The End of the Era of Interesting UI: An Old Story

Huh, I'd never thought about that — but I answered, "Well, there's a lot you can do since it starts with deciding what to build in the first place."

I think that answer was half a dodge. Coming up with content is a director's or planner's job. A designer can think about it too, of course — sometimes that's even preferable. But I don't think that's really what was being asked.

While we were talking, I also found myself thinking: building "fun UI" is kind of a thing of the past now, isn't it.

What comes to mind when you hear "fun UI"?

What I picture is stuff like Flipboard's page-turning animation or Path's menu — apps from around the time the iPhone was exploding in popularity.

Go back a bit further and there were flip phones that opened both vertically and horizontally. Whether you'd even call that a UI is questionable, and looking back, that gimmick itself was genuinely strange. (But I loved it.)

More recently, the Nintendo Switch does interesting things with how it treats its controllers. This game, which got some buzz, also looks like it has nice motion, and I want one.

The "Playdate" handheld game console announced by a manufacturer called Panic

I've gone off on a tangent. My examples keep being hardware, but what I wanted to say is that, to me, a "fun UI" carries some kind of "gimmick."

That said, anyone who's been around this kind of thing for a while probably already knew this topic is old news. The days of UIs packed with lots of gimmicks are behind us, and it's already old news that the iconic skeuomorphic camera icon became a clean gradient a while back.

If the whole topic of "gimmicks aren't needed anymore" is itself old news, what comes next?

Making fun, quirky UIs isn't a designer's role. I know that. Solving problems is a designer's role. I know that too. But is a designer's job really just to combine flat, modern UI components?

I think it's actually the opposite.

Combining a limited set of UI elements hasn't changed. But that's not because there's less to do — it's a state where you're now expected to control everything, from animation to user flow to content: "more is being asked of you."

Instead of facing the screen the way you would when creating a work of art, you're now expected to face the user — and there's a bit of loneliness in that. But that's a matter of balance.

How to turn "anyone could have made this" into "only I could have made this" isn't just about appearance. But it isn't just about thinking, either.

I felt like writing something, so I wrote down some things I'd been thinking about recently, and it really did turn into just a personal musing.

It's a company blog, but since we relaunched it partly to let people get a sense of who we are and what we think about as we work, I figure this kind of post is fair game too.