"Official"
"based on 71 users. "
"Billions in lost revenue"
Core blimey. Thank goodness for the experts to right our wrong paths, eh, peeps?
Personally, I blame Micro...hangon. It works here. So it isn't funny.
It's official: Users navigate flat UI designs 22 per cent slower
The mania for "flat" user interfaces is costing publishers and ecommerce sites billions in lost revenue. A "flat" design removes the distinction between navigation controls and content. Historically, navigation controls such as buttons were shaded, or given 3D relief, to distinguish them from the application or web page's …
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Tuesday 5th September 2017 11:57 GMT DaLo
UX testing can be performed on 71 users and give very good correlation.
It depends on the tests, the question/task set etc and the diversity of the pool of users (e.g. you couldn't ask 100 people in a pensioner home to carry out a task and think it applies to the whole population). This is very different from a statistical survey based upon opinion.
UX testing with a pool of just 5 users can provide sufficient result for your own apps to be clear about consensus if you have a clear problem you are trying to address. It may not suffice for a general subjective or opinion based question about your website or app.
Heatmap testing general requires around 40~50 participants.
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Tuesday 5th September 2017 11:59 GMT m0rt
Yes. But Billions in lost revenue?
Heatmap testing in a pool for a specific UI, fine. But then to extrapolate that across the, well the entire world using public with a claim of billions in lost revenue?
Sorry, I don't buy that. And being attributed to purely the aethetics and not the layout, information flow, and the segment of population etc. Not for something claimed this high.
If someone had said that 'KDE users more productive than Gnome' there would be a massive outcry at, well lots of things.
But hey. This is the new world APP rapid design, 'fail forward' and all those wonderful terms that mean half arsed conclusions are used to make grandiose decisions.
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Tuesday 5th September 2017 12:17 GMT m0rt
Gah - aethetics = aesthetics.
Anyway, on an 'ire roll' now so lets see where this goes...
If companies, who directly don't lose the billions by inserting a lovely 3d glow around their pop-up 'Hey - subscribe to our newsletter because we ROCK' as soon as you go to their web-app, really were concerned about lost productivity - I wonder how many billions, nay, Trillions, are lost daily because of 'Hey - your call is important to us, please stay on the line so we can bounce you around the globe a few times, in a phone version of a text adventure game!'
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Tuesday 5th September 2017 15:15 GMT Teiwaz
line up the complaints
'Hey - your call is important to us, please stay on the line so we can bounce you around the globe a few times, in a phone version of a text adventure game!'
Personally I've found those sorts of shenanigans more common on complaints and other 'information lines'
- If there was an actual number for 'I want to give company X some money' you can be damn sure the only bouncing will be minimal to filter out the 'Buzby callers'
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Tuesday 5th September 2017 16:13 GMT JLV
>Yes. But Billions in lost revenue?
I am really not sure what your point is. For example, Google/Alphabet reports ~$25B USD revenue per quarter. I'll use that rather than some breathless "size of Web economy" stat. Halving that, to remove non-web Google stuff, then taking the remainder as a rough proxy for the order of magnitude of the web economy*, if there is a 22% loss in navigational efficiency on web pages due to flat design, then yes, revenue on things like ad-clicking or purchasing may very well drop in the billions.
Assuming of course the 22% drop is real and not just something to sell more Nielsen services.
There is a difference between calling BS on some made up marketing numbers and just being cantankerous for no particular reason. The UI-expertise commentards already called you out on your dismissal due to methodology and sample size. I am calling you out for not realizing that "1-2% of very big numbers in the triple digits range of $ billions" may very well equate to "billions in lost revenue".
>This is the new world APP rapid design, 'fail forward' and all those wonderful terms that mean half arsed conclusions are used to make grandiose decisions.
Glibness <> insight.
* Assume Google has 5-10% market share of web revenues: $24B * .5 (a hypothetical share of their web vs non-web revenue) * 4 (quarters) * 10 (the inverse of their market share if at 10%) => $480B/year.
1%, not 22%, of 480B$ is already $4.8B.
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Tuesday 5th September 2017 16:37 GMT m0rt
Ok - so lets see how these figures transfer:
"if there is a 22% loss in navigational efficiency" - which comes down to time taken to perform various tasks. This doesn't say this results in a task not being completed. Just taking longer. So even if we then pick another figure out of the air -
"then yes, revenue on things like ad-clicking or purchasing may very well drop in the billions." How? It may, but equally you can say it may not. So we are no clearer. Or rather, I don't think we are.
"There is a difference between calling BS on some made up marketing numbers and just being cantankerous for no particular reason. The UI-expertise commentards already called you out on your dismissal due to methodology and sample size."
You think they did, but my comment was based on the leap between this study of 71 users then being extrapolated to a comment referring to billions. Not that you can't get any meaning stats on a UI from 71 users. UI expert I am not, but I *do* know you can design a good UI without and with 3d indicators. So throwing a figure of 22% navigational effiency change based on using 3d or not, I am sorry, but I find it very hard to believe you can then say Flat UI is results in lost billions. This is not a scientific methodology. A flat UI vs a 3d UI - these are VERY large areas. To start talking about Metro and OS design based on this study is a little disingenious. I feel.
"Glibness <> insight." True. Forgive my glibness. However, there is a trend to make sweeping statements based on 'marketing style evidence'. I think this is one of them. Admittedly, this is my thought process. Others will disagree.
Overall what we are talking about, potentially, is just being clear on what is and isn't a link on a web page. What is and isn't clickable on an app. This *can* be done with 3d, but equally can be done in a flat way.
Edit: Something bugging me. You put: "1-2% of very big numbers in the triple digits range of $ billions" may very well equate to "billions in lost revenue", which looks like a quote but I am struggling to see where that quote came from? Trying to work out how 1% came into this.
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Tuesday 5th September 2017 16:50 GMT m0rt
Edit - missed the edit window but the actual study goes on to say this:
"These findings also confirm that flat or flat-ish designs can work better in certain conditions than others. "
"Notice that those characteristics are also just good, basic UX design best practice: visual simplicity, external consistency, clear visual hierarchy, and contrast. In general, if you have an experienced UX team that cares about user research, you’ll do better with a flat design than other product teams that don’t. If your designs are already strong, any potential weakness introduced by flat design will be mitigated. If you’re conducting regular user research, any mistakes you make in implementing a flat UI will be identified and corrected."
So what we are now showing is that actually, this isn't a Flat vs 3D simple study. Which means that the Reg article we are discussing, is slanted differently to the conclusions actually put forward by the NN Group.
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Tuesday 5th September 2017 17:08 GMT JLV
Well, you're not wrong on doubting marketing numbers in general. But given the magnitude of the web economy, even small effects can add up dramatically. So, in this instance, I'd give it somewhat the benefit of the doubt.
Keep in mind: a huge web metric is a user abandoning at a landing page for whatever reason - this is something a pretty, but inefficient, UI could easily worsen even while it made all the deciders salivate. (think no further than Windows' 8 UI for example).
Honestly, I'd be more doubtful of the 22% efficiency loss claim. That's a big number, pretty easy to game and likely to motivate much spending on remedies and white paper purchases. On the other hand Nielsen lives and dies by its reputation for truthfulness.
If you're aware you're being glib, just as I am aware I am BS-ing some back-of-envelope numbers out of thin air, then, yes, we are on the same wavelength.
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Wednesday 6th September 2017 01:02 GMT Richocet
In terms of the time lost, 22% isn't high. I've just completed some UX testing like this, and found issues where people take 2-4 times longer to complete tasks in areas of the site with bad labeling. That is 200%-400% longer.
Every participant under 60 who I have tested with over the years is short of time, so taking longer to complete a task means they may not have time to do another task, and the risk of an interruption e.g. phone call, increases in proportion to the time taken. An interruption has a high chance of abandonment the task altogether.
Within an organisation, a 22% reduction in employee efficiency while using a website such as the company intranet is very significant.
Ad revenue comes from clicks and views, not how long each ad is visible to the user, so this will reduce advertising revenue.
For any eCommerce website 22% more time consuming will translate in about the same loss of revenue, plus competitors are just a click away, so under performing sites can lose customers to competitors.
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Wednesday 6th September 2017 00:53 GMT Richocet
This is a sound methodology. 71 users is hugely more than needed to come to a solid conclusion. There is not enough space to go into it all here, but UX Matters tackle the sample/validity question in "Studies for problem discovery" section of http://bit.ly/2wDVkrc
User testing is not Marketing hocum. In my experience Marketing managers can get angry when they receive the results of user testing as it cramps their style, debunks assumptions, and creates a high and measurable bar for design quality where traditionally there was no accountability. If it was easy to manipulate, they would do that rather than get angry.
On the other hand in my experience, devs more often claim that the methodology is invalid due to statistical sample size requirements. But this type of study is comparable to testing software for bugs. You don't need thousands of testers to find the major bugs. More than 3 is a waste of money because the extra bugs they find will be minimal.
If you work in the web industry and think UX techniques are unreliable, you are missing out on an important tool to built quality UI.
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Tuesday 5th September 2017 21:36 GMT shawnfromnh
God I hate KDE, it is an abomination to gui's everywhere. No icons on the desktop at all, who was the braniac that thought that was a great idea. I tried KDE for an hour and realized it was one of the most non intuitive interfaces I have ever used. Nothing was where I expected it if I could find it at all. Sure they got the bugs out of a lot of the programs that come with it but then the interface design itself became a bug of enormous complexity when gui's are supposed to simplify the OS for the users this monstrosity went the exact opposite direction. I think hiring a focus group of normal users would be the best money they could ever spend.
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Wednesday 6th September 2017 12:53 GMT P.B. Lecavalier
RE: KDE
Which version of KDE are you talking about? Past disappointments with an early version of very unstable KDE 4? Or disappointments with _any_ version of KDE 5 (or whatever they call it)? KDE 5 is one example of a flat-inspired design, with hard to distinguish monochrome icons (extremely stupid), and countless idiotic decisions. For some "traditional" features, you must now use the thing called "Activity", which I never figured out (it's easier to compile your own kernel, really, that says it all). I managed to stay on KDE 4, for the time being.
Confused about KDE? Try GNOME 3! I gave it a try, and binned it relatively quickly. Eventually, the developers of GNOME decided that what makes a desktop UX as we commonly know it must be completely stripped from the gtk library, enforcing people to have a program looking like a phone app. Unsurprisingly, I heard that gtk does not have the following it used to have. There seems to be a convergence toward qt.
Insanity just about everywhere.
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Tuesday 5th September 2017 17:16 GMT Aztekman
A small number (71 ) of users can but often do not give good correlation.
When using a small number, those tend to have similar demographics/attributes.
Who were the testers?
Were they Apple Users, Windows Users, Linux...?
What were there ages?
The article specifies that the finding are not real-life.
"To get comparable, interpretable results from this experiment, we had to ask users to do very focused, short tasks on a single page. In real life, users don’t do tasks that way. They arrive to your site, and don’t know who you are or what you do. They navigate to pages, and don’t know for sure that they’ll find what they’re looking for there. They explore offerings and options."
To call it official, is less than scientific or honest. It is more likely, the writer of the article is not a fan (more likely a hater) of the flat design.
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Tuesday 5th September 2017 15:07 GMT Hollerithevo
As a UX person as well as web dev
I can tell you that 8 people are enough to test on. NNg were using more than one site. You don't get any more information by doubling to 16. I have been in the eye-tracking and testing labs and I have dealt with the data. Even my marketing colleagues freaked and spent ££££ on focus groups, to get exactly -- EXACTLY -- the same results.
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Tuesday 5th September 2017 15:43 GMT m0rt
@ Hollerithevo Re: As a UX person as well as web dev
Sorry - this story is presented as Flat UI means lost productivity vs 3d.
I don't buy this. A well presented UI is a well presented UI with or without 3d effects. I am not descrying the fact you can test UI elements with a few users. I am arguing against the flat '3D means more £' rhetoric.
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Wednesday 6th September 2017 09:31 GMT Rob Gr
Re: @ Hollerithevo As a UX person as well as web dev
That was exactly my thought - based on the heat map illustration it looks like the same layout was tested with flat UI elements vs 3D elements. However, changing to a good modern design requires more than just changing a theme - it should use the placement and coloring to give the user cues which elements are active and which are passive.
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Monday 30th March 2020 14:18 GMT Bruce Ordway
Re: @ Hollerithevo As a UX person as well as web dev
"placement and coloring to give the user cues"
Idiomatic... user demographics, type of device, etc...
"design requires more than just changing a theme"
Which translates into taking more time and consideration.
I find most flat UIs to be lacking intuitiveness/feedback.
I'm not exactly part of the "target audience" though... since I'm older and spend 99% of my time using desktops/laptops.
"a good modern design"
Isn't that an oxymoron?
Good design tends to be timeless.
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Wednesday 6th September 2017 16:24 GMT enormous c word
Re: @ Hollerithevo As a UX person as well as web dev
Wrong! There needs to be a clear distinction between content and controls. As more and more apps have been skinned, now the Windows GUI makes content and controls indistinguishable and very web page has its own look'n'feel, the result is that usability conventions have been eroded away completely, and users have to *learn* the vagaries of every app/tool/application/web page. What a mess.
I wish developers would understand I just want to use your f*****g tool, not gaze upon the magnificence of your lovingly crafted individual creative masterpiece.
Windows 3.1 -> 2000 had very clear GUI guidelines and applications were MUCH easier to learn than pre-Windows DOS based apps. Of course MAC/GEM GUIs had their conventions, but the real difference could be perceived when PC users went from pure DOS Text-based applications to Windows with its standards and usability conventions.
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Sunday 10th September 2017 22:39 GMT fredj
When I am using a computer to get something done and get fouled up on a too clever UI the only extra anybody in the world gets from me is a few swear words. Can you put a value on that?
I might add that any sort of an advert comes into the same category. Adverts are part of most user interfaces. Fine if you are shopping but if you are working they are n b u at all.
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Tuesday 5th September 2017 18:27 GMT bombastic bob
Re: Isn't slower navigation BETTER for web site owners?
Slower is NOT better. FASTER is _ALWAYS_ better!
Besides, the article clearly points out that eyeball focus went to things that weren't "productive", like looking longer at titles [maybe to recognize it as a title?] or buttons or other things that are NOT content, apparently to recognize them for what they are. You know, those thermal plots near the center of the page...
So this "extra time on the page" is just inefficiency, and is NOT an indicator that your page is better, or more important, or more interesting. It's just HARDER TO READ when it's 2D FLATSO FLUGLY, vs Elegant 3D Skeuomorphic. (if you ask me, I want EFFICIENT design so I can get more done).
As for the article itself:
THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!!!
It's ABOUT DAMN TIME that the TRUTH about this 2D vs 3D came out, and I have instinctively HATED the 2D FLATSO since it was excreted from the evil bowels of Redmond's "force the world to change" department. I particularly blame THIS person, though ti's possible that not ALL of it was her fault, directly. Sinofsky was merely a convenient scapegoat, and being male, easier to fire.
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Tuesday 5th September 2017 22:22 GMT Anonymous Coward
"Once upon a time, all UIs were flat"
Did they really go with the '3D' look for buttons because of usability studies in the 80s? Or was it because they wanted to show off the computing/graphics power they had and make flat buttons look dated and backwards? I'll bet it was the latter. Apple seemed to be the only company that ever gave much credence to usability studies back then - if Microsoft paid attention to them back in the 80s and 90s they need their money back!
Once everyone and everything had 3D buttons by 2000 or so, I guess Microsoft decided to be different and unfortunately for the rest of us Steve Jobs liked what he saw. He always liked simplicity, so I guess its not surprising, but too bad everyone else went that way too.
Maybe it is like hem length, and everything that is old will become new again. The old flat buttons rule today, but maybe soon we'll see the 3D buttons return in a UI here and there as a way to stand apart from the crowd, and it will come back into fashion.
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Thursday 7th April 2022 08:37 GMT david 12
Re: "Once upon a time, all UIs were flat"
The enormously successful Windows 95, with the distinct window frames, was the result of usability testing. Which was vindicated by it's enormous success and popularity.
Steve Jobs famously didn't like the Win 95 UI, but he was hardly independent -- and even if he had been independent, examination of the Apple Mac OS UI indicates that, for him, it was more important to make the Mac screen 'look good', than it was to make the Mac screen 'work well'.
The Mac was justifiably popular for putting a good representation of the Page up on the Screen. People who had the job of publishing Pages thought that was important. Win95 sacrificed page publishing for clarity: even the fonts were designed to be pixel aligned /on the screen/ for clarity, sacrificing print design.
I was not a fan of Win95. There was a certain amount of general flakyness, demonstrated by the difficulty dong a first installation on a random generic PC. There was a reason for the Mac meme "it just works". But the UI was not one of the problems. The UI was provably superior to X-Windows and to the Mac, justifying the money spent on usability testing.
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Wednesday 6th September 2017 05:20 GMT SylviaElse
Re: Isn't slower navigation BETTER for web site owners?
There's a general belief that people see what they eyes point to, but that's far from being true. Work on "inattentional blindness" shows that even seemingly obvious material is overlooked when it is not related to what a person is searching for. Advertisements that trick a user will just annoy them, and make it even more likely they'll simply abandon a site.
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Tuesday 5th September 2017 19:21 GMT DJSpuddyLizard
Once upon a time UIs were all flat, then UX experts did some research and discovered that introducing 3D elements increased navigability. This must have been sometime around 1988.
Not surprising that modern research agrees, as meatspace hardware changes terribly slowly.
Agreed. What happened here is certain companies (Apple, Microsoft, etc), pushed the "new, modern, 50% less fat!" flat GUIs so they could either (a) run it on cheaper hardware or (b) make it run faster on underpowered hardware. iOS changed to make it run faster. The abomination that was Metro in Windows 8 was so they could run it on phones barely more powerful than digital watches.
The companies made the flat GUIs, then hired some brain-addled UX "experts" to convince us all that it was actually better not being able to figure out GUIs
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Wednesday 6th September 2017 00:32 GMT Updraft102
"UX experts did some research and discovered that introducing 3D elements increased navigability. This must have been sometime around 1988.
Not surprising that modern research agrees, as meatspace hardware changes terribly slowly."
And that's the entire thing neatly wrapped up with a bow.
Proponents of flat design tell us that skeuomorphic design was needed back in the early days of PCs because people didn't know how to use them, and the physical resemblance to actual tangible objects helped them to grasp such a heady topic.
Now, we're told, people have been using graphical computer interfaces for years, and they no longer need the "training wheels" of skeuomorphs.
Human brains have been dealing with 3d objects in the real world for hundreds of thousands of years (assuming 'human' means 'H. sapiens'). Our ancestors also dealt with 3d objects for millions of years before that. Beings that can quickly recognize threats, useful objects, edible objects, etc., in this 3d visual world are at an advantage compared to those who take longer to do the same. Everything about our evolutionary legacy is about creating brains that are adept at identifying objects in that 3d context.
Skeuomorphs are not training wheels for people who don't know that a box containing the word "Ok" means "Ok". It sounds dumb to put it like that, but that's essentially what the flat UIers are trying to tell us. Skeuomporphs are representations of UI elements using the native "design language" our minds have evolved to work well with over thousands or millions of years of living in a 3d world full of 3d objects. Of course we process things faster that way; that's not shocking or puzzling in any way. The shocking thing would be if, despite this evolutionary legacy, we were just as good at dealing with flat UI stuff that we've been evolving to use for four or five years (while continuing to spend all of our non-screen time in the 3d real world).
Can we finally put this whole flat trend to bed and worry about what works rather than what is trendy and new?
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Tuesday 5th September 2017 17:23 GMT a_yank_lurker
@mort - Bad UI design is a known killer. What the study is saying is much of the UI 'research' is not based on trying to understand how users actually interact with the site but on what looks cool to graphic artist. Good UI design should try accommodate both young eyes and geriatric eyes that do not work so well these days. This means fonts, font colors, background colors, visual clues, etc. need to carefully considered. Also throw in color blindness and other lifetime visual issues and many 'cool' UI designs are flatly idiotic because many will have trouble using the page.
Too often in IT there is a tendency to ignore human biology like visual acuity, hands, etc. which limits the range of valid options for an effective interaction.
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Wednesday 6th September 2017 05:38 GMT Jamie Jones
Too often in IT there is a tendency to ignore human biology like visual acuity, hands, etc. which limits the range of valid options for an effective interaction.
Ahh, like websites that have a perfectly good scrolling system at their disposal, so they can provide a number of posts that users can scroll through with just the cursor keys, or a mouse wheel.
And then they add a useless bit of bling that collapses longer posts, forcing your flow to be interrupted as you navigate to the "expand post" link.
Or, believe it or not, some sites replace the perfectly good post time/date with an XXX mins/days ago mashup that is useless for any time longer than an hour. And even more crazy, if you disable this iavascript bling, instead of falling back to the old date format, it just shows the date. No time.
So if you are reading a new topic, all posts have the same datestamp.
had although many point this out, nothing changes.
Crazy.
El Reg should do an expose on these sites....
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Tuesday 5th September 2017 17:26 GMT Nick Z
Re: based on 71 users
Scientists usually need to replicate their studies to be sure of their findings.
But what strikes me about this whole thing is that nobody did any such study, before flat design became popular.
Some people and companies just said it was good to do. And the majority went along, as if this was God's truth. Nobody even bothered to check how this change affected software usability for people.
I think this should be a lesson for the IT industry, not just about flat design, but about computer programming in general. Evidence-based programming is what the IT industry really needs.
Because there are other examples in software development where some popular guy or a group of popular guys say that this or that is good to do. And a lot of people in the industry follow along and treat it as if it's some kind of religion.
It's almost like people trained in Computer Science don't know much about science. Because they aren't using the scientific method and they aren't conducting scientific experiments the way true scientists usually do.
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Tuesday 5th September 2017 17:41 GMT Richard 12
Re: based on 71 users
The studies were done in the 80s.
Faux-3D where clickable things look like they stick out of the screen and repond to a click by appearing to become depressed was the consensus opinion for "best UX" throughiut the 90s and 00s.
Several different studies have shown "flat" to be less discoverable and slower to navigate.
It's just that the design people have forgotten history. No doubt this will be "rediscovered" soon.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
