Great article -but the image has issues with Safari (invisible drag corner), and iOS (a mess).

I have found that we need to be very, very careful, when making the UI more "fun."

Things like rounded affordances, short transition animations, easy-to-understand elements, etc., are good. They remove the "friction."

However, cute icons, unprompted animations, and overuse of whitespace for the sake of design aesthetics, can cause the UI to be too prominent.

UI needs to be approachable, useful, and unobtrusive. i.e. "forgettable." Many designers absolutely can't stand the idea of designing stuff that no one pays attention to; but that's actually exactly what most UI needs to be.

The metaphor that I use, is that most waitstaff at restaurants, wear black.

The reason is, is because people don't go to a restaurant to pay attention to the staff (with a couple of ahem exceptions <owl emoji/>). They go for the food, and the ease of having it provided without the need to cook and wash up.

I feel that UI needs to be the same.

I am currently working on a version 2 of a pretty popular app that has been out for a couple of years. The original was almost entirely designed by a professional graphic designer, and he did a great job -for the most part. It looks great, and people like it.

But I am constantly encountering people that have no idea about some of its most important features, mainly because the affordances were deprecated in service to visual aesthetic. The new version uses a distinct "accent color" for elements that can be manipulated, as well as simpler, clearer design. It's working well.

Another example is my "Spinner" UI element[0]. This was a UIKit element that I designed, to provide an interactive "prize wheel" spinner feature for iOS. It works nicely.

But I have never been able to justify actually using it for any of my projects. It's too "in your face."

[0] https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/RVS_Spinner

That's a lovely little article. Thank you.