&gt;The issues with skeuomorphism occur when the attempt at making a &quot;real life&quot; object imposes restrictions on functionality that would not have existed otherwise.<p>Just because you can do something doesn&#x27;t mean you should. Before relaxing the restrictions on functionality and making everything resizable and customizable, you need to think about the cognitive load that is going to impose on your users. Books are actually a good example of this. I&#x27;m not sure I&#x27;ve ever actually wanted to resize or reflow the text in a book. Most books work rather well with the default settings. I can just pick it up and start reading. I don&#x27;t need to mess with the column layout or scroll settings before I can start doing what I intended to do.<p>The other advantage that skeuomorphism gives you is that you can piggyback on pre-existing user expectations. A dial may be a bit awkward to use with a mouse, but at least I can look at it and figure out what it does at a glance. The same applies to other skeuomorphic UI elements, like 3-d buttons, notebook-like pages, tabs, etc. I can, at a glance, look at all of those things and know what the expected behavior and interactions are.<p>Compare this to Apple&#x27;s flat design or Google&#x27;s material design. Sure, it looks great. But I don&#x27;t know how to interact with it. Is this text a button, or is it just a label? Does this panel move when I swipe on it? Does swiping in from the edge do something? How about pinching to zoom? The fact that so many apps have a modal overlay tutorial on first run should tell us that our &quot;flat&quot; designs are unusable. Yes, having some kind of help that explains what each control does may be appropriate, but we shouldn&#x27;t have to explain how to use the controls themselves.