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Bringing Back Skeuomorphic Design

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Re: Bringing Back Skeuomorphic Design

#31

Post by taneq »

et-al wrote: post #5

Yes please. Apple had a good balance between skeuomorphism and minimalism a few years ago, but as Jony Ive & Co. strip out decoration for flatness, iOS 11 almost looks unfinished. Case in point: the PIN screen and the calculator app. Lock screen: https://file.mockplus.com/image/2017/10/5627bfee-8dbf-44b4-9... Calculator: http://cdn.iphonehacks.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/iOS-10... I live in an old Victorian house,…

No, I like this thing where "best practice" UI design looks exactly the same as my half-assed programmer art.

Re: Bringing Back Skeuomorphic Design

#32

Post by mr_toad »

wuliwong wrote: post #28
designcode wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't be any worse than bootstrap's col / grid system.

I've actually never even tried to understand people's issue with tables. I think there are important places to take stands in my life and I guess that isn't one of them. I'm more of a "generalist" than a front-end dev but that being said, I would guess that you would have more control for responsive layouts with bootstrap's grid system than using HTML tables. If I'm using table cells I can have them stretch or squeez…

The argument was/is that ‘table’ should have semantic meaning; you use it for tabulation of facts. Most people were using it to create arbitrary containers.

Some people have taken it too far, and refuse to use tables even for representing actual tables of data.

Re: Bringing Back Skeuomorphic Design

#34

Post by Uhhrrr »

A lot of the reason skeuomorphic design went away was that Apple had a release which used more skeuomorphism and was also ugly. The OP link is more tasteful. Let's just bring back taste, rather than carrying banners for one abstract philosophy or another.

Re: Bringing Back Skeuomorphic Design

#35

Post by mdip »

Amen.

I'll be the first to admit that "you don't want me doing your UX design"[0], but I found the whole violent shift from skeuomorphic to flat to be too much. Almost over night we went from nearly cartoonish to IRS forms "with color". As a non-designer, I was happy -- finally, I could hit up a web site for a reasonable color palette, grab a popular font from Google and have a design that almost passed as typical. As a user, I found the look ... boring and uninspired.

Here's the thing, though, skeuomorphic design did serve a purpose. It was to equate, for non-tech-savvy folks, concepts from the "real world" to concepts in an app. A few simple design elements can differentiate my calendar from my task list from my playlist and can be highly effective in circumstances where providing a UI more than a very brief glance can be dangerous[1]. And outside of those scenarios, it's nice reducing the cognitive load required to recognize the context of what I'm doing. Unfortunately, it was taken way too far. But it went too far the other way, too. There's a happy medium here, and I rather like the UI presented here as that happy place.

[0] I'm not completely miserable at it, but I'm a developer. I want a knob/switch/setting for everything and the ability to customize everything (I joke that I never quit Firefox because I love "about:config"). My mom doesn't. For most of my projects, which are either personal or targeted at engineers, a lot of time isn't spent thinking about design.

[1] For instance, waking my phone while driving to change the song -- It's nice to see something that indicates "that's a playlist" which is obvious and instant.

Re: Bringing Back Skeuomorphic Design

#36

Post by stephencoyner »

I agree that most UI is the same these days and some change from the norm should be encouraged, but I don't think that UI with actual real world things like binder clips is needed. Mobile apps don't need clips to keep pages together, so lets not bring new constraints into a field that already has it's own to work with.

I love how Google is updating material design to have more aggressive shadows and bring in elements that make the UI feel more like the real world, while also pushing the boundaries of app design with newer interaction models that most haven't seen, but immediately feel used to.

Mobile app design is such a new field, let's not jump back into our time machine because we feel nostalgic for Steve Job's Apple. Let's keep pushing the field forward.

Re: Bringing Back Skeuomorphic Design

#37

Post by tomc1985 »

wilg wrote: post #26
tomc1985 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fashion really has no place in computing. These are tools and we should treat them as such "The reaction, as all reactionary trends, was to throw out everything that came before and fully embrace this new direction of minimalist ui, white space layouts and magazine typesetting. Some argue that it was a timely change to meet the demands of the increasing complexities of the interface. That we had grown out of the need…

Do you think that fashion isn't a part of other types of tools?

I think that it is something imposed on us by the more aesthetically-inclined. Herd mentality, etc...

Given the anti-creative monotony that "fashion" produces in tech, I'd take the DIY geocities aesthetic and skeumorphism any day of the week

Re: Bringing Back Skeuomorphic Design

#38

Post by jbob2000 »

No, the reason we got rid of it was that it was impractical for like 90% of software. Skeuomorphism works for calendars and notepads, that's it. That's why those are always the examples you see for them.

There's no such thing as skeuomorphism for a chat app or a social media site - there's no analog comparison to take design cues from, they're inherently a digital thing. So what you end up doing is wrapping digital things in leather and wood texture as if it was some kind of physical device. It's tacky and cheap, and frankly, I think only a small subset of users get a kick out of it.

I don't like these designs at all. Sure, they are well put together. But the screen feels crowded and the buttons look hard to hit. It just looks incredibly delicate, if i flipped on large text mode, the whole design would break.

On the other hand... Skeuomorphism is fantastic for video games, where utility is not the primary motivator of design. If I'm playing a WW2 game of some kind, yeah, I'm cool with menus looking like war-torn clipboards and whatnot.

Re: Bringing Back Skeuomorphic Design

#39

Post by stephencoyner »

jbob2000 wrote: post #38

No, the reason we got rid of it was that it was impractical for like 90% of software. Skeuomorphism works for calendars and notepads, that's it. That's why those are always the examples you see for them. There's no such thing as skeuomorphism for a chat app or a social media site - there's no analog comparison to take design cues from, they're inherently a digital thing. So what you end up doing is wrapping digital t…

Completely agreed, well said.

Re: Bringing Back Skeuomorphic Design

#40

Post by guelo »

What's missing is user testing. Many designers are still in denial that they're engineers not artists, they still mock user testing with "users don't know what they want" etc.. But how do you know if the interface does what it's supposed to do? Does it have bugs?

One of the benefits of a platform design language is that users learn the language, they know what the buttons are, how to navigate around without putting too much thought into it. If you deviate from that you really need to be sure the user will benefit from it and it's not just pretty for pretty's sake.

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