This is a huge can of worms, but I think @sdw put it best:

“Very 'flat' UI is a meaningless reactionary design fad vs. overdesigned UI. Good designers aren't limited by style but taste and discretion.” twitter.com

We should strive to build the best possible app to solve the particular problem we’re trying to solve, not to follow a specific style or meet some arbitrary idea of good taste. Some aspects of what is labeled skeuomorphism actually aid in usability. @gruber generally did a good job walking the fine line between matters of taste and matters of usability, but that nuance seems to be lost on many people.

An app that uses leather textures and nails usability is better for the user than a convoluted app with no texture.

That's a great way to summarize it. While the general community may skew in one way or the other, designers need to do what's best for their particular app and users and resist the temptation to only follow what's in vogue. The best "flat" designs like Clear and Letterpress, certainly did that.

I'll add something from @marcedwards' article, and @clarko's upcoming Iterate appearance to the mix:

Other platforms can't composite or render well, so for performance, flat, solid, and square is a "have to" as much as a design language choice.

bjango.com

Unfortunately, I disagree on Clear. I think it’s a phenomenal app and pushed the boundaries of gesture-based UI, but the app seems to have been designed to be a buttonless app, not to be the best possible todo app.

@gruber put it well: “Clear is like an A+ submission for a class assignment to design a buttonless app; not a good idea for an actual app.” twitter.com

I know that sounds like a harsh critique, but I really don’t intend it as that. We need developers to experiment with taking things too far in a certain direction so that we can better understand where the true boundaries lie. And building a buttonless app was actually a great idea, it’s made hundreds of thousands of dollars. But I don’t see it as a paragon of usability

And I should probably point out, that I also don’t think any of my apps are paragons of usability. I hope to someday build an app worth of that label, but I’ve got a lot of learning and hard work ahead of me.

Thanks Rene. Very interesting perspective from @marcedwards.

I don't want to make the issue too much about Clear but, in it's defense: Clear might not be a paragon for discoverability - a particular aspect of usability - but it is a great to-do list app for many people (my wife and I included). It's popularity couldn't have lasted this long if it was merely a design experiment. While their goal might not have been to make the most usable to-do list, I do think they wanted to make the best to-do list for people who don't need all the fluff.

That’s a fair assessment. The iOS userbase is incredibly diverse, both in taste and in their ability to grok software. It’s a bit of a rabbit hole, but I do think targeting more sophisticated users is a valid strategy for certain apps. Which means that the criteria for assessing usability should be somewhat flexible. But that’s why I’ve been quite leery of all the talk of Clear being the future of all apps. If we’re judging usability on a sliding scale, it’s easy to forget that most users — even most sophisticated users — don’t want to have to learn how to use an app, they just want to use the app. Over time some gestures like pull to refresh will make their way into our common consciousness, but buttons have a long and useful life ahead.

And back to the original topic, I think targeting users with certain tastes is also a valid strategy. As the trend toward less skeuomorphic design gains steam, I think we’re going to see some delightfully skeuomorphic apps do incredibly well. When Classics first introduced the realistic page turn, I played with it for hours. It was just so damn fun. To this day I still prefer the skeuomorphism of iBooks to the bland reading experience of the Kindle app. And don’t get me started on Microsoft’s use of the “flat” design aesthetic. So... garish... and yet so cold...

I'm in the lucky situation as an UI/UX designer to have an App with a very large active user base (our iTranslate App). In such an environment you can learn very fast what works and what doesn't. One of my key findings is that I need to make sure, as a designer, that I minimize the amount of support questions that we get. You basically know you failed when you receive a thousand Emails per day with the same 5 questions, regardless if your design is flat or skeuomorphic ;-)

David Pogue weighs in on skeuomorphism and Apple with an article in Scientific American.

This is the post I wish I was smart enough to write. Case closed:

“‘Flat’ and ‘Skeuomorphic’ aesthetic, not design.

Aesthetic (how something looks) properties do not wholly describe the overall design of a thing. ‘Design’ as a descriptor represents the process, intentions, and execution of an idea, and aesthetics makes up a very small part of that. To distill our discourse on design down to the aesthetic choices is seriously disturbing – it discredits the most important considerations we as designers must make in order to create good design.”

I don't feel it's completely "case closed." The aesthetic *should* be tied into the usefulness metric mentioned in the article. Form informs function. The form should appropriately express the behavior of the app. The main problem with blaming this on "aesthetic" is that many designers don't understand that the design goes deeper than this. When you're looking to get Dribbble "likes" all that matters is that it looks amazing. What the button/screen (whatever you are showing) actually does (usefulness) is very much secondary, or non-existant. So aesthetic becomes its own layer rather than a part of the functionality that enhances the app's goal.

That’s pretty much what @mr said:

“Don’t get me wrong – aesthetic choices are important”

“Think about whether or not your aesthetic decisions will hinder your solution to the customer’s problem”

“Great UI [aesthetic] is a crucial building block of great design”

The problem he’s addressing in the post is ascribing too much importance to aesthetic and misunderstanding the role it plays in design. Both on the skeuomorphic side and the flat side too many apps follow a form over function approach — often unwittingly.

For example, in trying to create a “minimalist” app, people often conflate minimalist aesthetic with the minimalist design principles that can lead to better usability. Which leads to sparse, flat apps that are very hard to use

Is there a way to agree with something here without writing a comment? Sort of like the favorite on Twitter? :)

Great stuff, guys.

Francisco: yep, just click a sentence and tap highlight.

Louie Mantia weighs in here: mantia.me

One problem with this whole discussion is that I'm hearing top designers using different definitions of "skeuomorphism". For example Sascha Grief defines it as "a derivative object that retains ornamental design cues to a structure that was necessary in the original" (sachagreif.com), which sounds slightly different than what Mantia is talking about .

But any way, I think this whole debate stemmed from people painting unhelpfully broad strokes on the subject. I think most of us pretty much agree that these are both interesting styles that have become fads. They are both useful in different situations but neither is categorically better than the other.

We put Mantia, Wiskus, and Edwards on a mic together to suss it out:

imore.com

Nice! I don't know how I missed that. And I think I might have to take back my point about those two specific articles (Sacha's and Mantia's) - looking back at the examples, I think their definitions can be reconciled.