The Failings of Flat Design? Design for Designers.

My gut reaction was I knew it. You probably knew it too, really, didn’t you.

I’m not sure whether this study will pass quietly into obscurity or whether it will get picked up and passed around, but I felt it was worth mulling over. When flat design started becoming a thing, I felt a little torn. I was still cutting my teeth as a designer, I was still enjoying my first smartphone. I was still a little gleeful at how my notes app reflected the texture of my real life notebook. It felt like a missed opportunity to me, I hadn’t yet got into app design, actually I can’t imagine there were that many people outside of Apple working in app design (or at least producing much worthy of writing home about) and I lamented the loss of personal design opportunity afforded by skeuomorphism.

On the other hand, flat design was refreshing as a user. It was simple, minimal, clean. (Too simple? Too minimal? Too clean? Was I going to be out of a job? Was my job going to become boring? Would design become so easy and straight forward that no one would need me?) I started to see awe inspiring designs that utilised subtle colours, all the white space and playful typography that kicked my designy-senses into overdrive. I embraced along with everyone else, and I enjoyed it too. It felt like the future. It felt a bit like art. And to me, browsing an app or website with flat done at it’s best said, “Hey, look how easy this is. Look how simple I am. This is a breeze. You love me. Yes you will buy these shoes.” I experienced that. I couldn’t argue that it was bad for users, could I? And yet, something didn’t sit quite right.

Skeuomorphism recreated environments, textures, objects that users were familiar with. It gave them a certain confidence and familiarity that helped them towards their goals and eased shiny technology into their every day lives. Even “Web 2.0” (if you can call that a style) had it’s benefits. In all it’s garish glory, eccentric bevels and bottomless drop shadows, it shouted at the user, “HEY, I’M A BUTTON, PRESS ME.” or “Yo there, I’m a navigation bar, I’ve got what you need, baby.” In a lot of cases, there was a tad too much shouting going on, but it knew what it was trying to achieve (second to making our eyes bleed).

So I guess it’s natural that after all that shouting…we wanted some quiet. Enter flat design.

Now I think about it, I can kind of see how it happened. Beautiful design, made by designers, inadvertently for designers: the first generation of designers who had grown up through all of it, had experienced the evolution first hand and knew interfaces intimately. A problem with being someone who designs website and applications for a living is that you know them inside out. You analyse them, you tear them apart and put them back together. You could design an e-commerce product page with your eyes closed and your hands tied behind your back, amirite? You can get in the head of other designers, even the bad ones, and know what they were thinking. You know every conceivable spot that could house a ‘my account’ icon, you know every combination of shape, colour and size for a button, you know all the patterns for every entry into a check out journey, inside out, upside down and back to front. But that also makes you some kind of super user. That’s one of the hardest things to remember, you have to remind yourself day in and day out that you are not a normal user. You do not see that screen the same way they do. You can probably sympathise, you can’t empathise.

You might be thinking…but I spot usability flaws all the time. You might be thinking…but we test everything! We guerrilla test that shit, we A-B test it, we Z-Y test it, we install cameras in our users’ home to secretly video tape them using our app in their natural environments. And I get it. I’m with you. The sticky, horizontal menu you went live with scored considerably higher than the vertical menu in testing. But could it have been better? For our love of simplicity and our distaste for our embossed past, are we ignoring why those seemingly outlandish design decisions were made in the first place? Was that triumphant horizontal menu ever tested against a drop-shadowed contender?

I think what I’m saying is: sometimes you just gotta make it POP. And no, making it a very slightly darker shader of pale grey probably isn’t enough (although it’s a beautifully warm grey, good job).

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