eyevariety

The conclusion is a total let down.

"Dust off your drop shadows and gradients, and introduce them to your flat color buttons and icons. Do your absolute best work without feeling restricted to a single aesthetic."

I feel like the author is admitting that they are completely constrained by the rules or whims of trend- and that breaking out of them is some kind of crazy paradigm shift- and that breaking them only involves mixing in the tired tropes of the last fashion into the tired tropes of the new one.

My experience is that its only the non-designers that feel constrained by fashion. The professionals push the boundaries - they are the ones that define it.

Irrespective of his concerns as an individual- from a pure usability perspective: any waiting of any sort that does not signify some valuable piece of information is negative to user experience. We have seen time and time again that web speed optimizations show significant positive change in how people use or abandon different web tasks.

There may be some abhorrent business perspective that uses this loading time as a "this app is so complicated it takes minutes to load" type thinking- but this is pure snake oil. Ultimately being able to use a tool as soon as the need strikes and at a speed as close to your own thoughts as possible is the best user experience. Any decisions that are made (8 minute load time) based on technology contraints tend to impact user experience negatively.

The UX is broken, but adding the start button would only break it more. I don't have much confidence in their design team, but I think they know there is no returning to the start button.

Do you believe Samsung has benefited from Apple's R&D?

This is my understanding too. And I think the Metro look is going to perform particularly poorly when it is isolated to navigational components on a webpage while content follows whatever other visual form.

IMHO the real MS interface isn't very desktop/mouse friendly and the reason it works is because all of those square buttons are the only thing you can activate in the metro screens. If I put one rounded button in the metro interface I'll bet it would get clicked far more often than the other interface elements. It wonder if they tested it vs a more humanistic version?

Kudos to Next Web for celebrating interface innovation. The payment process looks super slick.

Good perspective!

It is ADD for sure, but there is a measured dopamine response to this type of interaction. The easiest way to understand the history of any object is through a timeline, so when appropriate I do think you are going to see a lot more of it.

From my vantage all of the modern social networks feel like the newest incarnation of the blog model, which has always had that timeline model.

Nir Eyal has some nice thoughts on it: http://www.nirandfar.com/2012/08/the-webs-slot-machine.html

Sage advice. It took me longer than it should have to learn this.

Brilliant!

I meant the big app developers. Its a throwaway comment for sure. I was just trying to encourage the original idea of the post while taking out its legs by pointing out how most of these don't look as good as they do on iOS.

The apps look great for sure and it seems like the big dogs are prioritizing Android. Many of these examples are in fact on both platforms, and overall they look better on iOS than the android version. On Android they look like a modified, less 'pretty' version of the iOS app- particularly the ones that carry over iOS design patterns.

I love how Hacker News has a bunch of pissed of nerds that are mad that a website advertising music plays said music.

What a brilliant name! We need a tinfoil chrome extension.

Thanks for the detailed response, and like a good UI junkie you are into the emotional aspects of the user experience. I think the ambient data of the tiles is so seductive. I love that the OS and Apps feel merged- I'm sure that has slowed development for third parties too, but it does sound great.

The animation sounds very tight, which is something lacking that really frustrates me on Android.

Good call on instagram too, its a great social network for visual folk- and probably one of the few apps on the phone that I really love. Seems like it would do well on WP.

My question around the wifi is just because I have heard that it doesn't work as well as the iDevices, but as a heavy user it seems like you have't seen that.

Thanks again for the detail.

Thanks for that- very interesting because IE seems to have parity on the desktop- MS must be really working hard.

Did he use grid paper to do the schedule? Excel is really not very skeuomorphic. One variation on being more skeuomorphic would be that it came with various templates one of which looked like a typical work schedule sheet, but leveraged excel's strengths of automatic calculation. That skeuomorphic move would have helped him realize the possibilities and he could have achieved self actualization and gotten that extra 20-30% without your help.

Its not that a simpler shape isn't easier to process, its that its harder to infer purpose when there is so little information (like in the case of Metro). A button is something that needs to be 'pressed' so it should look like it can be- and by doing so you understand that it is a button much faster.

Donald Norman and Jakob Neilsen have long preached this and they have a bunch of info on affordances and why they work: http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/affordances_and.html

More recently see Steve Krug's "Don't Make Me Think"

Bashing skeuomorphism is the easy way out.

Non physical affordances don't come easy, and like it or not our brains are trained in a world of 3 dimensions made of matter. Dieter Rams built things around their functional components, the materials available and the other constraints given to him by a physical world.

Edward Tufte preaches that content rules and all else is extra. We can certainly minimize everything that isn't the focus, we should, after all. But abandoning the lessons from skueomorphism really means you are throwing out every hint of natural world affordances in your interfaces. The first 3 dimensional shading or shadow and you have veered into the land of skeuomorphism - and that's ok, because a world of flat squares with Helvetica labels takes a whole lot more mental cycles to process than that beveled 3d button, and it always will.

I look forward to seeing what you are doing with kicksend- with or without hints of the physical world.

What are your favorite things? How is the HTML 5 rendering? How is the wifi? What are its biggest faults? What do you feel like you are missing?

I am very curious. I am a long time Apple fanboy and a general UI junkie. Android still feels so inconsistent that I am not interested yet, but I am very curious about Metro on mobile. iOS has been relatively stagnant interface wise and while extremely functional and completely unoffensive, I am itching to try something new.

The ipad app switching/closing/task bar gestures are pretty natural though. See them once and they are unforgettable.

Great little post and totally true. Related, the Airplay implementation is a good example of restraint in interaction design. Airfoil does much more, but it isn't as natural or easy to grok as Apple's implementation.

The twitter clone is a proof of concept. A better description would be that its a paid social graph designed to be used by third party apps. Just like Facebook apps or apps that use twitter to sign on, app.net can be used as that identity- the difference being that app.net is promising not to put arbitrary restrictions on how it is used.

Daniel Pink's "Drive" is a manifesto around this idea. I think all craftsmen should read it.

I know from years of optimization and measurement. Everything matters. Google/ Matt Cutts like to state otherwise, but SERPs prove otherwise.

Not saying that it goes back to semantic classes or anything like that, but if aligning alt tags, creating hierarchy with headings, being smart about the order of the code vs the order it appears- all those things are going to require 'coding'in a UI that is just as work intensive as coding them in the traditional sense.

Have you ever built a webpage? There are many optimizations that simple software just isn't going to come through on.

Have you ever SEO'd a site? That is something that certainly takes semantics into account and does so in a way that affects every page and their relationships.

Interface design is a separate process entirely, and its focus should not always be constrained by the engineering it would take to actually code the interface.

If it would take so little effort to make such a software, it would certainly exist. The mockup tools out there are pretty primitive and also fairly limited in number. What you describe is certainly in the future, but to be truly good it will require some very sophisticated technology.

Gimme gimme! So tired of flipping between programs during my process because none of them do it well. Omnigraffle just hasn't evolved enough.

Its a great point and I love a good set of affordances, that said all it took was seeing the 4 finger gestures on the ipad once and I could never forget them. The 4 finger pull the a up for switching and full hand movement for closing the app are so natural.

OsX has gotten rid of the little handles on the edge too- I imagine its all going to disappear.

I dig the terminology they use. Layer is a great term. Also loved the distinct lack of chrome around layers. The invisible interface is still the future.