I think Flat UI can look absolutely awesome, the problem for Windows is that Microsoft hasn't done it well. I don't know what it is exactly, but their new UIs look bloated, yet barren. It feels like there's a lot of noise, yet no functionality. It's certainly not helped with the serious UI layering MS has been doing for the last decade (take all the basic functionality, create a new UI for that, create a link that opens a dialogue for the old functionality). Nowadays you have to enter 4 dialogues to access anything slightly advanced in outlook.
Since then, details were improved, but the overall concept has never felt natural or appealing for me. It always feels like something I have to work against. (And I usually do appreciate reasonable white space, distinctive typography, and clear geometry.)
Can you show me some "absolutely awesome" examples of Flat UI? Our sense of beauty and aesthetics comes from the physical world, which contains gradients, shadows, dimensions and so on. Simple geometric shapes can be elegant, but I haven't seen examples of Flat UI that is awesome as well as doesn't suffer from usability issues.
Screen with blue todos is using white text on gradually lighter background in the end the contrast is terrible IMO.
Also the gradient looks tacky and pointless
For a to do list, I think that makes a lot of sense. The items at the top of your list are higher priority, so having higher contrast text and a more saturated background up there draws your attention to the stuff that's most important.
I'll grant that -- but it's also a to-do list, which is pretty much the simplest possible application. It's a common "hello world" for GUI toolkits, and it's the first use case in the org-mode tutorial.
Is there any software more sophisticated than 'a 3x5 card with a pencil' which uses this user interface paradigm? I think any paradigm, no matter how confusing or clumsy, is sufficient for that case.
I agree they can look awesome, but I still struggle to find actionable components when using them, so I find them to be counterproductive most of the time.
It is definitely possible to devise a flat UI visual language that would make anything clickable easy to identify, etc.
Two problems: (1) It takes a real and complex design effort, and (2) it's nearly guaranteed to be at odds with the "clean look" aesthetics.
I think it's the minimalist aesthetics that caused the fad of flat design and unidentifiable controls. It strives to make a page / form visually simple, thus hiding its real richness and the irreducible complexity stemming from it. In a misguided attempt to avoid cognitive overload it turns UIs into impenetrable puzzles.
There is a fundamental tension between "clean and simple" and "rich and comfortable". It's much easier to sell "clean and simple" and pretend that it's "intuitive" and does not take any learning. But once you've bought that, and want the power features, they are either not there at all, or are very well hidden ("have you tried triple-drag this to the right?").
Ideally there would be a switch between "beginner mode" and "pro mode", but there's little incentive form the market, because people are just used to put up with the limitations.
I think the "clean look" is not aesthetic. It is like a white canvas that has just been purchased from an art supply store but has not been painted on yet.
