[drbawb]

Oddly enough, the first thing that comes to mind when I see the new `Outlook` is: "all text is actionable."

Everything on that Outlook screen seems to be clickable, with the possible exception of the logo (upper left) and copyright notice (bottom left).

It reminds me of the `acme`[0] editor a bit; not nearly as flexible, of course, because it is executing pre-programmed commands, not arbitrary shell commands.

I bring `acme` up for two reasons: (a) it gives you an interesting perspective on "text as actions" and (b) look at that menu system... no buttons, no distinguishing marker, the menu is just text! The buttons are just text!

The editor itself is fairly nice to work in; a big departure, yes. Intuitive? Kind of; it only becomes intuitive once you understand "mouse-chording", after that the UI makes plenty of sense, even when it's almost entirely "flat."

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So, if you assume everything is clickable by default (which is true, give or take a few very specific targets that have no obvious action anyways), why then does the user need skeuomorphic hints?

If 90% of the non-whitespace results in a "button press", that fact should become obvious fairly quickly, even to the uninitiated.

If you cut out all the cruft and only leave the functionality, the functionality will inherently "float" to the surface. And that seems to be the case in Microsoft's latest bout of UX.

[0]: http://acme.cat-v.org/readme

[nostromo]

Even if all text is clickable, not everything should have such a similar visual weight.

In Gmail, there's a big ass red button that does exactly what you think it will do. (http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lyrwjaXatd1qea4hso1_500.pn...) I bet I could use Gmail for the first time in Arabic if I had to. I'm not sure I could use Outlook.com.

[ThomPete]

And that big red button was only added much later. The first versions of gmail didn't have that.

MS is doing something very wise here. They are starting flat and then over time they will find a balance between what needs to be more obvious than other things. Just wait and see.

[drbawb]

I should also point out that I only know what the "big red button" does because I use GMail.

If I was seeing GMail for the first time in a completely foreign language: I wouldn't associate "red" with Compose/New Message.

Colors carry significant cultural baggage.

Here in the U.S, for e.g: I associate Red with `danger`, `anger`, and perhaps `stop` or `caution.` [0]

At first glance, a red button (relying solely on skeuomorphic distinction, and not the text) is something I _definitely_ don't want to click. I would assume it would delete my selected mail, or perhaps mark it as spam.

At least with text you don't have that cultural baggage. You have the baggage of the language, e.g: you definitely have the steeper learning curve of learning the UI's language.

Though I'd rather it be grammatically ambiguous, as opposed to being visually ambiguous. For instance: if MS used slang or abbreviations in their Metro applications, it may throw off non-native speakers.

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While I agree with GP that MS could benefit from using a bit more distinction. I'd still steer away from using colors and gradients and such (rather: such distinctions wouldn't be my first choice). Cultural differences aside, you have to consider biological differences, such as color-blindness.

You can add visual distinction without necessarily resorting to skeuomorphism. For example: add some vertical lines, mess with font-weighting (which MS seems to use heavily), etc.

[0]: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/colours...

[ThomPete]

I agree completely.