There's a tangible backlash against Skeuomorphism in UI design. What are your thoughts?

I guess in someway I've been part of this backlash against the Skeu, as I've pointed fingers several times on Twitter.

Why? It just isn't to my taste. Just as Justin Bieber isn't my taste in music. It doesn't make me wrong, it doesn't make me right. It's all personal taste.

Regarding the wider backlash, I think it's hit a point when someone can crank out a design in Photoshop with a thousand layers and it gets picked out as "good design", whilst something simpler often gets overlooked. These examples of "good design" get emulated to death throughout the design community, which means they get stale quickly.

Who knows - this backlash may lead to an uprising of "simple" design, which may in turn lead to a backlash of that....

Agreed, there's a clan of Photoshop cowboys cluttering up Dribbble and template/gallery sites with overblown nonsense. Skeu-buse (I just coined that) is rife, which has in turn given it a bad name. Like I said though, with discretion a little bit of Skeu never killed anyone.

I still feel the best piece I've read on it is tobiasahlin.com

It echos my feelings that storytelling should be why we use it and not for aesthetic purposes only.

We also have to be wary we don't get tied in to a system because of the way we've designed it. An example would be iCal, where any interaction that doesn't mimic a real (leather bound, ugh) calendar, would seem out of place, however useful they may be.

I feel the validity of the metaphor is whats important. iCal is subjective, its not needed and it doesn't enhance the way the product works but its only subjective that one doesn't like the faux leather and torn months. My mum loves it on her iPad and if she were to get a mac she would feel at home instantly.

Where the metaphor simply doesn't work is when we try to merge the thoughts of digital delivery with an old school piece of kit such as a reel to reel machine, as in Podcasts, it simply doesn't sit right.

As usual with these things, it's better to ignore the trend and concentrate on what is best for the user in a particular scenario. Tobias puts it well in the post that Mark has linked to, "Done right, skeuomorphism can retain the simplicity and ease of use of an interface while empowering users to act."

I'll agree that there is an overabundance of skeu for the sake of it (esp. on Dribbble) but, unless it's in your product, why care? Let them overcomplicate and obfuscate their interfaces, it will just help yours stand out, whether you use skeuomorphism or not.

Tobias does make some great points, I'm not an emotionless person that hates a story - and there are (a few) Skeu's that I feel work pretty damn well in their context.

I think perhaps the definition needs to be a bit clearer, by the current definition the majority of interfaces are skeuomorphic - they use buttons, are buttons not themselves a skeu?

For the recent Podio iPad design, we went for a completely 'flat' aesthetic, but there are interaction skeus there - panels have physics and elasticity as if they existed in the physical world.

So perhaps I'm a massive hypocrite? Argh.

I think it's important to differentiate between different kind of skeuomorphs - visual skeuomorphs and interaction skeuomorphs.

Visuals are just tacky Photoshop candy; no real harm done.

Interaction skeuomorphs have the potential to damage more than just the quality of Dribbble - an outdated interaction metaphor holds back the progress of interaction design, a broken interaction metaphor is confusing to the user AND holds back progress.

Of course you can have well-used interaction affordances as in the Podio iPad app, and you can even have well-used visual skeuomorphs too - Müller-Brockmann-by-numbers isn't appropriate either all the time ;)

Some more of my notes from an upcoming blogpost- checkthis.com

I used a similar style to Podio when producing the UI for Optiscan, although a much simpler app. Users prefer the UI because it's less intrusive.
"Tacky Photoshop candy" is a bit of a harsh generalisation though. Cellar app wouldn't have anywhere near as many users without its semi-realism, and we're keeping it for the new version being worked on now. It had to be justified mind you.