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Neumorphism in User Interfaces

uxdesign.cc

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Re: Neumorphism in User Interfaces

#31

Post by crimsonalucard »

ScottFree wrote: post #24
crimsonalucard wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing in nature is that flat or that simple. Millions of years of evolution have made our eyes adapted to look at things with texture. The idea of creating interfaces that only convey information that is needed does not mesh with human nature. A good analogy for this is exercise. You would think that the more you use a machine the more wear and tear it will gain. Counter intuitively our bodies are designed to be us…

> I call it Paleo design Go for it. Come up with some rules + create some examples + market the hell out of it + charge for training classes = profit!

Arrows are artificial to the eyes. They never existed in nature. However, people have been recognizing hand signals for years.

Paleo design involves replacing all flat arrows with a photorealistic picture of a hand curled into a fist with the index finger pointing at the subject.

That's a free lesson in paleo design for you!

Re: Neumorphism in User Interfaces

#33

Post by fragsworth »

thatsenough wrote: post #17

> This shot by Dribbble user alexplyuto gained over 3000 likes and pushed the trend forward. [1] That mockup is aesthetically pleasing, but from a usability perspective it's terrible: every UI element looks like a button. The progress bar (?) looks like a slider. How do users know which elements they're supposed to interact with? Why do we make the same mistakes over and over? [1] https://miro.medium.com/max/3200/1*g…

That progress bar doesn't even make sense. For "cash available"? What kind of progress bar makes sense for that? Having available cash in some shitty company's account is not a goal you want to reach.

It is unfortunate that people focus on such superficial aspects of design, especially in UI design. When there's some trend showing up, you'll see countless people talking bullshit about aesthetics and how pleasing things look, and people get so wrapped up in it that they ignore any sense of usability.

Re: Neumorphism in User Interfaces

#34

Post by egypturnash »

overcast wrote: post #7
egypturnash wrote: post #2

A few years down the line we'll see people experimenting with bringing in more textures and decorative details and then, hey, here we are back in the world of faux leather-bound planners and music players made out of jeans and whatnot. And I, for one, will be delighted, because I've been tired of everything having to be flat shapes on bright white backgrounds for at least half the past decade.

The problem with all these crazy textures, drop shadows, and chunky buttons, is that they get tacky very quickly. While plain simple layouts are timeless.

I don't think the discipline of computer user interfaces has been around long enough to say anything is "timeless".

I am sure people making advertising art in the 1950s thought their work was "timeless" too but from a modern perspective there sure is a distinct look; today's Apple-led "minimalism" will probably look just as archaic most of a lifetime later.

Re: Neumorphism in User Interfaces

#35

Post by nerfhammer »

Noumenon72 wrote: post #15

This article uses the spellings "neuomorphic" and "Neuomorphism" in places, which just highlights the fact that dropping the "o" was a mistake and obscures the origins of the word.

I thought for a second it was some sort of portmanteau of the German 'neu' and Greek 'neo'

Re: Neumorphism in User Interfaces

#36

Post by Zigurd »

If you have safety, discoverability, and direct manipulation you have less of a need to turn a small flat piece of glass into a simulation of a physical control panel. Mobile device screens are a new medium. Do the things that free you from pre-smartphone thinking. "Flat" isn't a goal. Neither is realism. You can't wireframe direct manipulation (or even long-press, or multi-finger touch). So it is underutilized.

Re: Neumorphism in User Interfaces

#37

Post by defanor »

thatsenough wrote: post #17

> This shot by Dribbble user alexplyuto gained over 3000 likes and pushed the trend forward. [1] That mockup is aesthetically pleasing, but from a usability perspective it's terrible: every UI element looks like a button. The progress bar (?) looks like a slider. How do users know which elements they're supposed to interact with? Why do we make the same mistakes over and over? [1] https://miro.medium.com/max/3200/1*g…

Text contrasts (or, rather, lack of those: red on dark blue, light grey on lighter grey, dark grey on dark orange) are appalling too, as are the tiny font sizes. The website on which it is written has similar issues (and a sticky header in addition to that); it is rather strange to read about subtle differences in UI aesthetics while failures to show comfortably legible texts and indicate element purposes are so common.

Re: Neumorphism in User Interfaces

#38

Post by foresto »

I don't want or need my UI to pretend it's a Nordic modern art museum. Seeing all that screen space wasted on huge margins, drop shadows, and glow effects makes me want to cry.

I would rather see more of the information I frequently need, or the controls I frequently use, without having to dig through page stacks and submenus to find them.

In cases where there isn't any more commonly-used stuff to display, I'd rather have text that can be easily read without squinting/glasses/giant phone screen, and controls that can be easily operated while riding in a vehicle.

Re: Neumorphism in User Interfaces

#39

Post by defanor »

ScottFree wrote: post #23
thatsenough wrote: post #17

> This shot by Dribbble user alexplyuto gained over 3000 likes and pushed the trend forward. [1] That mockup is aesthetically pleasing, but from a usability perspective it's terrible: every UI element looks like a button. The progress bar (?) looks like a slider. How do users know which elements they're supposed to interact with? Why do we make the same mistakes over and over? [1] https://miro.medium.com/max/3200/1*g…

Is there a good, up to date source on the relevant UI/UX research? I went looking for some the other day and found a combination of opinion, dogma and unreplicated research.

My experience is similar, though nngroup.com has some reports that look like an okay research (though unreplicated as well). NASA's color graphics pages [1] seem to be based at least partially on research, contain further references, and generally seem good to me, but they are focused primarily on accessibility (and similar to WCAG). Searching for relevant papers on CiteSeerX, Google Scholar, and so on usually yields surprisingly little.

[1] https://colorusage.arc.nasa.gov/issues.php

Re: Neumorphism in User Interfaces

#40

Post by core-questions »

foresto wrote: post #38

I don't want or need my UI to pretend it's a Nordic modern art museum. Seeing all that screen space wasted on huge margins, drop shadows, and glow effects makes me want to cry. I would rather see more of the information I frequently need, or the controls I frequently use, without having to dig through page stacks and submenus to find them. In cases where there isn't any more commonly-used stuff to display, I'd rather…

This is why every actually-productive program ends up looking "ugly" - think Blender or any other 3D tool, or Emacs, or a well fleshed-out IDE, or a professional engineering tool. The screen is cluttered with dialogues and toolboxes, many of which can be customized and rearranged into precisely the tool you have in mind.

Consider, for example, that Word 6 for Windows 3.1 let you do more to customize toolbars and menus than the latest Office 365 does inside the browser. The market was for a professional, to some extent, before; Microsoft Works was the dumbed-down version for more casual needs. Now, it seems like that professional set of functionality is an afterthought for a lot of UX designers.

Then again, you only really need pro UX when your goal is to actually get your product working well for people that aren't good at discovering interfaces themselves. If your target market is used to hammering their way through ugly UIs and CLIs out of necessity, pro UX focused on the 99% might not be the best investment; being consistent in your choices to at least make results predictable is probably the best lesson to apply in its stead.

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