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It's a shame no one has mentioned the impact of the Mac OS X "Aqua" interface on all this. Aqua was the name Apple gave to the user interface style it introduced in Mac OS X. It changed the Mac's software from looking like this: …to looking like this: Here's Steve Jobs introducing it for the first time at MacWorld San Francisco 2000. As he says: ...

It's a big part of Skeuomorphism vs flat design, a debate about which Sacha Greif has a good writeup. Skeuomorphism like gloss, reflections and textures make things look like “real” objects, but all the fancy can increase cognitive load, and gives an unfortunate “samey” feel. The majority of iOS icons have the same or similar gloss effect on their icons, ...

Circular buttons can work well when an icon is all that's needed inside. A good example of this is Path. Their single icon buttons are circular and work well. However, to fit a word in the button, like 'Register', the button would have to be as tall as it is wide, taking up a lot of valuable space and creating a huge button. If using completely circular ...

This largely a question of design trends, but there are some UX aspects to it. Glossy icons and buttons were (arguably) mostly used to show affordance. It was also then used almost religiously in all Apple designs. Even today, most iOS icons are glossy by default. People don't neet to be shown some gloss or gradient to know that they can interact with ...

The answer is largely historical. In early HTML, there were no native circles or even squares with rounded corners, and the only way that you could have them was to use images. And at a time when speed mattered a lot (think 2000+ times slower than a connection today), most websites avoided images as much as possible. So, if you wanted to make a button, ...

The arrows on scrollbars are a functional element. If you click on them they move the screen up or down. Clicking on the area between the arrows and the position marker usually moves the screen up or down a page at a time. They are therefore not redundant as nothing else behaves in the same way. Whether or not they are needed is a different issue. While ...

Mac OS X scrollbars has no these arrows (at least by default) for a couple of years already. And it seems like most of the users are OK with this. But, for Mac OS X it's a system-wide change and every (almost) app is affected by it so everything behaves the same way. Actually, I don't see any reason to drop these arrows off (except for the rare design ...

Might be a bit of a tangent, but this trend reminds me of the BBC announcing their new "digital" logo back in 1997. The big reasons they gave at the time were that the move from glossy to a simpler matt logo allowed the logo to work better at multiple resolutions and on multiple devices. It also compressed better which was a big deal with their website in ...

Question's a bit too broad. There are sites devoted to this like http://www.useit.com/ (Jacob Nielsen) and books like Rocket Surgery Made Easy (Steve Krug). And it depends on the site/web application purpose - is it a blog? a store? a web service? And there are lots of specific answers on usability questions posted on this site addressing common issues. If ...

These all have their own uses, it depends on what content you have and how you want users to find content that determins which should be used. Using all of them will certianly be confusing, as all of these are variations on the same theme. Highest Rating If voting or reviewing is important to your content, this is a great way to go. However it's also ...

It's an age old balance between form and function. UX is trying to balance the two. You want something which is visually pleasing and "looks good" but also want something that conveys information quickly and efficiently and is easy to use. The Photoshop icon is really the best example. Sure the Feather looks cool, but what does that tell someone about ...

I can only speak from my own observations. People buy tablets and use them on the go. Internet on the go costs extra money depending on country and provider. Heavy websites load slower. Good designers think about how to keep performance and loading times low and conclude to move away from heavy bling bling buttons. Besides, Skeumorph designs have reached a ...

For browser based UIs it's marginally more efficient and much more cross-browser compliant to build these 'flat' designs i.e. no drop shadows, bevels, gradients, rounded corners etc etc This doesn't make a a great deal of difference on a desktop / broadband / modern browser but on mobile devices where connections are slower, screens are smaller and browser ...

Why the sudden change? Broadly speaking, it is not a sudden change. Specific to MS, it is a bit of a sudden change. It's a design trend. Graphic design and UI design, like design in general follows aesthetic trends. In the case of MS's examples, as many have noted, Windows 8/Metro is being designed as a significant departure from their previous ...

First, to my knowledge, there are no standards here (at least no formal ones). The de-facto standards we have (like the 960px one) come about because of manufacturers more-or-less standardising hardware screen resolutions (lately with the help of VESA). Microsoft recently posted their telemetry data in this area for Windows 7 users: Image from Building ...

The first question is simple: do users need multiple ways to sort? It depends simply on the amount of items they need to sort through. If you have 7 items total, an unordered list is sufficient. If you have 7 billion items, you'll need super-fancy sort orders combined with multiple filters. If you've something in between, well, you'll need something in ...

Attitudes have changed mainly because of: Horizontal Scroll on Tablet Ability of the mouse to scroll more easily through advanced coding Increased importance of Chinese language websites ONE: Tablets have broken the barrier so it doesn't seem strange anymore. Consider image carrousels that are featured on websites or any type of slider. The user has to ...

In my view, horizontal scrolling as such is even less accepted today. With responsiveness on the rise (RWD & A List Apart article from 2010), pages with regular horizontal scrolling appear to have "flawed designs" that force the browser to show horizontal scrollbars. This is even less acceptable as it was 5 to 10 years ago. In addition to that, ...

It boils down to the User, the Task and the Environment. In the past when horizontal scrolling was "bad practice" the conditions were this: Environment - A browser on a PC or laptop. Scrolling via a trackpad or a mouse. It's really awkward scrolling with a mouse horizontally. As we all know. Now this is changing rapidly because the environment of ...

Considder how you're going to place multiple round icons: download bmml source – Wireframes created with Balsamiq Mockups In the first solution, you're basically still using a rectangular grid, and you're effectively wasting the space around the icons. However, with circular icons you could go for a hexagonal grid like in the bottom solution. ...

I believe with all new technology, people compete to be the most intricate, the most complex, to demonstrate their knowledge of the latest trends. Whether it's Flash, jQuery, or glossy buttons, developers show one another their knowledge of the web by pushing it as far as it can go. Once that happens, the technology grows old, the competition stops, and ...

Like my marketing professor used to say: If everyone in the market is advertising toothpaste with sweet minty taste. You better advertise a toothpaste with salty taste. If everyone is advertising with flouride, you better do one without flouride! i.e. Think Different! Basically it's a marketing trend. All about standing out from the others. Now ...

It's a fashion called 'Metro' inspired from Microsoft Metro. Yep, flattened and squared just like a Microsoft-Metro app. If you remember the 'glossy-rounded-gradient' design just came in after windows XP, the 'glossy-rounded-shaded-and-shadowy' came in just after windows Vista. It's a fashion, nothing more.

Unfortunately, there are more of these "older users" than JohnGB things, it's just we usually don't mingle with them. Recently I met a girl - she is about 27ish, working in the online marketing industry - and she told me in a conversation that she never uses sliding on mobile phones, she needs explicit buttons for everything. So, it's not just older users. ...

This is a good question! Trending and Popular almost are synonymous, but as in the case with Youtube both these terms exist. Trending is something that is of present age, at the moment and a time scale that is relevant as of in shorter span of time. Trending news that is emerging news. Popular is alike Trending, but could be in a medium span of time, where ...

Interesting point. I agree that most of these if not all can represent the same thing. I found in most cases a website will almost always use at lease one. And the metric used I think has something to do with the type of website or how content is presented to the user. eg. "Most Discussed" would be more suited to discussion forums and blog type websites, ...