unzoom enough to fit what I
consider a reasonable amount of text on the screen.

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nwh
Why does this obnoxious website hide my scroll bar? I've absolutely no idea
how long the article is without it.

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didgeoridoo
I'm seeing it as a very faint gray outline. My guess is that the svbtle theme
is using the shadow DOM to customize scrollbar appearance (couldn't find where
he's doing it in a cursory search of the applied styles though). Check out
Chris Coyier's article on the subject here: [http://css-tricks.com/custom-
scrollbars-in-webkit/](http://css-tricks.com/custom-scrollbars-in-webkit/)

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molbioguy
Minor point. I think the article is incorrect regarding long press being
absent on iOS. I think it's been available for some time as
UILongPressGestureRecognizer.

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nacker_hews
Interesting. I'd also be curious to see a post that only compares iOS 6
against iOS 7.

