
Humanist Interface: The Entrenchment of Modern Minimalism - elischiff
http://www.elischiff.com/blog/2015/2/18/the-entrenchment-of-modern-minimalism
======
pavlov
_Microsoft’s design language, Windows Modern, is eerily similar to the
paintings of Mondrian. Its abstract world of flat colored planes and
typography has lost all sense of connection to anything meaningful or
concrete. These deliberately obscure design choices often leave users without
any way to discern the function of interface elements._

That rings of unjustified bias. There's hardly any difference between Windows
Phone and iOS 7+ in this respect.

IMHO Windows Phone is somewhat more logical to use and has less ambiguous UI
elements for one reason: apps tend to consistently use the bottom bar for
actions. The bar always works the same and the buttons always have the same
style.

On iOS there's more of a tendency to sprinkle buttons anywhere on the screen,
and those buttons can be styled pretty much anything: plain text, plain icon,
circle-enclosed icon...

Still, that's a minor gripe in practice.

~~~
whoopdedo
> On iOS there's more of a tendency to sprinkle buttons anywhere on the screen

Has it always been this way? iOS has been around longer than Windows Phone and
more people have created apps for it. I believe there is a tendency to
"interface drift" where when a new design pattern is introduced many
developers will race to imitate it. (Consider how Material Design is popping
up everywhere, even in places unrelated to Android.) But at some point an app
will break from the norm. Either because the UI doesn't fit what they want, or
it's a new idea that's an improvement over the standard, or just for the sake
of being different. That opens a floodgate as developers no longer consider
the base UI to be a rule and more of a loose suggestion. (i.e. After years of
everyone using the 3D controls of Windows 95, WinAmp introduced skinning and
after that all apps had to be skinnable.) Eventually users complain about the
confusing mess of interfaces, so the OS reigns everyone in by rebuild the
system UI with the best of the new ideas since the previous version.
Developers applaud the new universal design and flock to emulate it in their
apps. Thus the cycle repeats.

So is Windows Phone more uniform in its interface because it's designed to be
that way? Or is it just not old enough to have drifted away from the standard
UI?

~~~
anabis
Chrome for Android also puts buttons at the top.

I would prefer them to be at the bottom, because I have a large screen for
easy reading. Its hard to reach the top buttons.

------
crimsonalucard
The human capacity to read and decode symbols is only a recent cultural
phenomenon within the great span of our anthropological history. Therefore our
eyes have been naturally selected over eons to look at objects in the real
world a lot longer then they have been selected to decode symbols. As a
result, human eyes actually are better equipped to process shading, geometry
and the complexity of physical objects better then it can process a symbol.

Flat design is suppose to be more efficient, however based on our evolutionary
history, an all out flat design actually increases the effort the brain needs
to go through to process symbols. But really, this achieved efficiency doesn't
matter as the difference between flat and adding some shading is negligible.
What matters is whether or not we perceive the design as attractive, and that
is a purely cultural and subjective factor.

Flat design does have efficiency improvements but it's not where you think it
is. The efficiency improvement is not on the user side, but for the developer.
Anyone with the talent to make a cover photo, draw a flat square and paste
some text on it can now call themselves a professional designer.

Zero talent + minimal effort = Clean Minimal Design.

Maybe I'm exaggerating on the amount of effort required but definitely you
don't need the ability to paint like leonardo in order to make a minimal
layout.

~~~
ANTSANTS
A symbol is a symbol. A flat monochrome floppy disk icon represents the
concept of saving a file just the same as a lovingly rendered 3D floppy disk
or even a photograph would.

Text glyphs are very flat, abstract symbols that represent sounds or ideas
(indeed, I'm pretty sure the whole "flat design" trend was inspired by
typography in the first place). Sure, we've been hunting beasts for much
longer than we've been reading and writing, but written language is still a
very old invention in the human timescale. And art predates even that.
Humanity has had plenty of experience with symbolic visuals over the ages, I
think we're equipped well enough to use basic smartphone apps.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
Text evolved from shapes chiselled into rock or pressed into wet clay, so the
roots of typography are as tactile and 3D as it's possible to be.

Even ink on a scroll has a 3D feel. The 'paper' \- whatever it's made of - has
texture, and the way the ink sinks into it has depth and texture too.

Likewise with traditional printing. The sequence of pages creates a 3D object,
and old-fashioned heavy letter press books have texture and depth you won't
get on a screen.

Modern minimalism only became fashionable a century or so ago, which was -
coincidentally - around the time artists started experimenting with extreme
abstraction.

Minimalism has one big problem - it lacks scale-independence. A hand-printed
book has visual detail across a range of physical dimensions. You can see the
cover across a room, but if you look at the print with a magnifying glass,
you'll see detail at that scale too.

Minimalist digital typography has detail at exactly one dimension - the size
of the content. Zoom out, and you can't see the content. Zoom in, and you see
pixels.

It's a difference of metaphorical and literal depth. Ignoring scale-dependence
robs content of weight.

So minimalism is literally shallow. It's aesthetic lossy compression -
abstraction into illegibility, for the sake of abstraction.

You can get away with that in art if you have something interesting to say.
But it's really not the best of all possible solutions for UI/UX.

~~~
ANTSANTS
>Text evolved from shapes chiselled into rock or pressed into wet clay, so the
roots of typography are as tactile and 3D as it's possible to be.

>Even ink on a scroll has a 3D feel. The 'paper' \- whatever it's made of -
has texture, and the way the ink sinks into it has depth and texture too.

>Likewise with traditional printing. The sequence of pages creates a 3D
object, and old-fashioned heavy letter press books have texture and depth you
won't get on a screen.

But you don't _see_ the depth of the stroke or the texture of the paper when
you're reading. You see abstract lines. You don't _see_ the imperfect
squiggles our meat-appendages create unless you really focus; at a glance,
your brain autocorrects them into the intended strokes.

>Minimalism has one big problem - it lacks scale-independence. A hand-printed
book has visual detail across a range of physical dimensions. You can see the
cover across a room, but if you look at the print with a magnifying glass,
you'll see detail at that scale too.

>Minimalist digital typography has detail at exactly one dimension - the size
of the content. Zoom out, and you can't see the content. Zoom in, and you see
pixels.

Uh, no.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_graphics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_graphics)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_font](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_font)

>So minimalism is literally shallow.

"It seems that perfection is attained, not when there is nothing more to add,
but when there is nothing more to take away." \- Antoine de Saint Exupéry

------
elischiff
The second installment of Humanist Interface is out. In this section I discuss
the longstanding presence of modern minimalism in the GUI. Flat design is
nothing new—it has deep roots.

~~~
michaelfeathers
I wonder why we stopped? Art, architecture and interior design have moved
beyond modernism toward richer aesthetics. I'm not sure I'd want to use an
interface that looks like Szimpla Kert ( [http://bebudapest.hu/wp-
content/uploads/2012/07/szimpla41.jp...](http://bebudapest.hu/wp-
content/uploads/2012/07/szimpla41.jpg) ) but it would be nice to escape
modernism just a little bit.

Uncluttered and ornament-free is functional but it is also a bit boring. Maybe
we can make UI feel a little rougher without losing usability.

~~~
joshuapants
I do hope that we'll never see an interface like that! I think it's very
unlikely though, because unlike "static" art, user interfaces have to be
interacted with _and_ have to be learnable, comfortable, and useful. Even in
the most interfacey example you listed, interior design, interaction can be
limited: a lot of the wildly different designs are still more visual art than
they are functional pieces.

If I had to hazard a guess I would think that UI will become more kinetic. We
already see this with things like the bounce at the end of a scroll on OSX and
phones, as well as with window animations, but it can probably be taken
further. The interface could become more like a living, breathing thing than
just a piece of paper with some rectangles on it.

Think of a cat: they all have the same basic pieces, they have fairly
consistent behavior traits, but they all have different fur and eye colors.
The computer could become something of a useful pet.

But that's just my pie-in-the-sky vision, predicting the future is a mug's
game.

~~~
michaelfeathers
I don't want to see one that rough either. But a little rougher visually would
be nice. People do play with this space in typeface but rarely computer
typeface.

~~~
derefr
Computer-displayed text tends to be a lot smaller in practice (in arc-seconds
on the eye.) A flyer's 96pt masthead might have be scanned from arm's length;
a 20pt paperback page might be read rested against one's chest. Right now,
though, I'm reading this page zoomed out on an iPhone 6, at the same visual
distance as I would with a book—the text ending up at most 1/3rd the
perceptual size it would on the book. The backlight-powered contrast makes it
legible nevertheless, but I can't imagine how the text could be styled such
that I'd notice, while retaining its legibility.

------
guelo
I doubt all these flat/minimalist designers are doing user or A/B testing.
Things feel less usable and more confusing then the previous generation of
interfaces. This fashion is not driven by data. Which makes sense since some
years ago designers were mocking Google's functional, engineer driven,
A/B-tested interfaces. And Google gave in and started hiring the same fashion-
following sheep. Now you can't escape it.

~~~
nikatwork
I have done A/B design testing on ~10 mid-tier "consumer products" eCommerce
sites, and giant firetruck-red 3D bevelled "Buy Now" buttons converted
insanely better than minimal ones.

Personally, I want clearly-labelled tactile buttons that _make_ me want to
push them. Flat UI is more brutalist than humanist.

~~~
elischiff
Do you still have access to that data? Is it statistically significant?

------
normloman
"Those in positions of leadership in the community are undoubtedly aware of
the history and dangers of modern minimalism, and press forward nonetheless. "

Dangers. Like what?

I hate flat design too, but you're making a big deal out of this. Comparing
flat design to Picasso is not just a stretch, but does nothing to disparage
flat design. (People like Picasso!)

Here's all you need to know: Good interfaces provide discoverability and
perceived affordance. Overly minimalist designs neglect these needs. They
achieve conceptual purity at the expense of providing familiar reference
points that humans understand.

Connecting interfaces to art history is neat, but doesn't teach us anything.
Art doesn't have to be functional, but interfaces do.

------
agumonkey
Just in case, the black and white screen shot at the bottom is here in full
scale:
[http://static1.squarespace.com/static/54bb4cfce4b045585ada36...](http://static1.squarespace.com/static/54bb4cfce4b045585ada36f7/54c85fd6e4b0ea50d5b84d65/54c86452e4b0ae3a19c90123/1422419027572/xerox-
star-8010-03VIA+DIGIBARN.jpg)

from:

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=xerox+star+8010+03VIA+DIGIBARN&t=f...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=xerox+star+8010+03VIA+DIGIBARN&t=ffsb&iax=1&ia=images)

------
br3w5
I like the irony of the Paul Miller quote from the first article:

“I like to dink around in Terminal, accomplishing nothing, but at least
knowing that I’m engaging the computer on my own terms, with no buffer."

~~~
jjoonathan
Pfft. Real men (and women) use stty -icanon.

------
nazgulnarsil
Let's not forget getting rid of basic text cues, often in the name of
internationalizing. An app updates and suddenly basic actions are thrown to
random corners of the screen as ambiguous symbols. Google docs is a great
example with the big plus inside a circle in the lower right corner as a
replacement for the "new" functionality.

------
lesingerouge
While I understand the author's case for expressive design, I think it's
important to use the correct logic to make an evaluation.

And the base of that logic is in the premise, which in the author's case is
that expressive design, using simulacra of real life, somehow gives a user a
better understanding of the actual use of the digital object.

I believe that logic to be fundamentally flawed. As someone here already said,
humans have been trained to look at symbols far less time than they were
trained to look at real objects. As such, there exists a fundamental divide
between perception of a symbol and the perception of an object (even if it's a
simulacra, not a real one). Marshall McLuhan outlined it best in his Gutenberg
Galaxy, by separating letters (cold medium) from drawings (hot medium). As he
was saying, perception accuracy varies between this hot and cold mediums, with
hot having the highest accuracy, and cold the lowest.

Now, given this perceptual situation, I contend that given the nature of the
digital medium, any kind of symbol used within it will be perceived as
intrinsically cold by a given generation/cohort of users. I willingly shift my
attention from the symbols to the users because I believe that they should be
the true focus of the discussion. And the reality is that the very nature of
the digital world and the understanding of its functionality and laws is a
very high barrier to consumption for a lot of users.

My argument is way longer, but for the sake of simplicity, let me say just
this: I believe that design should focus on advancing the understanding of the
object that one uses. As such, I do not believe that expressive interface
design holds all the necessary keys to that advancement, being that, in its
intrinsic nature what it does is to simplify matters by simulating objects
that the user is already familiar with. There are only so many ways to use a
hammer and the representation of a hammer is contextually limited.

Minimalism is a temporary finish line. As the author noted, painters and
sculptors in modern art have trekked across a very large conceptual space
before arriving at minimalistic design approaches. Did this temporary finish
line stop development? No, it generated a diverse set of reactions, with some
painters re-approaching realism from different directions and some others
exploring the limits of minimalist symbols.

I believe that "flat" design is just a way-point, and that having reached this
way-point, there are myriad avenues now open to explore more in depth the
semantic interconnection between symbols and humans.

------
brooklyndude
Required Reading. :-)

------
msl09
I read many words but I could not understand what they mean.

------
ourmandave
I didn't know about the green bubbles from Android texts.

All I know is last December I had to score an iPhone 6 (or die trying) or my
daughter's Christmas morning would be ruined.

Now I guess I'm just the uncool dad who announced he's arrived to pick her up
with green text bubbles from my loser Android phone (with it's superior
hardware at 1/2 the price).

Oh woe is me, and so forth.

