Quote 1 May 30 notes

…[GMail’s] old interface had colored borders and variations in background color which served to deliniate navigation from content and provide visual landmarks that helped me find my way around the page. It had visual ‘texture’. The new interface lacks that visual texture. Without borders or landmarks, everything blends together into a featureless sea of white and light grey. It requires more work for me to parse visually, to figure out what I’m looking at or to find the link I want to click.

This is what happens when the cult of “minimalism” goes too far.

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GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism « Not The User’s Fault

This nicely sums up what bothers me about the school of UI design that glorifies visual minimalism and denigrates even light skeuomorphism as kitsch (Google’s Honeycomb tablet UI is another great example). While I agree Apple has been pushing the bounds of good taste with a lot of their recent work (iCal, Find My Friends, iPhoto for iOS), people who dismiss anything but flat, utilitarian UI as fluff are missing the important usability cues that texture, shadow and visual hierarchy can provide.

(via buzz)

  1. cflee reblogged this from buzz
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  4. cbowns said: I heard from a few users with low vision about the low-contract, all-grey sidebar icons that shipped in Lion’s Finder: turns out color, like, *helps people see*, and they were quite annoyed that they were changed to be less unique.
  5. mills said: Pushing the boundaries of “taste” in service of recognizable utility is more defensible than diminishing utility in service of “taste,” no question. I’m surprised at how often this seems contentious.
  6. buzz posted this

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