Skeuomorphism is the easy way out

Skeuomorphism unnecessarily constrains software design to the realm of real-world analogue. It completely breaks down when applied to concepts which do not fit. How do you create a skeuomorphic interface for something like Git? The answer is: you don't.

I think there's a difference between making software that looks pseudo-physical like Aqua, skeuomorphic like iCal, and mimicry like all those digital representations of a business "desktop", complete with 3d in and out box and useless paperclip holder...and I think that these things lie on a continuum.

For example, an audio recording app might start with a simple default OS "record" and "playback" buttons. Add shadows on the buttons and brushed aluminum for the window dressing and just look pseudo-physical, start adding 70s era cheap plastic looking knobs and you rapidly slide into skeuomorphic, keep going and next thing you know you hit Apple's podcast app, a little more and you go full Microsoft Bob and make you drag a virtual tape from one reel to another, through all of the various other windy rotating bits that are present in an actual reel-to-reel tape machine.

Skeuomorphism works when it dresses up a boring interface that's more or less feature complete. It might even go so far as to evoke the feeling of a familiar real-life object...paying it homage rather than mimicking it.

What doesn't work is when you rely on mimicry in an application to guide the user into the digital world from the physical one by employing a similar looking usage pattern. It sounds counter-intuitive, but it's true...why? One person's familiar metaphor may be completely outside of another person's experience. Take your example, Electric Checkbook, many people under 30 have probably never even written a check, or balanced a checkbook! I'm over 30, and I don't think I've ever even finished off an entire book of checks in my entire life! It's just a metaphor that no longer has relevance. I do lots of banking, pay bills, mortgage, car payments, school loans, utilities, etc. But I simply have never needed to use physical checks in anything but the rarest circumstances. For people in their 20s, they may have never actually even seen a physical check! The app may as well be designed around sectioning 8ths of Gold Doubloons and measuring out gold on a balance scale for all the relevance it has to new users!

Similarly, iCal looks like no timekeeping/scheduling object I've seen outside of professional offices of very senior executives and lawyers. Most people just don't use leatherbound desk calendars anymore. It doesn't evoke familiarity or nostalgia because it's simply entirely outside of most people's personal experience. Where iCal gets away with it is that it's fortunate that other calendar apps that computer users have become conditioned to over the decades are skeuomorphic in the sense that their design and layout are very much in-line with the layout of physical calendars anyways. But there is no reason a calendar can't be laid out in a wheel, or a list, or some other interface paradigm, and made to look like it was scratched into copper or some such and just been pseudo-physical.

The reel-to-reel "Podcasts" similarly tries to evoke some kind of nostalgia factor, listening to authoritative news reports on a vintage tape machine, without stopping to figure that most users have probably never even seen a "real" reel-to-reel. It's not skeuomorphic, it's Bob. It's so bad that the builders of the app didn't even bother building in the necessary functionality into the software before blasting faux-nostalgia vomit all over the design. At least I don't have to run the tape to setup the playback.

More importantly, design that's on the Bob side of skeuomorphic design almost always fails to scale. A bookshelf metaphor is fine because it's close enough to a basic grid of book covers, with a little wood veneer on it when a library has a few dozen titles in it. It blows up when you start having thousands and spend minutes scrolling through shelves trying to find your title, when a simple alphabetized list would have performed the function better. (The Bob way to solve the problem would be to organize your titles by the Dewey Decimal System, then give you a virtual card catalog, complete with little drawers full of little faded cards you have to comb through...and again this would present a physical metaphor for an experience completely outside of most people's modern experience in the last 20-30 years).

"Skeuomorphism helps people misunderstand the capabilities and limitations of digital products based on their understanding of a physical analog."

Right. Nothing sets hard limits in a user's mind then guiding them to use a piece of software through a terribly flawed metaphor. My father learned to use computers in the mid-90s when he was in his 60s and his chosen tool was MS-Excel as it most closely represented the ledger system he used to keep his books with (which is of course what spreadsheets were intended for in the first place).

His world turned upside-down when I showed him that he could also do his production planning (he ran a small manufacturer) with it. Instead of painstakingly drawing the production schedule grid for the next day by hand, moving jobs from one day to the next, assigning employees to tasks and machines, etc. Spending 6 out of his 12 hour work day on it. He could do the entire job in an hour in Excel, and it was more flexible and he could make mid-day changes and print the schedules out with just a few minutes of moving cells around.

It blew his mind. He had been thinking of Excel only as a digital ledge, but now he thought of it as a giant grid. Soon he was mocking up purchase orders sheets, tracking suppliers, handling expense reports, doing inventory management, past-job database (with prices and pointers to physical samples in an organized warehouse) and other sorts of probably inappropriate tasks that simply required a grid layout and some basic content to frame the use-case.

What was important was breaking him out of the metaphor and suddenly he found a kind of self-actualization that freed him of hours and hours of hand written paperwork. It transformed his business and allowed him to handle quite a bit more business than he could before. His digital records were so good that when he sold his company he figures that it added 20-30% to the asking price for the company. If Excel has been even more skeuomorphic of a book keeping ledger, with stitched binding and a traditional two or three column ledger, he may never have been able to break free of that metaphor and realize his other efficiencies.

http://chestofbooks.com/finance/banking/Money-And-Banking-Ho...

What you find ambiguous may not align with what others find ambiguous. You, as a nerd, know there are many options that "save" could entail. Does everyone else know that?

What if a user has no idea about "save options". To them "save" might just mean "save". That is, they want to be able to retrieve it later.

If I say to you "Jump!", you might ask "How high?" Others might just jump. Should we enlist some participants in a study and see what most people do? Let's ask people what "save" means. Then let's show them a button and ask them what it means.

Why does some software have an option to "show button text"? Why would anyone want to see text on a button? Why would anyone want that?

I wish there was a way I could post to HN in a series of buttons, like hieroglyphics. It would be "way better" than using words. You could click on them and they would bounce up and down. Way better than reading.

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.