RS Wood
2017-09-05 17:37:58 UTC
Finally, a study confirms the patently obvious: this design trend needs
to die in a fire. ("design for the sake of design.") I'm not a huge
fan of Windows software, but Windows XP UI was perfectly usable, I
thought, and it's gotten worse since then. On a recent Win10 install I
found the calculator app (an extremely flat design) to be one of the
ugliest things I've seen in software: just about as bad as Motif stuff
from early Unix GUI days (which was excoriated for its ugliness).
Screw Win for inventing it and Apple for making the rest of the world
copy it.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/05/flat_uis_designs_are_22_per_cent_slower_official/
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The mania is credited to Microsoft with its minimalistic Zune player,
an iPod clone, which was developed into the Windows Phone Series UX,
which in turn became the design for Windows from Windows 8 in 2012
onwards. But Steve Jobs is also to blame. The typography-besotted Apple
founder was fascinated by WP's "magazine-style" Metro design, and it
was posthumously incorporated into iOS7 in 2013. Once blessed by Apple,
flat designs spread to electronic programme guides on telly, games
consoles and even car interfaces. And of course web sites.
Flat designs looked "cleaner" and more "modern" (Microsoft's subsequent
portmanteau term for its Metro design), but there was a price to pay.
The consequence is that users find navigation harder, and so spend more
time on a page. Now research by the Nielsen Norman Group has measured
by how much. The company wired up 71 users, and gave them nine sites to
use, tracking their eye movement and recording the time spent on
content.
"On average participants spent 22 per cent more time (i.e. slower task
performance) looking at the pages with weak signifiers," the firm
notes. Why would that be? Users were looking for clues how to navigate.
"The average number of fixations was significantly higher on the
weak-signifier versions than the strong-signifier versions. On average,
people had 25 per cent more fixations on the pages with weak
signifiers."
The firm dispenses with the counter-argument that users were "more
engaged" with the page.
"Since this experiment used targeted findability tasks, more time and
effort spent looking around the page are not good. These findings don't
mean that users were more 'engaged' with the pages. Instead, they
suggest that participants struggled to locate the element they wanted,
or weren't confident when they first saw it."
//--clip
to die in a fire. ("design for the sake of design.") I'm not a huge
fan of Windows software, but Windows XP UI was perfectly usable, I
thought, and it's gotten worse since then. On a recent Win10 install I
found the calculator app (an extremely flat design) to be one of the
ugliest things I've seen in software: just about as bad as Motif stuff
from early Unix GUI days (which was excoriated for its ugliness).
Screw Win for inventing it and Apple for making the rest of the world
copy it.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/05/flat_uis_designs_are_22_per_cent_slower_official/
//--clip
The mania is credited to Microsoft with its minimalistic Zune player,
an iPod clone, which was developed into the Windows Phone Series UX,
which in turn became the design for Windows from Windows 8 in 2012
onwards. But Steve Jobs is also to blame. The typography-besotted Apple
founder was fascinated by WP's "magazine-style" Metro design, and it
was posthumously incorporated into iOS7 in 2013. Once blessed by Apple,
flat designs spread to electronic programme guides on telly, games
consoles and even car interfaces. And of course web sites.
Flat designs looked "cleaner" and more "modern" (Microsoft's subsequent
portmanteau term for its Metro design), but there was a price to pay.
The consequence is that users find navigation harder, and so spend more
time on a page. Now research by the Nielsen Norman Group has measured
by how much. The company wired up 71 users, and gave them nine sites to
use, tracking their eye movement and recording the time spent on
content.
"On average participants spent 22 per cent more time (i.e. slower task
performance) looking at the pages with weak signifiers," the firm
notes. Why would that be? Users were looking for clues how to navigate.
"The average number of fixations was significantly higher on the
weak-signifier versions than the strong-signifier versions. On average,
people had 25 per cent more fixations on the pages with weak
signifiers."
The firm dispenses with the counter-argument that users were "more
engaged" with the page.
"Since this experiment used targeted findability tasks, more time and
effort spent looking around the page are not good. These findings don't
mean that users were more 'engaged' with the pages. Instead, they
suggest that participants struggled to locate the element they wanted,
or weren't confident when they first saw it."
//--clip
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RS Wood <***@therandymon.com>
RS Wood <***@therandymon.com>