Ben Bleikamp is spot on in his post Skeuomorphism is not the problem:

The problem with all bad design, skeuomorphism included, is taste. It’s fun to make fun of skeuomorphism but when I glance at Dribbble I see a lot of it done tastefully. I also see a lot of beautiful flat design. It’s because a particular strategy or aesthetic isn’t really the problem with bad design, it’s a lack of taste.

Good taste is harder to learn, but it’s what prevents things like iCal from happening. iCal’s design isn’t awful because it’s skeuomorphic, it’s awful because it’s skeuomorphic in a tasteless way. A more subtle texture, a less harsh gradient, and more cues from other OSX apps could make iCal less of a laughingstock.

And while we’re at it, let’s also clear up what skeuomorphism is (and isn’t), courtesy of Sacha Greif.

In August 2003 — a few months before we got married — my wife and I went on a backpacking trip through Europe. You may remember that particular summer because it was the biggest European heat wave in a hundred years or something, so there was a lot of media coverage around it. Shops in Paris ran out of fans. Sweaty, half-naked tourists packed the sreets, which I’m sure made the locals even grumpier than usual about having to cede control of their cities to a bunch of foreigners.

It was quite a trip — 8 cities in 30 days. We used a hop-on hop-off bus service and stayed in youth hostels, as you do when you have no money. It was exhausting, wonderful, eye-opening, frustrating, beautiful. I’d love to show you some photos, but that’s going to be difficult because the album is sitting on my bookshelf at home.

Taking photos was different back then. Before the trip I bought 10 rolls of 24+3 Fujifilm ISO 400 film to use with my Nikon SLR. I had to weigh the importance of every photo, because not only was film expensive, we were also going to have to get the damn things developed. Once the trip was over we spent days going through the photos, reliving the moments, carefully picking the ones we deemed worthy of being put in our album.

I page through the album often. It includes some of the best photos I’ve ever taken, during one of the most tumultuous times in my life. My memories of that time are fading slowly along with the photos, but I’ll never forget the feeling of that month.

Last month several of my friends were in Europe on vacation. I know this because I followed their every move on Instagram and Facebook. Sometimes their photos reminded me of places we went on our trip. Sometimes I was jealous. Sometimes I just thought, wow, that’s pretty.

I wonder what it would be like if my wife and I did our backpacking trip now, almost a decade later. I imagine that I’d spend most of my time either taking photos with my phone, or hunting for free wifi with my phone. Because if you don’t post photos of what you’re doing, it didn’t really happen, right?

In a sense I’m glad we did our big Europe trip before social networks existed. We checked our email maybe once in every city — if we could find an Internet cafe. For the most part we were on our own. Just one couple amongst a sea of tourists. There was nothing different about the bottle of wine we had in that one Italian restaurant. Except that it was our bottle of wine, and we shared it just with each other. Not with anyone else. It was a whole month of secret moments in public, and we were just… there. We didn’t check in on Foursquare, we didn’t talk about it on Facebook, we didn’t post any photos anywhere. I now look back and appreciate the incredible freedom we had to live before we all got online and got this idea that the value of a moment is directly proportional to the number of likes it receives.

I woke up yesterday morning to a few Facebook status updates from people who don’t like Halloween, and who would never let their kids participate in the evils of trick-or-treating. I was immediately filled with guilt because I allowed my daughter to enjoy herself so much the previous night by letting her dress up in her self-chosen mermaid/fairy combination.

And then I realized that I feel like that all the time on Facebook. Guilt, anger, envy… Those are the emotions that fuel activity on most social networks, but perhaps Facebook more than the others. They’re the emotions that make us share/like/comment on things. And then I thought about our Europe trip, and how much I long for that time before we became obligated to carry the burden of the thoughts, feelings, and opinions of every single person we’re connected to online. It’s what Frank Chimero once called “huffing the exhaust of other people’s digital lives.”

I’m not saying I’m done with Facebook — and anyway, the public Facebook breakup blog post has become such a cliché that I don’t want this to sound like one. I’m just saying that I don’t like how my Facebook newsfeed makes me feel, so I’m going to “see other people” for a while, and see how that works out. And I’m going to try to rediscover the feeling of that Europe trip from a decade ago in the lives of the people around me.

Dmitri Fadeyev makes an argument in favor of continuous scrolling in eBooks (as opposed to traditional pagination) in The Return of the Scroll:

The scroll interface suits the variable nature of the digital content that it holds, but more so, it gives the user more fine-grained control over the reading experience. It feels more natural to scroll the page on a tablet because it creates the illusion of the physical medium, of a page sliding under your fingers. A scrolling interface also stops unwanted page turns if you happen to accidentally touch the screen. I’ve been trying out the new iBooks and while I think it’s too early to tell which mode is better, so far I really like it.

Even though his argument is solid, I still prefer the page metaphor when I’m reading an eBook, and I’m trying to figure out why. The closest I can get to a reason is the idea of “edges” that Craig Mod talks about in How magazines will be changed forever:

I miss the edges — physical and psychological. I miss the start of reading a print magazine, but mostly, I miss the finish. I miss the satisfaction of putting the bundle down, knowing I have gotten through it all. Nothing left. On to the next thing.

Scrolling is exhausting — it never ends. There is no sense of accomplishment. I once heard someone refer to infinite scrolling on websites as “a game you can never win.”

In contrast, pages allow us to hang on to some sense of beginning and end. They communicate a solid sense of progress. They serve as signposts to help us figure out where to stop reading until the next time. Where scrolling is an endless blob of text, pagination fits into the idea of memory chunking because it’s a more manageable unit to deal with cognitively.

In short, pagination lets you know that you’re getting somewhere, and not just running on a treadmill. Or maybe I’m just old and need to get with the times…

Update: @jbruwer pointed me to @simuari’s concept of flick scrolling as a possible solution. Video below, but also check out the post for more details.

Update 2: I wrote a quick follow-up to address some feedback on this post.

The Flat Design Era by Allan Grinshtein for the LayerVault Blog made the rounds a week or so ago, but I haven’t had a chance to read it until now. It’s a really good discussion about what they call “honest design”:

Designing honestly means recognizing that things you can do with screens and input devices can’t be done with physical objects — more importantly that we shouldn’t try copying them. It takes too much for granted. Can you imagine your pristine iPhone built into the body of an antique telephone handset? Is that beautiful design? […]

It is laziness to not continue to refine. Remove the unnecessary embellishments and keep stripping until you’ve almost gone too far. We believe that elegant interfaces are ones that have the most impact with the fewest elements.

Craig Mod’s How magazines will be changed forever ties in really nicely with my previous post on embracing limitations in the digital world:

Like Newsweek, almost all magazines will eventually go purely electronic. […] Still, as I watch this shift, I can’t help but feel a twinge of nostalgia. Not for the paper, but for the boundaries.

I miss the edges — physical and psychological. I miss the start of reading a print magazine, but mostly, I miss the finish. I miss the satisfaction of putting the bundle down, knowing I have gotten through it all. Nothing left. On to the next thing. […]

One of the qualities most natural to the user experience of print is the sense of potential completion, defined by the physical edges. It is a quality that is wholly unnatural to digital formats. The digital reading experience makes one want to connect and expand outward. Print calls for limit and containment.

(link via @RobertSBoone)

In Siamese Dream Frank Chimero addresses the differences between streaming music services (access to an unlimited number of songs) and purchasing music (ownership of a limited selection):

The way you navigate a place of abundance (streaming music) is fundamentally different than how you use a place with limitations (purchased music). In abundance, you’re looking to discover pre-existing value (“Knock my socks off!”), whereas with limitations, you’re looking to milk value (“I’ve got this thing. How can I learn to enjoy it?”).

He goes on to mention how this idea applies to most digital vs. physical environments:

Systems of abundance and limitation are not exclusive, even though we talk like they are. Digital services and technology rarely displace, but frequently add and augment. Your Twitter account didn’t replace your Facebook profile. You’re just splitting time and trying to keep both plates spinning. With digital, it is almost always AND instead of OR.

This is a huge part of our information overload problem. Imagine what would happen if you could only use one social network. Which one would you choose? What would you put there?¹ We create these artificial rules about what is appropriate to share on which network, and it’s only going to get harder to keep the separations straight as more and more AND services pop up.

We spend so much time trying to figure out what each network is for, but they’re all for the same thing: human connection. We get fixated on the tools and the medium, and forget that it’s people all the way down. I’m slowly realising that the real power of any network is in the off-network experiences they enable. It’s about the point where a simple Twitter conversation moves to email and a strong friendship. It’s about the point where a discovery of mutual interests online leads to a coffee and an hour-long conversation.

This horse had been beaten to death, but I’ll say it one more time. It doesn’t matter what network(s) you use, how many followers you have², what your Klout score is, or how Internet famous you are (or aren’t). What matters is the connections you make and the conversations you have. So what we really need is the courage to ditch AND (the place of abundance that’s about the dopamine rush of discovering new things all the time), and embrace OR (the place of limitation that’s about discovering value in the relationships that we already have).

Nick Wingfield has a Windows 8 story in the New York times that provides a pretty good summary of everything we’ve heard on the tech blogs over the past few months. This passage from Fresh Windows, but Where’s the Start Button? stood out for me:

Many of the familiar signposts from PCs of yore are gone in Microsoft’s new software, Windows 8, like the Start button for getting to programs and the drop-down menus that list their functions.

It took Mr. McCarthy several minutes just to figure out how to compose an e-mail message in Windows 8, which has a stripped-down look and on-screen buttons that at times resemble the runic assembly instructions for Ikea furniture.

“It made me feel like the biggest amateur computer user ever,” said Mr. McCarthy, 59, a copywriter in New York.

If your software makes users feel stupid, you’re in big trouble. Quotes like Mr. McCarthy’s is a manifestation of the age-old legacy software dilemma that Microsoft faces with Windows: do you scrap the thing and start over, or evolve what’s already there? Microsoft chose to start over, and we’re about to see if the gamble is going to pay off for them.

My money is on the argument that Joel Spolsky made in April 2000 in Things You Should Never Do, Part I:

When you throw away code¹ and start from scratch, you are throwing away all that knowledge. All those collected bug fixes. Years of programming work.

You are throwing away your market leadership. You are giving a gift of two or three years to your competitors, and believe me, that is a long time in software years.

You are wasting an outlandish amount of money writing code that already exists.

Or to bring it closer to design (and users) — as I argued in The Data-Pixel Approach To Improving User Experience:

The main problem with big redesigns is that, even though objectively the UX might have been improved, users are often left confused about what has happened and are unable to find their way. In most cases, making “steady, relentless, incremental progress” on a website (to borrow a phrase from John Gruber) is much more desirable. With this approach, users are pulled gently into a better experience, as opposed to being thrown into the deep end and forced to sink or swim.

I think we’re going to see a lot of sinking in the coming weeks…

Back in March I wrote about Pinterest, and how I believe it gives people the illusion that they’re creating something without the effort of actually doing the hard work. Now Clive Thompson makes a strong argument In Defense of Pinterest. He talks about the power of images to communicate emotion, and the one big way Pinterest is different from other social networks:

Indeed, part of the value of Pinterest is that it brings you out of yourself and into the world of things. As the Huffington Post writer Bianca Bosker argued, Facebook and Twitter are inwardly focused (“Look at me!”) while Pinterest is outwardly focused (“Look at this!”). It’s the world as seen through not your eyes but your imagination. “In such a self-obsessed society, this is a place where people are focusing attention on something other than themselves,” says Courtney Brennan, an avid Pinterest user.

These opposite sides of the argument aren’t mutually exclusive, of course. The critique that Pinterest is for people who “will do anything to avoid having to read” remains, but the examples cited by Clive convinced me that there is a great deal of value on the site — if you know where to look.