This is it! This is the one. This is the post that has finally convinced me to stop checking Designer News regularly. Wow

I lowkey have a crush on Nicky Case. Glad you like it!

Yes, that's exactly right! Nicky Case put together an amazing "explorable explanation" for voting systems here: http://ncase.me/ballot/

I love this! I'm currently working on a small web app for creating and distributing ranked choice polls in order to show its benefits over traditional plurality voting.

There's real code behind that font!

Was I the only one who imagined walking the poor little cat over the edge of the cliff as soon as I heard the waves at the end?

Yes? Okay, my therapy appointment is tomorrow.

Hi @designernews, please add downvoting, this article is trash :)

I'm surprised to see so many people reacting so negatively this claim. This research doesn't claim that flat UI is inherently unusable:

If your designs are already strong, any potential weakness introduced by flat design will be mitigated.

It does claim, however, that by merit of flat design being flat, there are less signifiers for users to grab onto, and that a lack of strong signifiers can cause users to hesitate. This is certainly true in my experience.

Think about the old distinction between inputs and buttons—the former had a shadow on the inside, the latter on the outside. This made it evident which was which, without hovering. In flat design, both of these inputs can appear identically, and often do. Popular design systems like Material do away with borders and background altogether, which leads me pretty regularly to question whether or not something is clickable.

It isn't that your app will be totally borked without drop shadows or gradients or whatever else. It's that every time you remove a signifier, you subtly increase the amount of mental effort that's required to use your interface. And since cognitive processing and willpower draw from the same pool of resources, you are increasing the likelihood that your users will make poor decisions both inside and outside of your app.

This isn't something that you can learn yourself out of. As designers, we are probably more skilled at picking out what can be clicked on and what can't, but here are two important truths:

1. We aren't designing for us, the strongest 5% of computer users. We're designing for the 95%.
2. Even if we were just designing for us, flat UI still induces subconscious hesitations. Why subject ourselves to that for an aesthetic?

Design is intent. When you're making a visual change, it pays to know the research.

I run the Dropbox Design Book Club. We're currently reading Nudge, which is about designing sensible choice architecture.

Past books include Creativity, Inc., written by Ed Catmull (Pixar and Disney Animation president) and Radical Candor, which is more management-focused but still a solid read.

Other books which have been in our selection polls include:

• Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better
• Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
• Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences
• The Hero and the Outlaw: Building Extraordinary Brands Through the Power of Archetypes

These books haven't shown up in book club, but they're some of my favorites and I return to them often:

• The Design of Everyday Things
• The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
• Nicely Said: Writing for the Web with Style and Purpose
• The Elements of Style
• Outliers: The Story of Success
• Thinking, Fast and Slow

Some of these may be a little more pretentious than you're looking for (Edward Tufte in particular can be a smug little prick) but I have found all of them genuinely helpful, if you can get past the rhetoric of certain authors.

If you want, you can follow me on Goodreads. Hope this helps!

Should be fixed, sorry about that!