In A Brief History of Human Centered Design, you touched on a lot of aspects of interface and interaction design that I found valuable to developing a dialogue around the subject. Nice work, by the way! With your example of the switch from affordance heavy skeuomorphic designs and their sometimes unnecessary or distracting components to the more simplistic flat designs that embrace the limitations of 2D screens, I think you clearly illustrated one of the many design challanges faced in the last decade.

Before I jump into a discussion about my views on how augmented reality interfaces will re-define digital interactions, I’d like to say a few words about my views on HCD.

To me, human-centered design means focusing on the needs of the people you are designing for and keeping that focus as you employ various methods of an iterative research and design process. It means laying aside assumptions, building empathy, and using insights from research to build an understanding of interactions between users, the world, and whatever you are designing. It means more than just testing for usability in prototypes and improving through refinement, although these are very important. Human-centered design, which I view as equal parts philosophy and approach, can extend past task execution and help us make users’ experiences more enjoyable, ethical, and intuitive.

Flat vs. Skeuomorphism Design in Augmented Reality Interfaces

Augmented reality (AR) is a relatively new way of layering digital experiences onto our analog world. This means that interfaces are about to expand past the 2D touch screens we’ve been designing for and join the 3D world around us. I’d like to offer up an example that discusses how we have a lot of work to do to begin understanding how best practices from 2D interfaces, like flat design, must be re-evaluated as AR becomes more commonplace.

Here we can begin to imagine how different elements of an augmented reality interface would best serve users in a more skeuomorphic visual representation, while others would benefit from a flatter design.

As we discussed, skeuomorphic design doesn’t necessarily embrace the 2D platform because it consists of 3D elements. What we must consider is the possibility that as digital and physical bridge with AR/VR, 2D flat design could become constraining. When a user can do more than swipe, push, and pinch, sticking with flat might actually limit affordances and oversimplify some interactions. Or, on the contrary, 2D could be a good constraint for the 3D world. Maybe adding that third dimension makes the interaction more difficult to discover or execute. One can only do so many things when interacting with a 2D object, but the gestures and affordances are almost endless in a 3D space. Flat design, in this view, could maintain its value for elements that are best when represented minimally.

Forward to your next post, I’d like to hear your thoughts on this subject. As interfaces begin to pop up in the real world via augmented reality, what impact will this have on the global design themes we define as best practice?

Side x Jason

Flat vs. Skeuomorphism Design in Augmented Reality Interfaces was originally published in Side x Side on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Dear Jason,

I believe all of the tools we use as a species share the same end result, they apply a force on another object. During the Renaissance, scientists defined a set of six simple machines that they determined are the building blocks of all machines. These include the lever, wheel/axle, pulley, inclined plane, wedge, and screw. These six machines were the core of every invention for centuries, that is until electricity showed up. It changed everything. We were no longer restricted to the simple machines because suddenly we could manipulate forces in ways never thought possible before. We could run wires hundreds of miles and transmit binary signals in a matter of moments. It wasn’t long before we realized we could compound those binary signals together to create complex messages and eventually digital displays.

Today we can create images on screens that respond instantaneously to a human’s input. Just think about how we can drag our finger across the front of our phones and the entire screen instantly reacts to the movement, that’s some crazy magic happening if you ask me. Before we even realized the implications of what we had created, an entirely new set of interfaces were born. Just as the six simple machines were the building blocks of complex machinery, the touch screen is the foundation for apps.

Although these touch screens were created only a decade ago, we’ve made great progress in creating intuitive and meaningful human interactions. For a long time, the leading software companies were dictating best practices for human centered design, and they often looked to the physical world for inspiration. Take Apple for example, they had just created one of the most breakthrough devices, the iPhone, but they recognized that there wasn’t a strong precedent for touch interactions. How could they signify that a button is clickable without a cursor changing as the user hovers over it? Simple, they followed the precedents set forth in the physical world, a practice often referred to as skeuomorphic design.

It naturally just makes sense. We recognize a button in the physical world because it has depth appears that it can be pressed, so they did the same thing. By adding a gradient and animating the object’s depth on press, they were able to mimic a human’s interaction with a real world button.

This set the precedent for years to come. As new digital products began to appear, their designers looked towards the physical world for inspiration. Online poker games looked just like real tables, music mixing applications matched the appearance of a DJ’s turntable. Even Apple’s iBooks app looked just like a wooden bookshelf, stocked with an infinite amount of texts.

As the years went on we began to see interactions become abstracted from the precedents created from the physical world. Not after long humans started to recognize digital patterns and were no longer dependent upon the the visual cues that mimicked the physical world. These new patterns sparked the rise of flat design. Suddenly we could create interfaces that are built for the digital world rather than the physical world.

Today there are a large amount of interaction precedents designed just for the digital world, such as Google’s Material Design. As we move forward, it is our responsibility to ensure that these interactions remain intuitive to the user. Yet we must experiment with new interaction patterns so that we can continue to evolve our tools just as we always have.

Even though it’s been just under a decade since the iPhone’s touch screen reinvented digital interactions, I think we’re due for another evolution sometime soon, what do you think?

Cheers,

Ben

A Brief History of Human Centered Design was originally published in Side x Side on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.