Keyboard Smörgåsbord

We had skeuomorphism for a few years. Then everyone decided to go flat and abstract. I don't think the obsession with flatness will last more than a few years, though. Sooner or later, something else will come up and we'll all rush to adopt it, users be damned.

Developers tend to have an analytical mindset, and people with analytical mindsets tend to overgeneralize. We find something that works for us in some cases, decide that it's the One True Way (tm), and try to apply the same principle to everything. We defend our choices religiously, blindly pursuing the ideal of purity. If any user dares to admit that they don't understand the reasoning behind our elegant designs, we blame them, not ourselves. PEBCAK, after all.

Then a new trend comes along, and we repeat the cycle all over again.

In fact, the problem does usually exist between the chair and keyboard. Except it's not always the user's keyboard and the user's chair. Sometimes it's between our keyboards and our chairs.

I find these long articles about such tiny details odd - extremely nit-picky and ultimately pointless.

Granted this is only based on personal experience and the experiences of people I know. Basically people figure out the shift key in less than ten seconds and it's not an issue.

Is this really a big deal for people? It looks nice and it works well, who cares?

It seems like you can always arbitrarily argue that a certain design decision is better than some alternative - it feels more like bullshit than science.

>More than two years have passed since the 2013 WWDC when iOS 7's flattened and utterly illegible software keyboard first saw the light of day.

Sometimes I think I'm the only person who feels flat is a dream come true. I've been waiting for this style to be mainstream for almost a decade.

I never really figured it out.

Also, it's the job of the UI to tell the user what is going on.

So no, it doesn't work, and it would be easy to make it work. Just give it a glow or a color, like the old keyboard did.

If something else looks fine as well and works better, why not use that?

For first-time or occasional users things like that can get needlessly annoying, and if "it's just a tiny detail" is applied to everything, it quickly leads to "death by a thousand paper-cuts".

So yes, most people probably don't care about it, but IMHO good UX design should care about tiny details and look into small effects.