this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2024
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I'd argue that designers don't even understand why they use Flat design in ui's. The purpose, as you said, is to reduce clutter. However designers don't understand this and remove all context from all UI elements. What is interactive and what is static is no longer discernable.
I'm writing this in Thunder and nothing in Thunder's UI shows any distinction between text that is interactive and text that is only text. You have to click the screen at random to see what happens.
Because of this, I'd argue that Skewmorphism is better because we have had 10 years of bad UI showing that designers do not know how to apply Flat design principles.
Skewmorphism is like garbage collection for programmers. A programming language doesn't need it and is faster without it but too many programmers for too long have shown they can't be trusted to write clean code.
I'd agree with everything you say about designers choosing to use flat designs without understanding the point. It's definitely overdone and this becomes a problem.
But your argument for skeuomorphism is a huge stretch. We had ten years of skeuomorphism also showing it just straight doesn't work in a lot of places. It becomes overloaded and hard to read.
But you're comparing it to absolute off the deep end applications of the opposite. Why not somewhere in the middle? The entire argument you make for it is just that "well people understood what was click able etc" which is literally just basic design principles and nothing to do with skeuomorphism uniquely.
Why can't we just expect UX people to do their jobs correctly? Why throw the baby out with the bath water in order to get a different baby we know has other issues?
We had 30 years of skeuomorphism starting with the Mac in 1984 and it always worked although suboptimal. Flat can be better but when not done right it's worse than skeu. I personally would rather have a UI that is more cluttered but always discoverable over a UI that isn't always obvious.
We can't expect UX people to do their jobs in the same way we can't expect programmers to do their job correctly.