[GenshoTikamura]

So the industry first squeezed talented designers out of the UI business by shoving that ugly ass flat style down everyone's throat, and now they're proposing to cycle back to skeuomorphism which the former were capable of and replace all remaining human designers with AI.

[neepi]

This reminds me of something that happened to us recently. So one of the internal things we have is a giant turd that sits on top of some Oracle/SAP mess. The user interface is circa 2001 and hasn’t changed really. Looks like a cross between Motif and GTK1 it’s that bad. The icons are off the shelf ones from some clip art collection.

So they need to rewrite it and got a consultancy to do it. The whole UI got rewritten using react and used an off the shelf flat design. A week after launch they sent out a user survey and nearly every respondent complained about the flat UI. So they made it look like the old one again very quickly.

So now we have a shiny new React app that looks like something from 2001.

I have to wonder if anyone likes flat user interfaces or just user studies are broken.

[cardanome]

I think modern UI is mostly optimized for onboarding new users. For that it makes sense to have a more minimalist UI that doesn't make the user think too hard and does not overwhelm them.

But if you need to do actual work you want maximum information density. You want icons that are easy to tell apart by color, not some sleek minimalist grey in grey.

If you use a tool every day for multiple hours your UI needs will be vastly different. We have forgotten how to build tools for power users.

[kunzhi]

> But if you need to do actual work you want maximum information density. You want icons that are easy to tell apart by color, not some sleek minimalist grey in grey.

IMHO Photoshop is still the classic example of this. The UI can feel overwhelming at first, like dropping into a helicopter cockpit. But once you start getting a hang of what you're doing, anything more "minimal" just feels like dumbing things down for the lowest common denominator.

From what I've seen in large enterprises, it's also why OG users are so attached to their mainframe terminal UIs. Yes, it's very hard to learn, but once you've developed some facility, everything else feels unusably slow.

I've never had a bad experience designing like I respect the users intelligence. Humans are insanely smart and capable, treat them that way and good results occur.

[jimmaswell]

GIMP's icon redeisign and new tool layout were a massive mistake IMO, first thing I do on a new install is disable tool groups and change the color scheme to "legacy"

[GuinansEyebrows]

> IMHO Photoshop is still the classic example of this. The UI can feel overwhelming at first, like dropping into a helicopter cockpit. But once you start getting a hang of what you're doing, anything more "minimal" just feels like dumbing things down for the lowest common denominator.

while i agree, i wish more dense applications like Photoshop took the Rhino3D approach of integrating a CLI directly into the interface. yes, you can click the icons or select tools from the menu, but being able to just type a command and arguments (or have it prompt for the arguments ex-post-facto) feels just incredible in an otherwise-GUI application, in a way that memorizing keyboard shortcuts just doesn't compare.

[falcor84]

> Humans are insanely smart and capable, treat them that way and good results occur.

My experience isn't quite that. While most humans can be capable when they want to, in typical situations they often don't and aren't. People who have put in years to become proficient in mainframe terminals aren't representative people in a typical situation; most people (myself definitely included) perform most daily actions on autopilot.

[skydhash]

And autopilot rely on consistent environment. Full focus isn't sustainable. Training and practice rely on this capability, ingraining something in muscle memory so you don't have to pay that much attention. When someone wants to fill a form or process some data, the less he/she pays attention to each action, the better it is.

EDIT

And that's why I like Vim and most TUI that much. I don't need to follow the cursor or wait an abitrary amount of time because "reasons". It's all muscle memory, and my attention is more on what I'm trying to do than how I'm doing it.

[neepi]

The mainframe terminal user interface was shown to me in all its glory by Italian gate staff at the airport in Rome. Literally hammered through a security check after I was flagged as having two return flights. It was no less than a form of kata.

I can imagine how shit it would have been if you have to log into windows and open a web app and use the mouse and stuff to click through a web form hacked up to do the job.

[rondini]

How is photoshop a classic example when all of the icons and controls are quite literally grey in grey like the person you quoted was denouncing?

[skydhash]

It's not grey on grey. It has cleanly delineated section, and most of them has been in the same place for ages. And there's thing like tooltips that help.

[DiggyJohnson]

because of the information / functionality density and the fact that it's optimized for power users

[starkparker]

> Humans are insanely smart and capable, treat them that way and good results occur

Obviously, maybe more obviouisly now than ever in recorded history, not all humans are smart or capable.

Regardless of capability, however, many humans excel at memorizing complex routes across obscure paths that they experience through spaced repetition, which research suggests can alter memory pathways in the brain to facilitate easier recall[1] and also engages memory functions in our nervous systems beyond our brain.[2]

Any UI, including bad ones, can foster efficient workflows in any user _if_ it accomplishes things compatible with repetitive use:

- the UI's behaviors and interactions are minimally interally consistent

- the UI has pathways from a starting point to a result that are discoverable through those behaviors and interactions

- the UI's reactions to input are sufficiently efficient to avoid arbitrary or dynamic pauses, which can disrupt effective repetition

- the UI's interactions are minimally accessible to people; if they use buttons, shapes, colors, sounds, controls, etc., a person can consistently distinguish between and physically access them when necessary

- a person interacts with the UI long enough to find those pathways from starting points to results, and does so repetitively over long time spans

Modern UI design often attempts to reduce the time to value for users at arbitrary experience levels, at the expense of maintaining the consistency of pathways that reward longtime users who have accumulated training.

The only people using the UI when the change happens are people with a non-zero amount of accumulated training. Any change disrupts consistency. It's a net negative to the people who are around to complain about it, and also resets the often competitive field of users; not only do experienced users have to relearn their workflows to avoid committing errors or wasting time, they also have to compete with new users who have easier access to results that previously required experience through repetition to efficiently reach.

For example, a UI designer might change the UI to surface a feature that they want users to access more easily by making it require 1 or 2 interactions to reach, but a veteran user already has "easy" access to that feature even if it takes 6 or 7 interactions to reach it, some of them obscure. If the change removes the result from the end of the old pathway and moves it to a new one that experienced users don't know, the new UI becomes less efficient for them no matter how smart or capable they are (or aren't). Both the new user and experienced user might be smart and capable or stupid and incompetent; the differentiating factor is experience.

Arguably, the "smart and capable humans" who use complex UIs are either the ones who achieve a level of power to prevent UI changes that degrade consistency of existing pathways to preserve their productivity at the expense of less-experienced users needing more time and training (at which point they probably don't need to use that UI anymore anyway, and the act mostly rewards other experienced users), or the ones who divert time that might be spent complaining about UI changes toward adapting to the new UI's pathways.

The truly disruptive UI/UX changes for repetitively used workflows are the ones that introduce unpredictable delays between interactions. Repetition rewards rhythm and consistent feedback, and unpredictable interaction delays destroy both.

1: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07425-w

2: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-53922-x

[robertlagrant]

It's worse - modern UI is for onboarding new customers. The calculus of what to prioritise should change when your customers aren't your users.

[KronisLV]

> A week after launch they sent out a user survey and nearly every respondent complained about the flat UI.

When have most users ever enjoyed a new UI in a system that they're used to? Genuinely asking, because while I enjoy things like new icon themes and even the UI of Windows 11, most of the time I've seen people complain about any new UI that displaces something that they're familiar with.

If I'm wrong and it's just the flat design that is the real issue (which might also be true), then wouldn't the solution be to pick any other modern look and feel, instead of necessarily reverting to the very old one? Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with the more old timey UI design, I think that Windows 9X versions had really good design, perhaps despite some usability issues like no proper fuzzy search in the actual OS etc.

I quite like how themable PrimeVue/PrimeReact/PrimeNG is and swapping themes shouldn't be something impossible, though I don't doubt that with many of the libraries out there that ends up being the case: https://primereact.org/inputgroup/ (click the little palette in the corner to switch themes)

[cardanome]

> When have most users ever enjoyed a new UI in a system that they're used to?

Blender.

Is has seen some drastic changes in UI but barely any backlash. Even holy-cows like right-click select got mercilessly slaughtered and I am not even mad about it, in fact I love the changes.

The main thing is that they are focusing on providing value to users and are dog footing their own software to create movies.

But yeah, generally people hate change and you should avoid changing things as much as possible. Sadly that doesn't work with the way incentives in most companies work.

[b3ing]

Yeah, you have to change things and make things look good and on trend to get hired or promoted. If you work on something that looks a few years old in your portfolio, you will be on the job market longer

[KronisLV]

Honestly, Blender is probably the best example anyone could bring up - thanks for that, they really did wonders with the UI/UX!

[neepi]

Well the problem was that they got a new UI anyway when they didn’t need or want one.

I think that was the problem.

[skydhash]

Flat design doesn't help with discoverability, because you're never sure what's an icon and a button, and if it's one, what it is for. But familiarity is another constraint, especially spatial relations and action flows.

[mrweasel]

> I have to wonder if anyone likes flat user interfaces or just user studies are broken.

My impression was that it was an attempt to get engineers to be able to do the design, rather than involving graphic artists.

I also think that we often conflate pretty with usable. There's nothing more interesting than these user interfaces that has grown organically for 20+ years. They look "bad" or at least old, but that doesn't mean that they necessarily have poor ergonomics. Some people, myself included, have tried to force that old-school, hodgepodge look, but you can't really do that either, it doesn't work. You just end up with ugly and confusing. Those interfaces has to evolve organically.

[williamdclt]

They actually polled for user feedback, listened to it and acted on it quickly? That sounds like a great consultancy!

TBH I’d guess that people would have complained whatever the new design was, people hate change. But yes, flat designs are often on the worse end of the spectrum

[neepi]

No we dug out a faculty statistician and did the analysis and paid them even more money to fuck it off.

The consultancy resisted this horribly because the tech lead is a performative bullshitter and it doesn’t look good on his portfolio page that it looks like something from 2001.

[michaelmrose]

He should show both the prettier and the ugly version side by side and give it as an example of him being adaptable and willing to please his client instead of himself.

[dahjelle]

> I have to wonder if anyone likes flat user interfaces or just user studies are broken.

I don’t have any experience in running user studies, but it sounds difficult separate the momentary frustration and drop in efficiency that a change in _familiarity_ brings from an actual difference in long-term _usability_. Do you know if the user survey the consultancy did tried to account for this?

[giva]

Sane people don't want to invest time learning a new UI just because it's prettier.

[esafak]

But it might improve the UX for others. You can't please everyone.

[nkrisc]

Doing a proper, unbiased usability study is difficult. I only worked at once company that had a dedicated user research team. The rest the time we designers had to run remote usability tests ourselves, for our own work, which is of course a pretty poor way to get any kind of objective result. No one wants to say, "hey, I tested my design and it sucked hard. Can I have another four weeks to try again?" Furthermore, we often didn't really have much of a say in the fundamentals of the visual appearance, we had to follow the brand standards and GUI pattern library that was chosen by other people. The brand guidelines were often delivered from on high from an outside consultancy, while the GUI pattern library was often produced in-house and robustly tested, but never perfect.

[xandrius]

Sounds like a win for the tech team at least.

[hulitu]

> Looks like a cross between Motif and GTK1 it’s that bad

You should see Material design or Windows 11.

[b3ing]

Nobody wants to relearn an application, that’s most likely what it was

[RajT88]

> So they need to rewrite it and got a consultancy to do it.

Why? Was it broken?

[bazoom42]

The best UI is the UI the users are already familiar with.

[gherkinnn]

Familiarity bias and coping mechanisms.

https://xkcd.com/1172/

[forgotoldacc]

I was ready for flat design to die 10 years ago. It's astonishingly unintuitive, ugly, the opposite of style, and straight up anti-human. There are still abstract icons in some apps and UIs that I can't wrap my head around and I have to just click and hope I'm right. There are things that I cannot figure out whether they're interactive or not unless I just tap randomly. There are so many occasions where I can't find what I'm looking for because some goober decided contrast and color coding is a sin.

Flat design stands against every single principle of proper design. All I can hope is 40 years from now, there isn't some "retvrn to tradition" BS where a new wave of the youth decide we should return to the "cool classic style of the 2000s-2020s". Let me be an old man and die with the software around me looking beautiful.

[mangecoeur]

This will happen for sure. Designs are fashions that come and go, like jeans that go from skinny to baggy and back again. I don't think anything is absolute, tastes change and people get used to just about anything, and will mainly gripe when anything changes.

[anthk]

Proper semiflat design worked well under System7 and AtarI GEM.

[ranger207]

Proper flat design worked great under Windows Phone 8. Still the best phone I've ever used

[jerf]

It seems like there's a lot of people in this conversation on HN still operating on a dichotomy between "skeuomorphism" and "flat". But "skeuomorphism" really ought to be reserved for those UIs that have an excessively-strong physical metaphor, tied to the real world. That's a restricted set of interfaces. They've never really been that popular. It's not likely to make a "comeback" and it's debatable whether they were ever popular enough to be characterized as making a "comeback" at all.

Both skeuomorphic UIs and flat UIs are particular points (or small regions) in a much vaster design space and we should not speak as if we are obligated to cycle between those two particular points, because it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. There's many, many, many options beyond those two.

[philistine]

People are too hung up on the look of the interface when they talk about skeuomorphic design.

It used to be that on iOS the bottom tabs would get indented when they were selected. That Z-axis intent, that apps would have even when they weren’t very skeuomorphic, that I hope it returns.

[jerf]

I kind of get that sense too. Sure, a "button" may be "skeuomorphic", but it's also a perfectly sensible graphical indication of a place that can be clicked, and only a small minority of "buttons" in the real world ever looked like a UI button. The UIs as a whole shouldn't be classified as "skeuomorphic". That generation of interfaces did a lot of other things that were only vaguely related to the real world... we have tabs, but tabs don't act like this. Looking up at my tab bar right now, they aren't even styled as "tabs", and nobody cares because that was never the core part of the appeal. Non-flat design had IMHO a much richer design language than flat design ever developed. Missing that design language and being forced into baby-speak for so much UI, when GUIs are already baby-speak themselves in so many ways (yes, the old UNIX hacker still sees the world this way) is very frustrating.

Even just a couple of layer's worth of visual depth, that ".5D", is so very useful.

[xnx]

Having a physical material-ness like this is the founding principle of Google Material UI.

[hauxir]

the middle ground is commonly called Neumorphism

[ben_w]

I look forward to the ultra-skeuomorphic future where our AR glasses deliver notifications rendered as fully realised Art Nouveau-era bellboys handing over telegrams.

[DemocracyFTW2]

This already happened in R W Fassbinder's Welt am Draht (1973) where when you are visiting the hotel in the simulation and your time's over, a bell boy with a chalked notice on a portable blackboard will walk through the hall to alert you to answer the phone in a specific telephone booth. We had a future to look forward to!, and now it's come to this—flat interfaces.

[jayd16]

Renders as dotmatrix printer paper out of your virtual fax machine.

[Vinnl]

Well, not sure if "the industry" is proposing this yet, or if it's just this one person and the Airbnb guy.

[PedroBatista]

There have been rumblings and attempts years prior. Now it only takes another attempt, an industry darling ( it used to be Apple) and a big hype boom on the Internet.

There is one problem tho: flat design is cheap to produce. Not sure if AI is there yet to be capable to produce good enough slop to become an industry trend that sticks.

[soco]

I'm not sure "good enough" was even a thing lately - all we do must be cheap while anything else is secondary. And AI can totally do cheap.

[evilfred]

Airbnb is an industry darling? in 2025? lol

[DemocracyFTW2]

> shoving that ugly ass flat style down everyone's throat

the correct term is ugly flat ass actually

That and the other thing I hate / despair over is the monumental space they now leave between list items. In some applications I get scrolling drop-down menus because of that. Yes, they'll rather have users scrolling through a menu that doesn't fit on the screen rather than compressing space between items.

[soco]

I think that comes from the horror period called "mobile first". Okay maybe I exaggerated a bit, not everybody called it horror. Some called it garbage.

[poulpy123]

I really prefer reasonably flat style UI (i.e. as long as the parts are easily differentiables) than the skeumorphic one.

[raincole]

Flat design is great. I'd probably use my phone much less if apps started using a skeuomorphic menu icon (that resembles a physical menu in restaurant) than 3-dot or 3-bar.

The problem is designers who take 'flat' as 'literally nothing indicating its interactivity.'

[a022311]

I can't believe I had to scroll so much to find a positive comment about flat UI design. If it's disliked so much, we should have moved away from it ages ago. Yet, we are where we are and that means something.

I personally like the current idea of "modern" UI, although it does tend to get too bloated at times. I generally prefer something minimal compared to old designs which weren't consistent, made heavy use of shadows and were pretty chaotic. Don't try to tell me old UI was playful (although as evidenced in the post, skeuomorphic UI _can_ be).

The point about some interfaces' usability being hampered by flat UI is valid. Complicated applications full of buttons with single-color icons are very hard to navigate. I find this especially true for GTK apps where the design system enforces a very specific icon style. Example: Pinta was designed to be very close to paint.net, but due to its flat design, it is very hard to navigate. On the other hand, while paint.net may look a little outdated, the design is consistent and optimized for efficient workflows.

I think the ideal design is somewhere in between flat and skeuomorphic. IMHO programs like Office and Inkscape make UI elements clear, while maintaining the ability for efficient workflows. Icons are simple, but a touch of color makes it trivial to distinguish between them.

Not every UI design is perfect for everyone, but interfaces should be designed with different needs in mind. "Power users" most likely just need better keyboard support and care less about how the UI looks.

[cainxinth]

This is broader than UX. Many trends are cyclical. So don’t throw out your skinny jeans!

[allears]

Not a problem, I just bought a couple of new pairs. I lost a bunch of weight recently and can't resist showing off.

[jayd16]

Icons are a small part of the flat design issues. I still don't see button borders and clear touchable sections in around these icons.

[keyle]

Yep this is a good summary.

[stitched2gethr]

I feel you, but cost is a real thing.

[vachina]

This is how you keep another generation of techbros fed and hired. Functionally, things have been stagnant for what felt like decades.

[DonHopkins]

I'm a big fan of the "Fukauffen Diamorph" school of design.