January 22, 2014 at 16:20Cooper Journal: Only one of us is comfortable with your flat design
- Transfer
I have nothing against fashion in interaction design. Honestly. It means that this professional field has figured out the basics of survival and can now afford the luxury of worrying about which scarf to wear this season. And I even think that it’s nice to look at the now fashionable flat design - this is a beautiful thing for the portfolio of those designers who use it.
But like corsets or leg bandages, the extremes of fashion ultimately lose practicality. Let me talk a little about practicality.
In The Design of Everyday Things , Donald Norman points out two kinds of knowledge about how to use one or another thing: information contained in the world and information in the head.
Information in the worldthis is what the user can look at to understand the subject. Map on the wall at the exit of the subway (subway) - information in the world. Address her when you need it, ignore her when you do not need her.
The information in the head is declarative and procedural rules about using things that users remember. That a subway ticket needs to be kept until the end of the trip is information in the head. Woe to the traveler who thought that the ticket was no longer needed and threw it away.
For fans of flat design, skeuomorphismakin to heresy. But it is valuable in that it falls into the first category of recognition (affordance) - this is information in the world. Of course, the interfaces with dermatin and brushed aluminum that Apple has generated are already extremes, which boiled down to meaningless mimicry of the real world. But a button that looks like a thing that you can click with your finger is useful information for the user. This is recognition (affordans), based on the vast experience of living in the real world, filled with physical buttons.
A clean, flat design doesn't just get rid of unnecessary load. It carries the load.What used to be information in the world, information that the interface carried, now - information in the minds of users, information carried by them. This "intra-head" information is easier to get to, but it requires the user to know it, remember and update it. In this version, scroll down or up? Finger swiping (swipe) works? Damn, if you please try and see what happens. The scope of our professional activities is now head over heels in a flat design, and we cleaned out our workplaces, cluttering user brains with memorable manuals for using our visually restrained, charming designs.
And although the podiums of the interaction design now look stunning, I believe that an all-user sigh of relief awaits us when everything starts to roll back a bit (without dermatin, Apple). This is so, food for thought for the new design year.
But like corsets or leg bandages, the extremes of fashion ultimately lose practicality. Let me talk a little about practicality.
In The Design of Everyday Things , Donald Norman points out two kinds of knowledge about how to use one or another thing: information contained in the world and information in the head.
Information in the worldthis is what the user can look at to understand the subject. Map on the wall at the exit of the subway (subway) - information in the world. Address her when you need it, ignore her when you do not need her.
The information in the head is declarative and procedural rules about using things that users remember. That a subway ticket needs to be kept until the end of the trip is information in the head. Woe to the traveler who thought that the ticket was no longer needed and threw it away.
For fans of flat design, skeuomorphismakin to heresy. But it is valuable in that it falls into the first category of recognition (affordance) - this is information in the world. Of course, the interfaces with dermatin and brushed aluminum that Apple has generated are already extremes, which boiled down to meaningless mimicry of the real world. But a button that looks like a thing that you can click with your finger is useful information for the user. This is recognition (affordans), based on the vast experience of living in the real world, filled with physical buttons.
A clean, flat design doesn't just get rid of unnecessary load. It carries the load.What used to be information in the world, information that the interface carried, now - information in the minds of users, information carried by them. This "intra-head" information is easier to get to, but it requires the user to know it, remember and update it. In this version, scroll down or up? Finger swiping (swipe) works? Damn, if you please try and see what happens. The scope of our professional activities is now head over heels in a flat design, and we cleaned out our workplaces, cluttering user brains with memorable manuals for using our visually restrained, charming designs.
And although the podiums of the interaction design now look stunning, I believe that an all-user sigh of relief awaits us when everything starts to roll back a bit (without dermatin, Apple). This is so, food for thought for the new design year.