Designers Criticize Apple's User Interface For OS X and iOS

Hugh Pickens writes "Austin Carr notes that a number of user interface designers have become increasingly critical of Apple's approach to software user interface design. Much of their censure is directed against a trend called skeuomorphism, a term for when objects retain ornamental elements of the past that are no longer necessary to the current objects' functions, such as calendars with faux leather-stitching, bookshelves with wood veneers, fake glass and paper and brushed chrome. A former senior UI designer at Apple who worked closely with Steve Jobs said, 'It's like the designers are flexing their muscles to show you how good of a visual rendering they can do of a physical object. Who cares?' The issue is two-fold: first, that traditional visual metaphors no longer translate to modern users; and second, that excessive digital imitation of real-world objects creates confusion among users. 'I'm old enough, sure, but some of the guys in my office have never seen a Rolodex in real life,' says Designer Gadi Amit. 'Our culture has changed. We don't need translation of the digital medium in mechanical real-life terms. It's an old-fashioned paradigm.' One beneficiary could be Microsoft, where the design of Windows 8 distances itself from skeuomorphism by emphasizing a flat user interface that's minimalist to the core: no bevel, no 3-D flourishes, no glossiness and no drop shadow."

Apple patented bad design too

[gelfling]

Silence, citizen or Apple will send its flying monkeys to sue you.,

But what about the next generation?

[Dahlgil]

Of course once you've gone completely flat and removed all the ornamentation, it makes one wonder where the next generation will go. Perhaps someone will suddenly realize, wow, we can make those tiles look just like a 3D image of a smartphone (and, of course, be promptly sued for rendering them with curved corners).

Re:Apple patented bad design too

[Type44Q]

Silence, citizen or Apple will send its flying monkeys to sue you

My eyes are still a little fuzzy from sleep and that looked like it said ..."Apple will send its flying monkeys to use you..."

Re:Too minimalist

[Barefoot Monkey]

Naturally, the trick to doing minimalism right is to use as little of it as possible.

I Agree!

[clonehappy]

Touching objects on a screen that look visually like what the physical representations of the function being peformed used to look like before we had PDAs and smartphones is ludicrous!

I'd much prefer a CLI so I can type "cd /usr/bin" then "./phoneapp dial -domestic [phone]" whenever I want to make a phone call and "./phoneapp hangup -log /var/log/calls.today" when I hang up and want to add the details to a log file. That's much easier for me to understand, and should be self-explanatory to anyone if they just read the command. :)

If that's just too hard for some people, I guess we can have a GUI with red and green icons with antiquated pictures of analog handsets on them, for now. But those should eventually be deprecated in favor of some newer, more modern representation of what a phone looks like.

Re:"a number of user interface designers"

[tooyoung]

I love their idea that we should update the application icons to be represented with more modern tools. Here are some icon suggestions for different apps that people might use based on the tool that they now use for that functionality:
Phone - cell phone
Calculator - cell phone
Note taker - cell phone
Music player - cell phone
Camera - cell phone
Web browser - cell phone
Photo viewer - cell phone
Facebook - cell phone
Calendar - cell phone
Alarm clock - cell phone
Contacts - cell phone

Re:"a number of user interface designers"

[Anonymous Coward]

This: Leaves. There are "directory" trees, so the "folders" should simply be called leaves. Because everybody knows what a tree ... oh, wait.