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In defence of skeumorphism
Skeumorphic is now a dirty word. Flat design is in. But skeumorphism it still has its uses.
Lets take a look at the new Twitterific iPhone app. It has a ‘modern’ flat look. But look at the action tray:
I have a problem clicking the buttons because I don’t know what the clickable area is. There’s no way to tell want my margin of error is. It makes me think for a split second more. It doesn’t matter whether the clickable area is actually bigger or smaller. The fact that I perceive it to be smaller is bad enough because it forces me to think. That’s bad enough.
On Tweetbot, the clickable area is pretty obvious:
You know which part of the UI can be pressed (affordance). You know how exactly how it will react. Making things more obvious, even if it’s a split second difference in reaction time, makes a big difference.
Flat design is an ok trend. I actually like it. But anything taken to the extreme can be bad. On one hand, overloading an interface with needless details such as torn paper in a calendar can distract and restrict, but we should not swing to the other extreme either.
Stripping away ALL skeumorphism can be just as bad as faux leather. Switches and buttons translate well into GUIs because they accurately communicated affordances.
This looks promising for prototyping. Drag and drop interface builder that uses Twitter Bootstrap. Export responsive interfaces to HTML/CSS.
This is a prime example of novel interaction and visual design, but terrible UX.
My fiancé and I are considering this place for our wedding. I’m terrible with directions so I use Google Maps or Gothere.sg a lot. For White Rabbit, I just want to find out where it’s located. I’m frustrated because it took me longer than usual. Problems I encountered in my use case:
- ‘Find me’ – I was looking for ‘Contact Me’ or ‘Location’, which is usually what other restaurants use.
- Location information was hidden. I literally had to do a treasure hunt for the location info.
- The info was displayed as an image. I couldn’t highlight it to copy it to google maps.
- But hey! There’s a link – ‘Click here to view the map’ – Let me click on that. Oh wait, that only shows a static image map. I still can’t copy and paste the text into Google Maps.
Don’t make me think. I want the location info and I want it now.
Update
Google extracts the contact info for you. Neat.
Sometimes people ask me about how I created my little media empire. This is how.
Ira spent 20 years working at NPR before he started This American Life. Twenty years making mistakes, learning from them, thinking about what he’d do with his own show. When he started This Life, NPR turned him down. After 20 years. Told him to do it on his own. So he went out and won some fucking Peabodys.
The day Ira told me he enjoyed a particular episode of my stupid comedy podcast that I didn’t even know he’d every heard of much less listened to was one of the proudest days of my life. For serious.
And speaking of serious: SERIOUSLY, MAKE YOUR THING.
Looks downright sexy.
