Yes! Please, give me big fat buttons. The thing I hate the most in the UI nowadays is to be randomly touching/clicking around to find what is touchable/clickable.
Yes, skeuomorphism went too far but the pendulum swigged way too far in the opposite direction. Metro, flat, ultra minimalistic design makes user interactions harder when they remove useful visual clues from interfaces.
I think there’s places for extreme skeuomorphism even if it’s not suitable everywhere. Nothing wrong with letting the designer have fun with absurdly detailed buttons for a game UI for example.
> The thing I hate the most in the UI nowadays is to be randomly touching/clicking around to find what is touchable/clickable.
Yeah, it reminds me of the old graphic text adventure games (e.g. Zak McKracken) where you had to hover the mouse over the entire screen to find the thing you are supposed to click on. If you're luck, the cursor might change shape. I generally prefer UIs to not be puzzles.
Yeah, if you think of terminal programs like old text adventure games that you have to keep typing stuff until something works, they're literally trying to make GUIs as unintuitive as terminals now.
Just swipe, shake, tap the corners, try scrolling even if there's scroll bar, until it does something!
To open settings, you're supposed to rotate the phone 180 degrees around the vertical axis, and then 180 degrees in the opposite direction. It's so obvious.
Did you read the first footnote I wrote in the piece? It’s actually about this exact thing you are talking about:
In many graphical interfaces that expect a mouse as input, the programmers will make the clickable area of the upper row buttons the same as the lower row ones, although this will be invisible at first. You can hover with your mouse over the buttons and then, magically, a button shape will appear. It’s not going to be a nice 3D-button shape however but just an outline. This serves no functional purpose. For instead of showing the user where all the buttons are from the outset, the whole affair becomes sort of a hide and seek game, where users have to guess which item they might be able to click.
Yes, skeuomorphism went too far but the pendulum swigged way too far in the opposite direction. Metro, flat, ultra minimalistic design makes user interactions harder when they remove useful visual clues from interfaces.