> I feel like the designers of this new theme have never sit down with anyone who's not a "techie" to explain to them how to use a computer.
The designers of this new "everything is flat and devoid of visual hinting" trends are maybe, at most, enthusiast, but not professional designers. I don't mean professional in the "hired for work" sense, but in the "really has the knowledge and has studied the psychology behind what makes a good UI design for human beings". Otherwise, nobody with solid background, experience, and/or scientific studies in their hands would in their right mind sketch the current shape of mindless "modern" UIs on a paper and feel like that's a very well thought out work right there.
And here I'm bashing not only OSS designers that think a bland and unclear design is the best that can be done, but also the same for designers of big companies that get paid for their work. Althought ironically now that I think of it, maybe the latter are somewhat less to blame, knowing how the corporate world works and knowing that they possibly don't agree with the results but their boss insists on how all buttons should lack any depth. So in the sense of not having a pushy boss with an agenda to fullfill... yeah it seems to me that OSS designers are acting worse by voluntarily pushing these supposedly "better", but almost quite objetively worse designs, into users' throats.
To back this up, the "actually has a degree in HCI" UX profressionals I worked with at a previous job railed against flat design and ensured our output was clear and intuitive. Though there was only two of them, so I can't say all of them would be like that!
> nobody with solid background, experience, and/or scientific studies in their hands would in their right mind sketch the current shape of mindless "modern" UIs
So... Since you are talking about scientific studies, could you please reference some studies that back you up and show that flat design is in some way inferior?
That flat design is worse is maybe not an universal truth, but no doubt it is a well known issue and concern has been shown everywhere. Quoting from my first link below, flat design has been widely criticized by HCI and usability experts.
This is one of those things that I'm willing to believe, without requiring a whole hands-on research, based on my subjective views, and on the fact that every time the topic arises, most devs seem to agree.
So we know that flat design is worse, or at least we have a very firm intuition. The only remaining thing is to quantify by how much. This paper seems to go into that direction:
Thank you for providing these links! I read the two articles.
The first one is the closest to what I was looking for. It contains three mostly independent experiments, comparing text, icons and web layout. Text and icon do not seem relevant to this discussion. The third part of the study compares a "traditional" website design to a new, flat one. This is more relevant to the discussion, but this comparison has three huge flaws.
Firstly, according to the pictures in the article, they were comparing two specific arbitrary websites. It is not clear how this comparison can be generalized. Secondly, the study is from 2015 when flat design language was relatively new. It could measure just the difference between any "traditional" and "new" design language due to the familiarity. Thirdly, the confidence intervals are huge. I don't think there is any pair of values that are confidently separated, which would make this a null result even if the experiment itself were totally fair.
The second article is very interesting, but its conclusions are non-committal. I clicked to several of the links from this article. Most of them are opinion pieces, and none that I found makes any judgement call about the comparative advantage of flat design.
I'm sorry but I ignored flatisbad.com since I believe Xisbad.com can't be an unbiased source of knowledge about X and should be ignored as a matter of principle.
You note that visual and UI design in open source and in proprietary applications show some of the same idiosyncrasies.
You conclude that this makes open source designers more blameworthy.
I would suggest instead, that this is evidence that those evil management overlords in the corporate world are perhaps convenient scapegoats, but actually less to blame than we might think?
macOS has the same problem: everything is flat. There are no borders around many buttons. It's hard to tell what is a label and what is a button, or which controls are disabled, and which are merely de-emphasized.
Apple used to be held as the pinnacle of design, but what does it say when their latest UI is indistinguishable from an amateur design?
The designers of this new "everything is flat and devoid of visual hinting" trends are maybe, at most, enthusiast, but not professional designers. I don't mean professional in the "hired for work" sense, but in the "really has the knowledge and has studied the psychology behind what makes a good UI design for human beings". Otherwise, nobody with solid background, experience, and/or scientific studies in their hands would in their right mind sketch the current shape of mindless "modern" UIs on a paper and feel like that's a very well thought out work right there.
And here I'm bashing not only OSS designers that think a bland and unclear design is the best that can be done, but also the same for designers of big companies that get paid for their work. Althought ironically now that I think of it, maybe the latter are somewhat less to blame, knowing how the corporate world works and knowing that they possibly don't agree with the results but their boss insists on how all buttons should lack any depth. So in the sense of not having a pushy boss with an agenda to fullfill... yeah it seems to me that OSS designers are acting worse by voluntarily pushing these supposedly "better", but almost quite objetively worse designs, into users' throats.
/rant