Let me try to make this post the least pretentious as possible, since that's the point I'm trying to make. I mentioned in March how much I dislike "white space design", but no matter how much I dislike this faux-museum design style that appeared with "Web 2.0" and culminated in Microsoft's Modern (Metro) design, that style is mere annoyance to what Apple recently did on the iPhone.
There is now a new design style of "skeuomorphism", which is essentially trying to mimic physical objects in digital form as closely as possible. This design style culminated with Apple flat-out copying the copy-protected clock of the Swiss Federal Railways on the iPad. And abuses of this style are easy to find.
Now, I'm not against basing new software concepts on physical objects. The whole "computer desktop" metaphor was a great example of how this can greatly help software literacy, compared to introducing difficult computer science concepts to users. But an important distinction is that those are metaphors, and users quickly learn that beyond a few similarities the software concepts are quite different. Metaphors merely help "bootstrap" the learning process, not replace it.
This new wave of skeuomorphsm is bad, and I'm not the only one saying, even within Apple . A lot of effort goes into making the software mimic a few physical objects, which not only wastes development time and processing power, but also makes things more complicated. A podcast player is not like a tape drive. An electronic book doesn't have to flip individual pages in 3D and with slight transparency. All those visual effects look cool the first time you see it, and are inconvenient waste the rest of the time. As a marketing tool, for making screenshots of your product, it's great, in the sense that it is deceptive. Otherwise, it is hubris on the part of the designer, making the "art" (playing with a Flash prototype) more important than development costs or usability. Another reason software design should never mix with marketing people. And before you run back to Microsoft Modern "white space design" as an alternative, please be creative at least a little bit...
That made me realize how much design cliques create echo chambers that give the entire industry the delusion that whatever they're making has to be good because everybody else is doing something similar. That has the nice indirect effect of making your design feel hopelessly dated within years. Yet usability, production costs are somewhat quantifiable metrics we can use to measure the quality of some software design. Software design is for the user first, it's not "art" for the designer's sake. If you want to make a piece of art, go ahead, but don't bother software engineers and end users, because you work for them, not the other way around.
Published on September 23, 2012 at 20:16 EDT
Older post: Twitter Like Email
Newer post: Lazy Memory