I am doing an article for 1stwebdesigner.com about this: Do Regular Users Really Care if Your Website is Flat? We all know that flat design dominates most markets, but do you think that average website users really care if the design is flat? What do you think?
Most users wouldn't even know the difference - they know if a site is well constructed and inspires trust but I doubt they could tell you why. It does depend on who you think regular users are. rofl
No really, when I googled for flat design, it looks like "normal" trendy design like 90% sites have... But they don't look cheap nevertheless...
Exactly - it's the current trend Before that it was the misnamed "web 2.0" style The OP wanted to know if people cared...
People care only about the content and a good design is one that doesn't draw attention to itself but to the content on the page. It should not make things difficult for the user trying to find information and should take little time to load.
I'd say they care about the good design, yes. If there is a difference between "flat" and "trendy" (what I mean is, if "trendy" is wider term than "flat", including but not limited to), then I'd say they most don't know the difference. If "flat" is that kind of site where you have a high header with lots of empty space, big bg fixed picture, and few high chunks of central content including 3 round-shaped pictures positioned in the central and 2 fancy buttons, then I'd say it's annoying, boring and looks like WP template copyed&pasted from elsewhere... I guess others see it that way also, so it could be counter-effect. (example: http://analytics-day.com/)
What matters most on a website is quality content and accessibility. ANYTHING else is goofy bullshit that's probably wasting bandwidth, code, and the user's time; no matter how many ignorant PSD jockeys try to piss on every single site out there claiming otherwise. No matter how pretty or flashy it is. That said, some 'flat' design is just as bad as the complex before it, if not worse. Sure it's lower bandwidth since it's mostly large empty areas, but those large empty areas are just wasting screen real-estate on 'gee ain't it neat' goofy crap that just gets in the way of what's important -- delivering CONTENT to the user. But for the most part "flat" design has become as sick a buzzword as "SEO", "HTML 5" or "Web 2.0" -- which is to say that what most people call it ... isn't... and when it is, it's not Scottish.
Ditto this. I think there's something to be said for any kind of design, provided it is what the end user wants. If you're building for the general mobile phone crowd, for example, it's going to look VERY different to an internal intranet site built for graphic designers or something. I think we should have three tenets of web design: (1) Content. (2) Accessibility (or simplicity - that works for me, too). And (3) No stupid crap.
This right here is the number one thing most "designers" AND 'clients' having sites built for them neglect. So many sites are more about stroking the designers ego or meeting the desires of clients who don't know enough about websites to be making decisions in the first place, that the most important thing -- making the site useful to visitors -- gets ridiculously neglected. You see the same idiocy out of SEO-tard scam artists who are so concerned with getting traffic to the site they stop caring about if that traffic consists of visitors who actually care about the content, if that content is even relevant to the topic the site is supposed to be about, or even if the visitors can get at the content. See why most of my google searches of the past two years have no relevant results until page 2. Thanks SEO scam artist jackasses! (search engines really need to add per-user blacklist options) The biggest question any developer should be asking themselves when adding things OTHER than content to the site is "How does this make the site more useful to the visitor?" -- and when it comes to massive bandwidth wasting background images, goofy illegible bandwidth wasting webfonts, and the endless pointless "gee ain't it neat" scripttardery your typical jQuery using dumbass craps all over websites with, the answer is "It doesn't... at ALL". ... and if it doesn't, for *** sake LEAVE IT OUT! But what do I know, I consider Apple products to have all the artistic style and grace of a recently sanitized hospital ward, and consider most artistic "movements" of the past century like post-urbanism to be such effete elitist placebo bull that really need to go back into the bowels from which they came. Maybe I'm just too blue collar for this ****.
I concur, they are and I've gotten more than a few laughs from reading them. Apart from his unique stylistic approach, I have found his posts *very* instructive and I have learnt a great deal from them. I am grateful that he takes the time to write them and in so doing, teaches non technical people such as myself.
Typical users don't give a shit, purely flat designs can be hard to navigate through. I think most users just care about the content, usability, and speed
I think people care more about the experience they have. Don't make them think. Flat design or not make it dead simple to use and navigate
That's where a LOT of 'designers' seem to screw up. They're so obsessed with 'form over function' it's like they forget the purpose of a website is to deliver content, not stroke their... ego. Ego, yeah, that's the word I wanted to use. A good design shouldn't distract from the content. Content is what brought a user there, is what they are after, and the entire reason a website should exist in the first place -- and yet it seems many people don't even THINK about that when they start sleazing together a PSD before they even have semantic markup :/ Likewise, "gee ain't it neat" animated nonsense shouldn't make sites harder to use. It's part of why I've soured on dropdown menus completely. They cause "link overload" where you overwhelm users with options while at the same time hide options from the user, are a pain to use for mobile users, and are often a waste of bandwidth if people aren't using most of what's been stuffed up there. It gets even WORSE with this idiotic halfwit bekaptah nonsense we're seeing now of taking the already hard to use on mobile dropdown menu, and crap it into an accordion launched from a vague/meaningless and annoying single button. People consider that an improvment? Lemme guess, they never actually used it on a mobile device? Hence my latest site being so ridiculously plain it's almost painful to my artistic sensitivities -- since as much as I make fun of the artsy fartsy types in web design, I am a digital artist, conventional media artist and sculptor as well. Not the best of any of those, but it's why I can smell artsy nonsense a mile away. Crudstunk, I forgot to pull the pics of my sculpts off my.opera before they folded it... time to dig and get them into FB I guess... In any case -- and this flies in the face of what most people will tell you -- the BEST design is one you don't notice, since if you notice it, you're not paying attention to the content. Most of the time you 'notice' a design, it's NOT because of something good.