A Comparative Study of Skeuomorphic and Flat Design from a UX Perspective

Abstract

Abstract:A key factor influencing the effectiveness of a user interface is the usability resulting from its design, and the overall experience generated while using it, through any kind of device. The two main design trends that prevail in the field of user interface design is skeuomorphism and flat design. Skeuomorphism was used in UI design long before flat design and it is built upon the notion of metaphors and affordances. Flat design is the main design trend used in most UIs today and, unlike skeuomorphic design, it is considered as a way to explore the digital medium without trying to reproduce the appearance of the physical world. This paper investigates how users perceive the two design approaches at the level of icon design (in terms of icon recognizability, recall and effectiveness) based on series of experiments and on data collected via a Tobii eye tracker. Moreover, the paper poses the question whether users perceive an overall flat design as more aesthetically attractive or more usable than a skeuomorphic equivalent. All tested hypotheses regarding potential effect of design approach on icon recognizability, task completion time, or number of errors were rejected but users perceived flat design as more usable. The last issue considered was how users respond to functionally equivalent flat and skeuomorphic variations of websites when given specific tasks to execute. Most tested hypotheses that website design affects task completion durations, user expected and experienced difficulty, or SUS (System Usability Scale) and meCUE questionnaires scores were rejected but there was a correlation between skeuomorphic design and increased experienced difficulty, as well as design type and SUS scores but not in both websites examined.

Analyzing journeys in sound: usability of graphical interpolators for sound design

“…Although the use of sixteen participants in the testing is a small number when compared to usability testing for general computer applications, it is a fair number in the music/sound technology area. Here formal usability testing is not often undertaken, as with the other interpolators [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10] or where it is done, it is often done with smaller numbers [30][31][32][33]. Nonetheless, with sixteen participants, some interesting results were obtained, and significance was shown between how the users interacted with the interface that had no visuals and the one with the full visuals.…”

“…It has been previously suggested that users that give a SUS scores of 82 (±5) tend to be "Promoters" and likely to recommend the system to other users [28]. Although these norms [20,28] are from a wide range of general computing systems, the obtained SUS scores still appear to perform well when compared to other music/ sound systems that have also been tested with SUS [30][31][32][33].…”

Ve’rdd. Narrowing the Gap between Paper Dictionaries, Low-Resource NLP and Community Involvement

“…This latter feature could then be used with feeding the results of pencil-n-paper inspections of translation, derivation and etymology relations. This interface design decision is meant to mimic the experience they would have when using a pencil and a paper, although by using a flat design paradigm as opposed to a fully skeuomorphic design, as there is evidence of the former resulting in a higher perceived usability (Spiliotopoulos et al, 2018).…”

Can Skeuomorphic Design Provide a Better Online Banking User Experience for Older Adults?

“…Finally, there has been some research into the use of skeuomorphism for user interfaces for older adults. A 2018 study found that older adult that had not been exposed to flat design would have more of a positive experience with skeuomorphism as the intuitiveness of the supported affordance would make the interface easier to understand [35]. This would be the case if older adults have not had much exposure to previous computer and mobile interaction.…”