On Infantilization in Digital Environments (2015)
Hmmm... design fashions change over time and are also affected by technological limitations.<p>I’m the beginning we had text only terminals. Font designs were about it.<p>Business machines stayed that way for quite a while.<p>8 bit machines came along and allowed a rudimentary windowing environment. The “desktop” metaphor with its “files” was extremely popular and arguably very successful.<p>Roll on 16 and 32 bit machines and the windows and Mac “desktop” windowing systems added some colour but no whimsy.<p>Macs got some smiles. Good god - it’s the end of grown ups.<p>iPhones (not iPads as the article asserts) introduced a heavily skeumorphic interface for two reasons: it was technologically possible on that platform and it was a design that someone with enough influence had chosen.<p>No surprises there: a wildly successful product that introduced a new design idea sparked a new fashion in UI design.<p>But skeumorphism in web design turned out to be less than great for reasons presented in the article.<p>So we retreat from skeumorphism and end up with: flat and colourful. UX (not just UI) experts discover that fast-loading and simple to comprehend websites convert to more sales and more profit.<p>Simple and easy is king on the web for obvious reasons.<p>If simple and easy looks like infantile there’s an excellent reason: it’s because they share many things. But not all.<p>Online gambling and share trading platforms my look infantile because they want to be appealing but they are fundamentally not infantile.<p>It’s easy enough to make a point if one only presents facts that support it. So much is skipped in this article that I feel like it might well be possible to cherry-pick enough opposing examples to argue exactly the opposite.