6 ms·

Why I'm No Metrosexual

93 points by ziyadb 14y ago

rco8786 14y ago
Is it just me or is the font size on that blog really, really small?
- dbrian 14y ago
  Ah yes, reading about UI design flaws on blog with horrible UI design flaws. The irony... it burns.
radarsat1 14y ago
Note that he's referring to Norman's use of the word "affordance," more correctly referred to as "perceived affordance." Both are important concepts in design. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance
stephengillie 14y ago
That's a lot of buildup just to say you feel the interface to be unintuitive. We know how to interact with different items because of experience and common signals -- not all door handles are alike, but different interpretations of the 2 major types (knob and lever) are similar enough to visually signal to us their probable use-case (opening a portal in the wall). Similarly, I could go on about how the "stop, wait, go lights" at the top of windows in OSX are counterintuitive because they are in the same location as their Windows counterpart, but have different functions. It's not intuitive because the same visual signals provide different outcomes.
- troebr 14y ago
  Exactly how I felt, not to say that it wasn't well written, but it sure takes long to get to the point of this article.
marknutter 14y ago
I think the issue is that one shouldn't go too far in the direction of skeumorphism or too far away from it. Most people are comfortable with some level of skeumorphism because it can be a powerful usability enhancement. As I type this I'm looking at the "add comment" button below here on Hacker News, and wouldn't you know it, it's got a slight gradient giving it a bevel, suggesting it's occupying 3-dimensional space and can be pushed like a button. Of course this can be taken too far. When too many skeumorphic accents are added to a design it can cause it to be rigid and noisy. As the OP mentions, if you go too far from skeumorphism you run contrary to how the human brain works. My favorite user interface designs usually have a very tasteful and well placed set of skeumorphic elements with an overall minimalist design. Tactile, not tacky.
zv 14y ago
Another rant about Metro interface. Can we please stop it already, it's just beating a dead horse. Sure, Windows 8 is kind of beta quality, just like Vista was. On a side note, comparing with door handles is just wrong. We already have a generation who grew up with idea of abstract controls. We have a save button which mostly looks like floppy button. How many 16 year olds know what floppy is?
- wildranter 14y ago
  Not many, and that's a good thing. The floppy icon only didn't represent well the abstract act of saving files. As it turns out it's just plain better present to users a button with the clear text inside, save. Or completely remove it from the UI, and do auto save for users. On a side note, Windows 8 is beta as were: windows vista, winxp pre sp3, win2k, win millennium, win98, win95, win 3.x, and previous. Microsoft had only two versions of Windows that were really usable, stable, and fast: WinNT 4, and Win7.
  - lmm 14y ago
    I get frustrated when things move from text to icons. E.g. gmail (at least on android). Studies have shown that text buttons like "mark as spam" are more usable; I wish google would listen.
lini 14y ago
Nobody is born with the skills to open a door or push a button. I have a <1yr old that still can't do either of those. That is something you learn. Metro is just a different type of UI that you might want to learn. "Can I click on all those tiles?" - if you try to touch or click them, you will quickly see a 3D effect that mimics that of a push button (tile scales to 97.5% of its size similar to a pushed button). After that you will quickly learn that you can interact with tiles.
- nodata 14y ago
  But a physical button has a shape or appearance that makes it look like something to push. It's learnable. The author is making the point that Metro has zero visual clues, it's not learnable. You don't know which tiles you can interact with until you try and interact with them.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
    >But a physical button has a shape or appearance that makes it look like something to push. It's learnable. And there are also plenty of things that looked like buttons when I was little, that I thought you could push. But you couldn't. I don't really buy this argument.
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  But that then creates an expectation that "anything in a square box can be clicked on" which is going to make life difficult if you want to design an app but now you can't use square boxes for pure information display.
  - pilgrim689 14y ago
    These are called style guidelines and iOS has them too [1]. If you don't adhere to some of them, you won't even get your app in the App Store. So you need to design your app in an "iOS" way, just like here Windows Phone devs should design in a Windows Phone way. http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/userexperience/conceptual/mobilehig/Introduction/Introduction.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40006556-CH1-SW1 http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/userex...
kolektiv 14y ago
A little OT, but it does make me chuckle when you read this on a blog with little to no visual affordances. The title and the date are both permalinks, but there's no indication until you mouse over to check. That's fine - for the sake of cleanliness it's an acceptable trade off. And also, importantly, we've learnt that they probably are. Consistency is also important. Whether people will learn Metro successfully (statistically) etc. is yet to be seen I guess, but it's more complex than this.
- ajanuary 14y ago
  I agree that it's a tradeoff. Though one thing that differentiates them is that the systems we learnt about titles and dates being typically interactable had mouse pointers. I can't quite express why, but it feels less annoying to mouse over something and discover it's interactable (via a change in the mouse cursor) than to stab at text on the screen. I guess one is a more passive "will this do something if I interact with it" while the other is a more proactive "I'll try to interact with this and see if it works". One results in a yes or no answer, while the other results in a failed action, which seems more frustrating to me. That all just goes to show that, as you said, it's more complex than simply missing affordances = unusable UI.
jwineinger 14y ago
Says the guy with the black and white blog. ZING
- littlespark 14y ago
  HEYOOOOO!
VMG 14y ago
Nah, I don't buy it. These kinds of things are easily learned. Web links don't have depth and we all learned pretty fast that we can click them (in some instances they don't even have to be underlined)
- pixxa 14y ago
  Most Desktop web browsers provide quite many affordances for links, and do so automatically upon hover: change cursor, underline, pop up link description, show URL in status area. Touch UIs can't have these "introspective" affordances because hover is not practical in a touch-based UI. Even with all these affordances, if a Web UI didn't distinguish a link from other content visually, it would make for a difficult interface to traverse.
  - king_jester 14y ago
    Very much this, hyperlinks are visually distinct elements in pure HTML and get color and style change (underline) to indicate the link. One of my biggest pet peeves are sites that alter link style in CSS so that it loses those kinds of visual clues and makes it harder to know what can or cannot be clicked.
- mitchellbryson 14y ago
  Depth in this context is relative (affordance is a better term btw). A boldness in a sea of un-bold text is something worth investigating (affords something...), with your mouse, or just your eyes - then you can determine from the text whether you might want to click it or not. This is why it's common to underline links or change colour. You can't make a link the same as normal text and expect a user to learn which words you've used for links. The point is we already know these things by intuition, we shouldn't have to learn them. "Don't make me think" - Steve Krug
recoiledsnake 14y ago
The flip side is that interfaces have tended too much towards faux 3d on a superflat 2d screen and also ignoring that the UI can be "authentically digital" instead of being tied down to analog equivalents. I find the author's analysis very simplistic. Also, this is just about mostly about the buttons and links which can probably be fixed easily in the future. Metro is much much more than that, Metro also removes a lot of unnecessary chrome like lines around menus etc. and reducing visual clutter which are very important on mobile devices where you're looking for actual information in a pinch on-the-go. The codeword for this is "Content over Chrome". Android(starting with ICS) also is trending a bit towards Metro in things like the weather app, Google Now and the overall designed aesthetic. https://lh4.ggpht.com/p-eZmyce7_T2-_eOwltQxU6glPj6f53kDXvDvN8GPzRZXY4qe_pxHBdmXmtJeyRIZ8qA https://lh4.ggpht.com/p-eZmyce7_T2-_eOwltQxU6glPj6f53kDXvDvN... Anyone see the similarities between this[1] from 20 years ago and the iPhone UI + every other mobile OS including Android, Palm, Windows Mobile < 7, Blackberry, Meego, Firefox OS etc.? [1] http://img.tfd.com/cde/_PROGMAN.GIF http://img.tfd.com/cde/_PROGMAN.GIF Here's more information if you're interested in the design philosophy behind Metro written by an actual designer who designed Metro like content for his clients' websites. The principles of Microsoft Metro UI decoded http://www.riagenic.com/archives/487 http://www.riagenic.com/archives/487 Going full Metro. http://www.riagenic.com/archives/493 http://www.riagenic.com/archives/493 Things you ought to know when designing metro screens http://www.riagenic.com/archives/526 http://www.riagenic.com/archives/526 Hopefully all this results in better UIs in the future instead of the tired old jaded WIMP interface and Desktop on mobile yet again with some added touch features and I think Microsoft has taken a good first step here to shake things up.
- tagada 14y ago
  the author missed the paradigm shifting ... He still thing that shadows and transparency are what make an UI usable ... huh. There is a lot more affordance in modern UI like Metro than in old school static "3D" UI with reliefs and shadows like we all know in Windows, Mac or Linux ... When you hover something which is interactive, it tells you that it can interact, how, and what for. This is affordance. While shadows are just ... nothing.
- erikpukinskis 14y ago
Killah911 14y ago
Why the need to use "Metrosexual" reference? A little sensationalist isn't it?
- oellegaard 14y ago
  Very sensational. I dislike these kind of posts that get to the frontpage because of their title, rather than the actual content :( If the content is good enough, please put something related to that in the title.
- 16s 14y ago
  Agreed. This has nothing to do with the term "metrosexual". "Metrosexual is a neologism, derived from metropolitan and heterosexual, coined in 1994 describing a man (especially one living in an urban, post-industrial, capitalist culture) who is especially meticulous about his grooming and appearance" - Source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrosexual http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrosexual
  - kyro 14y ago
    I'm very well aware of the term and would consider myself a metrosexual in some ways. It was just a play on words.
    - jessedhillon 14y ago
      Yes, but not a very relevant (or clever) one. Just because two words can go together doesn't make it a fit for the article's title. Something about Metropolis would probably have been better, as in, not being a denizen of the city of Metro. Also, if you actually do consider yourself to be metro, then it's even more out of place.
  - mseebach 14y ago
    Wikipedia quotes the dictionary incorrectly. It refers to a heterosexual man, yes, but the "-sexual" postfix comes from homosexual. It's meant as a put down to straight guys acting gay.
untog 14y ago
And to add to the confusion, why are there different sized tiles? Why on earth would that be confusing? When I see a double door next to a normal sized door I don't freak out and try to break down the wall instead. I get the point being made in the article, but I don't quite buy it. I don't think that people understand they can press app icons on the iPhone because they have raised shadows around them, I think they press them because they are visually eyecatching and surrounded by areas that are not. There are many different visual cues out there, and people adapt to new ones all the time.
- lnanek2 14y ago
  Honestly, consistency is a much prized and proven way to help users navigate an interface. If they see things where and how they expect, they can navigate through easier, find buttons and actions easier, etc.. It's also prized in design and aesthetics. Designers (and even the Android design site) recommend designing to a grid to get a uniform, nice looking appearance. So altering the size of the tiles is considered bad from a UI and appearance perspective.
  - untog 14y ago
    Funny, because Windows Phone 7 had very static tile sizes (there was one double-width one), wheras 8 allows a large variety of sizes. They do still fit a consistent grid, though- they're all half or double size another. Android widgets, by comparison, can often be very weird dimensions, and have very different designs that look ugly when combined.
  - belorn 14y ago
    Consistency is not just to avoid confusion and make things easier. Inconsistency is a direct source for irritation and annoyance. Its very easy to see if you give a computer worker a different keyboard setup (that is, other than qwerty or even just a slightly modified version). It drives people nut!
- scott_s 14y ago
  But why are the titles different sizes? There may be no reason beyond aesthetics, but that's his point: differing sizes often conveys information, and even if it does not, it takes effort on our part to realize that size differences does not imply functionality difference. And if I did see a double-door immediately next to a normal sized door, I would wonder why that was set up like that. Is one the emergency exit? Is one the freight-entrance?
xradionut 14y ago
It's yet another rant, but there's a deeper problem with GUI "thrash" at Microsoft. One example is Outlook. The interface changed in 2010 and again in 2013. This causes confusion and doubt amoung users and distrust from IT and the folks that write the checks. Is the new software really better, or are the folks in Redmond just remodeling the interface to sell "new" versions?
- mitchellbryson 14y ago
  I hope they're that smart. But I have a feeling they're just changing so often because they don't have any confidence in their abilities to design a good UI. On this basis, Metro has a couple of years before we see something completely different.
lnanek2 14y ago
Honestly, Android's newer holo theming suffers the same exact problems. I've watched countless users and received support emails where people just don't *ing notice/try/use the action items in the new action bar pattern we're all supposed to be using. This pattern has us place very sparsely decorated icons in the top bar, generally without even text. Tons of users completely miss them vs. big, chrome, 3D styled, pushable-looking buttons on the bottom of an app. Even worse, the icons aren't supposed to have text and users are supposed to know to long press on them to find out what exactly they do. I've never in my life seen a user do that. I emailed a Google Dev Advocate about all this, asking if they actually had statistics and user studies to back up this new direction they are taking the UI, if it actually helped users in the metrics or was just designers trying to make things look pretty without actually helping. No answer.
- drivebyacct2 14y ago
  In that case, I'll start thanking God everytime I open my phone that Duarte gets his say and not idiot users.
- RivieraKid 14y ago
  100% agree with the icons without labels. Do you have an idea how to solve this?
  - king_jester 14y ago
    You can provide labels with action bar action items inline instead of just relying on a long press to get a popup hint by using android:showAsAction="ifRoom|withText" on any menu item in the menu XML. You can also do this programmatically. The big downside to this is that one phone devices you basically will only be able to show 1 action item with an overflow menu since you'll run out of space with just the first action item. The best work around is to make actions very obvious based on the icon used for the action item. You could also consider moving non-obvious UI behaviors into the main content of the page where there is more room for labeling.
ian00 14y ago
It appears his "thesis" is half way through: "It’s because our eyes know we’re in a 3D world. We can detect light sources, and degrees of shading, and depth. And without any of these, we’d be absolutely lost." My first thought: I'm reading English text, with no shading or depth, and it seems to be a pretty effective form of communication. tldr: the article is hyperbolic garbage.
richardlblair 14y ago
/begin nerd rage/ For the love of god, why the hell is your font 11px?? What the hell are you thinking?? You know how many people here would have had to zoom in?? Are you new to the internet?? /end nerd rage/
- Lagged2Death 14y ago
  I zoomed. I think your criticism is valid.
  - Retric 14y ago
    11px should be readable by default. If you zoomed you should change your default settings or get your eyes checked. Edit: I would also like to point out that HN uses font-size:10pt see: http://ycombinator.com/news.css http://ycombinator.com/news.css
    - Lagged2Death 14y ago
      I would also like to point out that HN uses font-size:10pt... The 10pt text here on Hacker News is much bigger than the 11px text on that blog. My browser allows me to edit the blog's source and reload; 11pt text on there looks fine. ... get your eyes checked This is a terrible, terrible attitude.
      - Retric 14y ago
        Actually, it's not that uncommon a problem. I had a user in there mid 50 who kept complaining about the fonts in a custom application. Turns out he was having vision issues and after getting some reading glasses he stopped having any issues. PS: I have a high resolution screen and changed my default zoom the make the vast majority of websites readable. True, it would be nice if websites stuck with readable percentage based fonts, but until then it's an easy change. And, IMO far more productive than complaining on HN which the author might not even read.
    - richardlblair 14y ago
pxlpshr 14y ago
There's very little I like about Metro, but I do like that Microsoft is focusing on the total user experience across all its products. Perhaps they need to divide the company into 3 components — consumer (win metro / tablet / phone), enterprise (win office / office suite / .NET), entertainment (xbox). I've been a Microsoft fanboy [1] but just find very little about Windows that I love anymore. I understand they are trying to be visually different from OSX, but I'm not sure this is the right direction. OSX hasn't deviated from 'windows-based' app management and Metro makes its history as Windows almost unrecognizable. As a power user with 2 monitors usually running 2x or 4x in split or quad view, I don't see a UI that will be more adaptable for efficiency and multitasking. iOS handles it very poorly. [1] DOS > Win 3.1 > 95 > 98/ME > NT > 2000 > Windows XP > .. converted to Apple ..
vetler 14y ago
I haven't used Metro, so I'll wait to judge how usable it is, but I love the fact that they've gone their own way, and not created an iOS/Android lookalike. The blog post feels too negative, and gives the impression that it's written by an older man that dislikes breaking with the norm - though his points are probably valid.
steve8918 14y ago
I agree. I played around with the Surface RT for over 30 mins at a Microsoft store with the intention of buying it for my parents for Christmas, and I walked away because even I couldn't effectively figure out what the "rules" were for interacting with Metro. I'm sure if I gave it more time, I could, but there is no way my parents, who still use XP, would be able to figure it out. I wasn't sure what I needed to do to get to the "Desktop" mode where it looked like Windows 7, or how to flip back and forth, and which things I could swipe, etc. I felt like it was a big mess because a lot of the UI features that we've come to expect were not there. In contrast, the iPhone and subsequently the iPad were intuitive right off the bat. To be fair, I'm seeing a lot of this terrible UI experience in other things as well. For example, on Chrome when you are reading a PDF, if you want to save it or zoom, it's not obvious how to do it. You need to miraculously hover over the bottom right corner and then the buttons show themselves, but there are no visual cues indicating that that's what you're supposed to do. It's fancy, but terrible UI. The same thing occurs on Facebook, where people are just expected to know where to hover in order to show functionality. I don't know where this trend came from, but it's terrible, and I think this article is showing an extension of how we are moving away from all the visual cues and things we've learned about UX in the past 30 years. Sure, it's different but it doesn't mean it's better, especially when it forced people to hunt, peck, and guess for functionality, something that UX is supposed to get rid of.
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
  >I wasn't sure what I needed to do to get to the "Desktop" mode where it looked like Windows 7 Really? I suppose you could have difficulty with it, but the "Desktop" tile is quite clearly visible...
- 32bitkid 14y ago
  anecdotally, my mom really likes Windows RT. Watching her use the traditional start menu, or attempting to navigate Windows Explorer to find something is an exercise in pain. She, honestly, really enjoys the full screen start menu -- easier to find the app she wants to start --, the WinRT full screen apps -- doesn't have to remember/think about window/application life cycle management. It pretty much works the way that she wanted Windows XP to work in the first place. When I use Windows 8, on the other hand, I spend 99% of my time on the desktop, and the transition to a full screen start menu/screen is pretty jarring. But, honestly, as far as the new UI paradigms go, its not that much of a mess... Try watching a Windows user try to use a OSX for the first time. Or vice versa. Or a mac user trying to use KDE. I think the real world analogy of the OP is a bit flawed. Babies don't instinctually know how to open a door, that is not something we are genetically programmed for. They learn by watching other people do it, and you learn by trying. There is a low penalty for trying to failing to open a door correctly -- sometimes you push instead of pull -- and that is the point of a good user interface. Does Windows 8 succeed at that? Perhaps, but its not a disaster. A disaster would be a door that killed you if you tried to open it incorrectly.
speednoise 14y ago
This line of argument always jumps right from rods and cones to perceived affordances without ever making the case that there's a significant gain to perceived affordances from mocked up depth. If this is so uncontroversially true, surely someone has done a study you can link.
pixxa 14y ago
Jacob Nielsen details many of the usability issues of Metro design, see Flat Style Reduces Discoverability in http://www.useit.com/alertbox/windows-8.html http://www.useit.com/alertbox/windows-8.html . At the highest level, Metro design feels like a case of design overgeneralization. It tries at once to apply the same look & feel principles in Touch, Desktop, and Web context. Jack of Many Trades, Master of None.
- mnicole 14y ago
  Reduced discoverability is the exact issue XBOX Live's interface has had since they updated it -- it's harder to differentiate between content I've paid for, their internal marketing and external advertisements to the point where I deliberately avoid them and just use the XBOX button modal to navigate. There's no rhyme or reason for the element sizing, outside of [apparently] making all of the stuff that's actually relevant to me the smallest.
cooldeal 14y ago
I wish Apple was the one that came up with Metro and not Microsoft. If it did, then many tech pundits with high readership like Gruber, Siegler et. al. would be posting endless analysis of how Apple shook up the UI paradigm to make a great new UI instead of going with the same old icons, toolbars and docks and how everyone else is copying them with sparse UI. That would've led tech minded folks to give Metro more credit than all this upvoted noise with link bait headlines on the tech blogs with flimsy analysis of only about how it sucks and nothing about the good parts like "content over chrome" or "authentically digital". I think Metro is in some ways becoming victim of tech partisanship, you can absolutely love your iPad, have an Android tablet with ICS(I do), but still recognize some good UI work being done by Microsoft. Edit: Something like the following post would've definitely made the HN front page if it was iMetro or even if it was Google that did it with Android. http://www.riagenic.com/archives/487 http://www.riagenic.com/archives/487
- lazerwalker 14y ago
  I feel that the complete lack of distinction between clickable/tappable tiles and non-interactive ones is a very real problem, and not unlike the sort of thing that pundits have skewered Apple for in the past (the overly-ornate skeuomorphic-esque visual designs of Calendar / Contacts / Game Center, for example). That being said, I think there's definitely some truth there for a lot of the other Metro hatred. More and more modern iOS apps have a flat UI style that isn't unlike Metro, but you don't see people giving them shit for it.
  - MatthewPhillips 14y ago
    There are no non-interactive tiles in Windows 8 or Windows Phone.
    - indiecore 14y ago
      I really think that a very simple gradient or a 1 pixel wide white/black(depending on background) border around the edges of all interactable elements would go a long long way to fixing this issue without breaking up the UI too much, it might even expand it because just having that distinction gives you another "word" in your visual vocabulary. *edit: Changed "buttons" to "elements"
marze 14y ago
It was 2002 when the last competent UI engineer left Microsoft, none of this is a surprise.
MatthewPhillips 14y ago
Couldn't disagree more. We know that things are clickable when they are verbs or icons that are well-established synonyms for verbs. Gradient isn't a substitute for being explicit.
OzzyOsbourne 14y ago
Slightly OT: "The Rods... so sensitive that they can be triggered by single photon" This sort of thing is why I love HN. Irrespective of the topic, there is always some little gem I find somewhere. I was very sceptical of this claim, so I looked it up. Turns out it is possible: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Quantum/see_a_photon.html http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Quantum/see_a_photon.h... http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10800676 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10800676 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1281447/?page=1 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1281447/?page=1
kenjackson 14y ago
The author doesn't get it. A lot of the way users know what to click is based on consistency. If it's a tile on the start screen you can click it. Want to print? It's always in the same place? Want to share? Same place. Want to close an app? Always the same way? Want to see more options for an app? The same way. Now within the app one could argue there is a stronger need for affordances, but even there I've yet to encounter a single problem in my use of several Win8 apps. I find the Win8 interface a lot more intuitive than the OSX interface. But I'm sure others would find the opposite. I suspect a lot depends on your starting point and your predisposition. My four year son figured out most of the Win8 interface in about 5 minutes (literally... at the MS store he was flying through the UI much better than I'd ever seen him with Win7 and a mouse).
- bad_user 14y ago
  On my iPad, my 2-year old is able to unlock the screen, go to Home in case any app is active and then open his favorite 2 apps (a simple game for toddlers and a painting app). That's not saying much though, he just did what all kids do ... tried things out and quickly memorized what worked and it was easy and fun for him to do so because of the touch-screen. He also taught me some shortcuts I had no idea were available, like how to do multitasking by switching between active apps or how to split the on-screen keyword into 2 smaller pieces :-) In general, kids can learn by trial and error quite efficiently, sometimes in a matter of minutes or seconds and shouldn't be used as a benchmark for how intuitive an interface is, because all that really says about an interface is that it can be learned by trial and error by kinds. Regular WIMP interfaces are indeed not intuitive for kids because the interface is often exposed through hierarchical menus that can't be explored by children who can't read.
  - kenjackson 14y ago
    In general, kids can learn by trial and error quite efficiently, sometimes in a matter of minutes or seconds and shouldn't be used as a benchmark for how intuitive an interface is, That seems like a great benchmark to me. If trial and error gives feedback that allows you to qiuckly learn the UI then that's pretty useful. At the end of the day a lot of usability is about two things: 1. Consistency 2. Familiarity If trial and error is effective then consistency is in place. Skeumorphism is about taking familiarity of the real world and applying it to the digital world. And this actually has some use, in particular for UI that users won't interact with much. There's no chance for users to be become familiar with that UI. But for UI that is always there, skeumorphism becomes limiting and can become unusable when you really want to extend beyond what you see in the real world. Metro says, "The digital world is becoming so prevelant that we should optimize for it, not just the physical world." Is Metro perfect? No. But I think it has the right idea to figure out what works on computers/tablets/phones first. Don't be encumbered by trying to map to physical objects. People will spend so much time with the digital objects that they may spend 10m doing trial and error the first time, but shortly the digital world will be just as familiar as the physical world. Lets not waste the opportunity to introduce the right interactions.
pilgrim689 14y ago
Our ancestors did not own smartphones, so the broad evolution argument is kind of garbage. User interfaces need to be researched before we can make conclusions on skeuomorphism vs "pure digital". Furthermore, the author talks about affordances and how Metro has none. This is false. Anything that can be touched on the screen reacts to your touch. For example, if you're scrolling down the main menu and your finger happens to press down on a tile, the tile will be "pushed inwards" at the point of contact (even if you haven't released your finger). It's very subtle, but it definitely lets your subconscious know that in the future, if you would want to press that thing, you can. Now it's not an immediate affordance like a door knob, but a touch screen in itself is an affordance for touching, and once you touch then the other affordances reveal themselves.
nnq 14y ago
Metro is pulling things in the right direction I think. Hyper-skeumorphism did immense harm in the hands of copy-style designers, allowing them to justify their unoriginality through "I can copy that because it's actually copying a real-life object, you can't be unoriginal if you copy physical reality, all great artists did it" reasoning. It's better to concentrate on the axis between obscene skeumorphism and uberminimalistic full-flatness then to pick on any one of the extremes as they are obviously flawed. Take for example the whole crop of metro-style Bootstrap themes and pick an UI interaction element like the buttons, to see an example of a scale of designs between decent micro-skeumorphism and full-flatness. This one http://bootswatch.com/cosmo/#buttons http://bootswatch.com/cosmo/#buttons or this one http://talkslab.github.com/metro-bootstrap/basecss.html#buttons http://talkslab.github.com/metro-bootstrap/basecss.html#butt... sport full-flat microsft style buttons, with no hints of possible interaction, while others like http://inprogress.neuronq.ro/madmin/ http://inprogress.neuronq.ro/madmin/ show subtle hints of skeumorphism (you can probably google for many other more or less metrofied bootstraps...)
uvTwitch 14y ago
Pretty sure this guy only wrote the article so he could use that great witty zinger of a headline he'd thought up. Not gonna waste my time reading design critique by someone using an 0.002pt font on their blog.

93 points by ziyadb 14y ago

rco8786 14y ago

Is it just me or is the font size on that blog really, really small?

dbrian 14y ago
Ah yes, reading about UI design flaws on blog with horrible UI design flaws. The irony... it burns.

radarsat1 14y ago

Note that he's referring to Norman's use of the word "affordance," more correctly referred to as "perceived affordance." Both are important concepts in design. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance

stephengillie 14y ago

That's a lot of buildup just to say you feel the interface to be unintuitive. We know how to interact with different items because of experience and common signals -- not all door handles are alike, but different interpretations of the 2 major types (knob and lever) are similar enough to visually signal to us their probable use-case (opening a portal in the wall). Similarly, I could go on about how the "stop, wait, go lights" at the top of windows in OSX are counterintuitive because they are in the same location as their Windows counterpart, but have different functions. It's not intuitive because the same visual signals provide different outcomes.

troebr 14y ago
Exactly how I felt, not to say that it wasn't well written, but it sure takes long to get to the point of this article.

marknutter 14y ago

I think the issue is that one shouldn't go too far in the direction of skeumorphism or too far away from it. Most people are comfortable with some level of skeumorphism because it can be a powerful usability enhancement. As I type this I'm looking at the "add comment" button below here on Hacker News, and wouldn't you know it, it's got a slight gradient giving it a bevel, suggesting it's occupying 3-dimensional space and can be pushed like a button. Of course this can be taken too far. When too many skeumorphic accents are added to a design it can cause it to be rigid and noisy. As the OP mentions, if you go too far from skeumorphism you run contrary to how the human brain works. My favorite user interface designs usually have a very tasteful and well placed set of skeumorphic elements with an overall minimalist design. Tactile, not tacky.

zv 14y ago

Another rant about Metro interface. Can we please stop it already, it's just beating a dead horse. Sure, Windows 8 is kind of beta quality, just like Vista was. On a side note, comparing with door handles is just wrong. We already have a generation who grew up with idea of abstract controls. We have a save button which mostly looks like floppy button. How many 16 year olds know what floppy is?

wildranter 14y ago
Not many, and that's a good thing. The floppy icon only didn't represent well the abstract act of saving files. As it turns out it's just plain better present to users a button with the clear text inside, save. Or completely remove it from the UI, and do auto save for users. On a side note, Windows 8 is beta as were: windows vista, winxp pre sp3, win2k, win millennium, win98, win95, win 3.x, and previous. Microsoft had only two versions of Windows that were really usable, stable, and fast: WinNT 4, and Win7.
- lmm 14y ago
  I get frustrated when things move from text to icons. E.g. gmail (at least on android). Studies have shown that text buttons like "mark as spam" are more usable; I wish google would listen.

lini 14y ago

Nobody is born with the skills to open a door or push a button. I have a <1yr old that still can't do either of those. That is something you learn. Metro is just a different type of UI that you might want to learn. "Can I click on all those tiles?" - if you try to touch or click them, you will quickly see a 3D effect that mimics that of a push button (tile scales to 97.5% of its size similar to a pushed button). After that you will quickly learn that you can interact with tiles.

nodata 14y ago
But a physical button has a shape or appearance that makes it look like something to push. It's learnable. The author is making the point that Metro has zero visual clues, it's not learnable. You don't know which tiles you can interact with until you try and interact with them.
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
  >But a physical button has a shape or appearance that makes it look like something to push. It's learnable. And there are also plenty of things that looked like buttons when I was little, that I thought you could push. But you couldn't. I don't really buy this argument.
jiggy2011 14y ago
But that then creates an expectation that "anything in a square box can be clicked on" which is going to make life difficult if you want to design an app but now you can't use square boxes for pure information display.
- pilgrim689 14y ago
  These are called style guidelines and iOS has them too [1]. If you don't adhere to some of them, you won't even get your app in the App Store. So you need to design your app in an "iOS" way, just like here Windows Phone devs should design in a Windows Phone way. http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/userexperience/conceptual/mobilehig/Introduction/Introduction.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40006556-CH1-SW1 http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/userex...

kolektiv 14y ago

A little OT, but it does make me chuckle when you read this on a blog with little to no visual affordances. The title and the date are both permalinks, but there's no indication until you mouse over to check. That's fine - for the sake of cleanliness it's an acceptable trade off. And also, importantly, we've learnt that they probably are. Consistency is also important. Whether people will learn Metro successfully (statistically) etc. is yet to be seen I guess, but it's more complex than this.

ajanuary 14y ago
I agree that it's a tradeoff. Though one thing that differentiates them is that the systems we learnt about titles and dates being typically interactable had mouse pointers. I can't quite express why, but it feels less annoying to mouse over something and discover it's interactable (via a change in the mouse cursor) than to stab at text on the screen. I guess one is a more passive "will this do something if I interact with it" while the other is a more proactive "I'll try to interact with this and see if it works". One results in a yes or no answer, while the other results in a failed action, which seems more frustrating to me. That all just goes to show that, as you said, it's more complex than simply missing affordances = unusable UI.

jwineinger 14y ago

Says the guy with the black and white blog. ZING

littlespark 14y ago
HEYOOOOO!

VMG 14y ago

Nah, I don't buy it. These kinds of things are easily learned. Web links don't have depth and we all learned pretty fast that we can click them (in some instances they don't even have to be underlined)

pixxa 14y ago
Most Desktop web browsers provide quite many affordances for links, and do so automatically upon hover: change cursor, underline, pop up link description, show URL in status area. Touch UIs can't have these "introspective" affordances because hover is not practical in a touch-based UI. Even with all these affordances, if a Web UI didn't distinguish a link from other content visually, it would make for a difficult interface to traverse.
- king_jester 14y ago
  Very much this, hyperlinks are visually distinct elements in pure HTML and get color and style change (underline) to indicate the link. One of my biggest pet peeves are sites that alter link style in CSS so that it loses those kinds of visual clues and makes it harder to know what can or cannot be clicked.
mitchellbryson 14y ago
Depth in this context is relative (affordance is a better term btw). A boldness in a sea of un-bold text is something worth investigating (affords something...), with your mouse, or just your eyes - then you can determine from the text whether you might want to click it or not. This is why it's common to underline links or change colour. You can't make a link the same as normal text and expect a user to learn which words you've used for links. The point is we already know these things by intuition, we shouldn't have to learn them. "Don't make me think" - Steve Krug

recoiledsnake 14y ago

The flip side is that interfaces have tended too much towards faux 3d on a superflat 2d screen and also ignoring that the UI can be "authentically digital" instead of being tied down to analog equivalents. I find the author's analysis very simplistic. Also, this is just about mostly about the buttons and links which can probably be fixed easily in the future. Metro is much much more than that, Metro also removes a lot of unnecessary chrome like lines around menus etc. and reducing visual clutter which are very important on mobile devices where you're looking for actual information in a pinch on-the-go. The codeword for this is "Content over Chrome". Android(starting with ICS) also is trending a bit towards Metro in things like the weather app, Google Now and the overall designed aesthetic. https://lh4.ggpht.com/p-eZmyce7_T2-_eOwltQxU6glPj6f53kDXvDvN8GPzRZXY4qe_pxHBdmXmtJeyRIZ8qA https://lh4.ggpht.com/p-eZmyce7_T2-_eOwltQxU6glPj6f53kDXvDvN... Anyone see the similarities between this[1] from 20 years ago and the iPhone UI + every other mobile OS including Android, Palm, Windows Mobile < 7, Blackberry, Meego, Firefox OS etc.? [1] http://img.tfd.com/cde/_PROGMAN.GIF http://img.tfd.com/cde/_PROGMAN.GIF Here's more information if you're interested in the design philosophy behind Metro written by an actual designer who designed Metro like content for his clients' websites. The principles of Microsoft Metro UI decoded http://www.riagenic.com/archives/487 http://www.riagenic.com/archives/487 Going full Metro. http://www.riagenic.com/archives/493 http://www.riagenic.com/archives/493 Things you ought to know when designing metro screens http://www.riagenic.com/archives/526 http://www.riagenic.com/archives/526 Hopefully all this results in better UIs in the future instead of the tired old jaded WIMP interface and Desktop on mobile yet again with some added touch features and I think Microsoft has taken a good first step here to shake things up.

tagada 14y ago
the author missed the paradigm shifting ... He still thing that shadows and transparency are what make an UI usable ... huh. There is a lot more affordance in modern UI like Metro than in old school static "3D" UI with reliefs and shadows like we all know in Windows, Mac or Linux ... When you hover something which is interactive, it tells you that it can interact, how, and what for. This is affordance. While shadows are just ... nothing.
erikpukinskis 14y ago

Killah911 14y ago

Why the need to use "Metrosexual" reference? A little sensationalist isn't it?

oellegaard 14y ago
Very sensational. I dislike these kind of posts that get to the frontpage because of their title, rather than the actual content :( If the content is good enough, please put something related to that in the title.
16s 14y ago
Agreed. This has nothing to do with the term "metrosexual". "Metrosexual is a neologism, derived from metropolitan and heterosexual, coined in 1994 describing a man (especially one living in an urban, post-industrial, capitalist culture) who is especially meticulous about his grooming and appearance" - Source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrosexual http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrosexual
- kyro 14y ago
  I'm very well aware of the term and would consider myself a metrosexual in some ways. It was just a play on words.
  - jessedhillon 14y ago
    Yes, but not a very relevant (or clever) one. Just because two words can go together doesn't make it a fit for the article's title. Something about Metropolis would probably have been better, as in, not being a denizen of the city of Metro. Also, if you actually do consider yourself to be metro, then it's even more out of place.
- mseebach 14y ago
  Wikipedia quotes the dictionary incorrectly. It refers to a heterosexual man, yes, but the "-sexual" postfix comes from homosexual. It's meant as a put down to straight guys acting gay.

untog 14y ago

And to add to the confusion, why are there different sized tiles? Why on earth would that be confusing? When I see a double door next to a normal sized door I don't freak out and try to break down the wall instead. I get the point being made in the article, but I don't quite buy it. I don't think that people understand they can press app icons on the iPhone because they have raised shadows around them, I think they press them because they are visually eyecatching and surrounded by areas that are not. There are many different visual cues out there, and people adapt to new ones all the time.

lnanek2 14y ago
Honestly, consistency is a much prized and proven way to help users navigate an interface. If they see things where and how they expect, they can navigate through easier, find buttons and actions easier, etc.. It's also prized in design and aesthetics. Designers (and even the Android design site) recommend designing to a grid to get a uniform, nice looking appearance. So altering the size of the tiles is considered bad from a UI and appearance perspective.
- untog 14y ago
  Funny, because Windows Phone 7 had very static tile sizes (there was one double-width one), wheras 8 allows a large variety of sizes. They do still fit a consistent grid, though- they're all half or double size another. Android widgets, by comparison, can often be very weird dimensions, and have very different designs that look ugly when combined.
- belorn 14y ago
  Consistency is not just to avoid confusion and make things easier. Inconsistency is a direct source for irritation and annoyance. Its very easy to see if you give a computer worker a different keyboard setup (that is, other than qwerty or even just a slightly modified version). It drives people nut!
scott_s 14y ago
But why are the titles different sizes? There may be no reason beyond aesthetics, but that's his point: differing sizes often conveys information, and even if it does not, it takes effort on our part to realize that size differences does not imply functionality difference. And if I did see a double-door immediately next to a normal sized door, I would wonder why that was set up like that. Is one the emergency exit? Is one the freight-entrance?

xradionut 14y ago

It's yet another rant, but there's a deeper problem with GUI "thrash" at Microsoft. One example is Outlook. The interface changed in 2010 and again in 2013. This causes confusion and doubt amoung users and distrust from IT and the folks that write the checks. Is the new software really better, or are the folks in Redmond just remodeling the interface to sell "new" versions?

mitchellbryson 14y ago
I hope they're that smart. But I have a feeling they're just changing so often because they don't have any confidence in their abilities to design a good UI. On this basis, Metro has a couple of years before we see something completely different.

lnanek2 14y ago

Honestly, Android's newer holo theming suffers the same exact problems. I've watched countless users and received support emails where people just don't *ing notice/try/use the action items in the new action bar pattern we're all supposed to be using. This pattern has us place very sparsely decorated icons in the top bar, generally without even text. Tons of users completely miss them vs. big, chrome, 3D styled, pushable-looking buttons on the bottom of an app. Even worse, the icons aren't supposed to have text and users are supposed to know to long press on them to find out what exactly they do. I've never in my life seen a user do that. I emailed a Google Dev Advocate about all this, asking if they actually had statistics and user studies to back up this new direction they are taking the UI, if it actually helped users in the metrics or was just designers trying to make things look pretty without actually helping. No answer.

drivebyacct2 14y ago
In that case, I'll start thanking God everytime I open my phone that Duarte gets his say and not idiot users.
RivieraKid 14y ago
100% agree with the icons without labels. Do you have an idea how to solve this?
- king_jester 14y ago
  You can provide labels with action bar action items inline instead of just relying on a long press to get a popup hint by using android:showAsAction="ifRoom|withText" on any menu item in the menu XML. You can also do this programmatically. The big downside to this is that one phone devices you basically will only be able to show 1 action item with an overflow menu since you'll run out of space with just the first action item. The best work around is to make actions very obvious based on the icon used for the action item. You could also consider moving non-obvious UI behaviors into the main content of the page where there is more room for labeling.

ian00 14y ago

It appears his "thesis" is half way through: "It’s because our eyes know we’re in a 3D world. We can detect light sources, and degrees of shading, and depth. And without any of these, we’d be absolutely lost." My first thought: I'm reading English text, with no shading or depth, and it seems to be a pretty effective form of communication. tldr: the article is hyperbolic garbage.

richardlblair 14y ago

/begin nerd rage/ For the love of god, why the hell is your font 11px?? What the hell are you thinking?? You know how many people here would have had to zoom in?? Are you new to the internet?? /end nerd rage/

Lagged2Death 14y ago
I zoomed. I think your criticism is valid.
- Retric 14y ago
  11px should be readable by default. If you zoomed you should change your default settings or get your eyes checked. Edit: I would also like to point out that HN uses font-size:10pt see: http://ycombinator.com/news.css http://ycombinator.com/news.css
  - Lagged2Death 14y ago
    I would also like to point out that HN uses font-size:10pt... The 10pt text here on Hacker News is much bigger than the 11px text on that blog. My browser allows me to edit the blog's source and reload; 11pt text on there looks fine. ... get your eyes checked This is a terrible, terrible attitude.
    - Retric 14y ago
      Actually, it's not that uncommon a problem. I had a user in there mid 50 who kept complaining about the fonts in a custom application. Turns out he was having vision issues and after getting some reading glasses he stopped having any issues. PS: I have a high resolution screen and changed my default zoom the make the vast majority of websites readable. True, it would be nice if websites stuck with readable percentage based fonts, but until then it's an easy change. And, IMO far more productive than complaining on HN which the author might not even read.
  - richardlblair 14y ago

pxlpshr 14y ago

There's very little I like about Metro, but I do like that Microsoft is focusing on the total user experience across all its products. Perhaps they need to divide the company into 3 components — consumer (win metro / tablet / phone), enterprise (win office / office suite / .NET), entertainment (xbox). I've been a Microsoft fanboy [1] but just find very little about Windows that I love anymore. I understand they are trying to be visually different from OSX, but I'm not sure this is the right direction. OSX hasn't deviated from 'windows-based' app management and Metro makes its history as Windows almost unrecognizable. As a power user with 2 monitors usually running 2x or 4x in split or quad view, I don't see a UI that will be more adaptable for efficiency and multitasking. iOS handles it very poorly. [1] DOS > Win 3.1 > 95 > 98/ME > NT > 2000 > Windows XP > .. converted to Apple ..

vetler 14y ago

I haven't used Metro, so I'll wait to judge how usable it is, but I love the fact that they've gone their own way, and not created an iOS/Android lookalike. The blog post feels too negative, and gives the impression that it's written by an older man that dislikes breaking with the norm - though his points are probably valid.

steve8918 14y ago

I agree. I played around with the Surface RT for over 30 mins at a Microsoft store with the intention of buying it for my parents for Christmas, and I walked away because even I couldn't effectively figure out what the "rules" were for interacting with Metro. I'm sure if I gave it more time, I could, but there is no way my parents, who still use XP, would be able to figure it out. I wasn't sure what I needed to do to get to the "Desktop" mode where it looked like Windows 7, or how to flip back and forth, and which things I could swipe, etc. I felt like it was a big mess because a lot of the UI features that we've come to expect were not there. In contrast, the iPhone and subsequently the iPad were intuitive right off the bat. To be fair, I'm seeing a lot of this terrible UI experience in other things as well. For example, on Chrome when you are reading a PDF, if you want to save it or zoom, it's not obvious how to do it. You need to miraculously hover over the bottom right corner and then the buttons show themselves, but there are no visual cues indicating that that's what you're supposed to do. It's fancy, but terrible UI. The same thing occurs on Facebook, where people are just expected to know where to hover in order to show functionality. I don't know where this trend came from, but it's terrible, and I think this article is showing an extension of how we are moving away from all the visual cues and things we've learned about UX in the past 30 years. Sure, it's different but it doesn't mean it's better, especially when it forced people to hunt, peck, and guess for functionality, something that UX is supposed to get rid of.

TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
>I wasn't sure what I needed to do to get to the "Desktop" mode where it looked like Windows 7 Really? I suppose you could have difficulty with it, but the "Desktop" tile is quite clearly visible...
32bitkid 14y ago
anecdotally, my mom really likes Windows RT. Watching her use the traditional start menu, or attempting to navigate Windows Explorer to find something is an exercise in pain. She, honestly, really enjoys the full screen start menu -- easier to find the app she wants to start --, the WinRT full screen apps -- doesn't have to remember/think about window/application life cycle management. It pretty much works the way that she wanted Windows XP to work in the first place. When I use Windows 8, on the other hand, I spend 99% of my time on the desktop, and the transition to a full screen start menu/screen is pretty jarring. But, honestly, as far as the new UI paradigms go, its not that much of a mess... Try watching a Windows user try to use a OSX for the first time. Or vice versa. Or a mac user trying to use KDE. I think the real world analogy of the OP is a bit flawed. Babies don't instinctually know how to open a door, that is not something we are genetically programmed for. They learn by watching other people do it, and you learn by trying. There is a low penalty for trying to failing to open a door correctly -- sometimes you push instead of pull -- and that is the point of a good user interface. Does Windows 8 succeed at that? Perhaps, but its not a disaster. A disaster would be a door that killed you if you tried to open it incorrectly.

speednoise 14y ago

This line of argument always jumps right from rods and cones to perceived affordances without ever making the case that there's a significant gain to perceived affordances from mocked up depth. If this is so uncontroversially true, surely someone has done a study you can link.

pixxa 14y ago

Jacob Nielsen details many of the usability issues of Metro design, see Flat Style Reduces Discoverability in http://www.useit.com/alertbox/windows-8.html http://www.useit.com/alertbox/windows-8.html . At the highest level, Metro design feels like a case of design overgeneralization. It tries at once to apply the same look & feel principles in Touch, Desktop, and Web context. Jack of Many Trades, Master of None.

mnicole 14y ago
Reduced discoverability is the exact issue XBOX Live's interface has had since they updated it -- it's harder to differentiate between content I've paid for, their internal marketing and external advertisements to the point where I deliberately avoid them and just use the XBOX button modal to navigate. There's no rhyme or reason for the element sizing, outside of [apparently] making all of the stuff that's actually relevant to me the smallest.

cooldeal 14y ago

I wish Apple was the one that came up with Metro and not Microsoft. If it did, then many tech pundits with high readership like Gruber, Siegler et. al. would be posting endless analysis of how Apple shook up the UI paradigm to make a great new UI instead of going with the same old icons, toolbars and docks and how everyone else is copying them with sparse UI. That would've led tech minded folks to give Metro more credit than all this upvoted noise with link bait headlines on the tech blogs with flimsy analysis of only about how it sucks and nothing about the good parts like "content over chrome" or "authentically digital". I think Metro is in some ways becoming victim of tech partisanship, you can absolutely love your iPad, have an Android tablet with ICS(I do), but still recognize some good UI work being done by Microsoft. Edit: Something like the following post would've definitely made the HN front page if it was iMetro or even if it was Google that did it with Android. http://www.riagenic.com/archives/487 http://www.riagenic.com/archives/487

lazerwalker 14y ago
I feel that the complete lack of distinction between clickable/tappable tiles and non-interactive ones is a very real problem, and not unlike the sort of thing that pundits have skewered Apple for in the past (the overly-ornate skeuomorphic-esque visual designs of Calendar / Contacts / Game Center, for example). That being said, I think there's definitely some truth there for a lot of the other Metro hatred. More and more modern iOS apps have a flat UI style that isn't unlike Metro, but you don't see people giving them shit for it.
- MatthewPhillips 14y ago
  There are no non-interactive tiles in Windows 8 or Windows Phone.
  - indiecore 14y ago
    I really think that a very simple gradient or a 1 pixel wide white/black(depending on background) border around the edges of all interactable elements would go a long long way to fixing this issue without breaking up the UI too much, it might even expand it because just having that distinction gives you another "word" in your visual vocabulary. *edit: Changed "buttons" to "elements"

marze 14y ago

It was 2002 when the last competent UI engineer left Microsoft, none of this is a surprise.

MatthewPhillips 14y ago

Couldn't disagree more. We know that things are clickable when they are verbs or icons that are well-established synonyms for verbs. Gradient isn't a substitute for being explicit.

OzzyOsbourne 14y ago

Slightly OT: "The Rods... so sensitive that they can be triggered by single photon" This sort of thing is why I love HN. Irrespective of the topic, there is always some little gem I find somewhere. I was very sceptical of this claim, so I looked it up. Turns out it is possible: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Quantum/see_a_photon.html http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Quantum/see_a_photon.h... http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10800676 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10800676 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1281447/?page=1 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1281447/?page=1

kenjackson 14y ago

The author doesn't get it. A lot of the way users know what to click is based on consistency. If it's a tile on the start screen you can click it. Want to print? It's always in the same place? Want to share? Same place. Want to close an app? Always the same way? Want to see more options for an app? The same way. Now within the app one could argue there is a stronger need for affordances, but even there I've yet to encounter a single problem in my use of several Win8 apps. I find the Win8 interface a lot more intuitive than the OSX interface. But I'm sure others would find the opposite. I suspect a lot depends on your starting point and your predisposition. My four year son figured out most of the Win8 interface in about 5 minutes (literally... at the MS store he was flying through the UI much better than I'd ever seen him with Win7 and a mouse).

bad_user 14y ago
On my iPad, my 2-year old is able to unlock the screen, go to Home in case any app is active and then open his favorite 2 apps (a simple game for toddlers and a painting app). That's not saying much though, he just did what all kids do ... tried things out and quickly memorized what worked and it was easy and fun for him to do so because of the touch-screen. He also taught me some shortcuts I had no idea were available, like how to do multitasking by switching between active apps or how to split the on-screen keyword into 2 smaller pieces :-) In general, kids can learn by trial and error quite efficiently, sometimes in a matter of minutes or seconds and shouldn't be used as a benchmark for how intuitive an interface is, because all that really says about an interface is that it can be learned by trial and error by kinds. Regular WIMP interfaces are indeed not intuitive for kids because the interface is often exposed through hierarchical menus that can't be explored by children who can't read.
- kenjackson 14y ago
  In general, kids can learn by trial and error quite efficiently, sometimes in a matter of minutes or seconds and shouldn't be used as a benchmark for how intuitive an interface is, That seems like a great benchmark to me. If trial and error gives feedback that allows you to qiuckly learn the UI then that's pretty useful. At the end of the day a lot of usability is about two things: 1. Consistency 2. Familiarity If trial and error is effective then consistency is in place. Skeumorphism is about taking familiarity of the real world and applying it to the digital world. And this actually has some use, in particular for UI that users won't interact with much. There's no chance for users to be become familiar with that UI. But for UI that is always there, skeumorphism becomes limiting and can become unusable when you really want to extend beyond what you see in the real world. Metro says, "The digital world is becoming so prevelant that we should optimize for it, not just the physical world." Is Metro perfect? No. But I think it has the right idea to figure out what works on computers/tablets/phones first. Don't be encumbered by trying to map to physical objects. People will spend so much time with the digital objects that they may spend 10m doing trial and error the first time, but shortly the digital world will be just as familiar as the physical world. Lets not waste the opportunity to introduce the right interactions.

pilgrim689 14y ago

Our ancestors did not own smartphones, so the broad evolution argument is kind of garbage. User interfaces need to be researched before we can make conclusions on skeuomorphism vs "pure digital". Furthermore, the author talks about affordances and how Metro has none. This is false. Anything that can be touched on the screen reacts to your touch. For example, if you're scrolling down the main menu and your finger happens to press down on a tile, the tile will be "pushed inwards" at the point of contact (even if you haven't released your finger). It's very subtle, but it definitely lets your subconscious know that in the future, if you would want to press that thing, you can. Now it's not an immediate affordance like a door knob, but a touch screen in itself is an affordance for touching, and once you touch then the other affordances reveal themselves.

nnq 14y ago

Metro is pulling things in the right direction I think. Hyper-skeumorphism did immense harm in the hands of copy-style designers, allowing them to justify their unoriginality through "I can copy that because it's actually copying a real-life object, you can't be unoriginal if you copy physical reality, all great artists did it" reasoning. It's better to concentrate on the axis between obscene skeumorphism and uberminimalistic full-flatness then to pick on any one of the extremes as they are obviously flawed. Take for example the whole crop of metro-style Bootstrap themes and pick an UI interaction element like the buttons, to see an example of a scale of designs between decent micro-skeumorphism and full-flatness. This one http://bootswatch.com/cosmo/#buttons http://bootswatch.com/cosmo/#buttons or this one http://talkslab.github.com/metro-bootstrap/basecss.html#buttons http://talkslab.github.com/metro-bootstrap/basecss.html#butt... sport full-flat microsft style buttons, with no hints of possible interaction, while others like http://inprogress.neuronq.ro/madmin/ http://inprogress.neuronq.ro/madmin/ show subtle hints of skeumorphism (you can probably google for many other more or less metrofied bootstraps...)

uvTwitch 14y ago

Pretty sure this guy only wrote the article so he could use that great witty zinger of a headline he'd thought up. Not gonna waste my time reading design critique by someone using an 0.002pt font on their blog.