It is a genuine head-scratcher – how a company that clearly has the capability for original product development, given critical successes such as its Neutron semi-modular synthesizer or its Wing mixing console, could veer to such an unimaginative extreme. Behringer now claims that the firmware will differentiate the Swing, but how hard would it have been to think of something – anything – to differentiate the hardware? Could they really not come up with a single idea?

Well, here are ten of them.

1. Add a step sequencer

Korg’s Logue series proved that a modern step sequencer on a keyboard can be a great combination. Why not add one to the Swing?

2. Add a grid controller

Electronic musicians love grid controllers. Why not add one to store and trigger sequences? As a bonus, it could output chromatic notes on a second MIDI channel.

3. Add a touch-plate keyboard

You know the “great artists steal” line that Picasso probably stole himself? The Swing may merely be copying the KeyStep, but if it were to also steal the MicroFreak’s funky and expressive keys, Behringer could actually have something great.

4. Add generative and random elements

While we’re creatively stealing from the MicroFreak, why not grab some of its generative capabilities? Be the unpredictable alternative to the KeyStep.

5. Make it tiny

The KeyStep is portable, but it’s not that portable. Make a KeyStep alternative that will fit in a laptop bag, and maybe borrow the Korg NanoKey layout while you’re at it.

6. Make it huge

Some musicians don’t like mini keys. Some want more than two and a half octaves. Make a KeyStep for them!

7. Build it like a tank

The KeyStep may be reasonably well-constructed, but it’s not the most premium-feeling device, either. Put it in a metal chassis with wood end cheeks like Behringer’s own semi-modular series, and you can charge a premium.

8. Add a joystick

It worked on the Prophet VS. Why not on a modular controller keyboard?

9. Add some pots

A complement of knobs could output CV or MIDI CCs for more hands-on performance of modular or other synthesizers.

10. Ditch the flashing octave lights

Arturia, love ya, but if Behringer fixes this distracting design flaw, I might just have to go with their alternative.

For many, digital-only is a conflicting proposition. It curtails long-established freedoms of lending and resale, yet most would agree that it is also inevitably the future. But it doesn’t have to be the former. There is a solution – and it already exists.

The physical discs included with the retail versions of console games have served an increasingly marginal utility over the past console generation. Ever-larger day-one patches weigh in in the gigabytes. Triple-A games already require tens of gigabytes of data to be copied from the disc to the hard drive in order to manage load times, and the Playstation 5’s reliance on a super-fast SSD architecture only formalizes this.

This leaves the disc with precious little to actually do – it’s too slow to be played from, its data is often outdated by the time it’s installed, and as broadband speeds continue to inch upward, the read speed of even a modern Blu-ray drive is already slower than some fiber connections. Yet despite all this, the lowly disc still has one ace in the hole.

Even stripped of its value as a storage mechanism for game data, the disc serves a critical purpose: It is the physical manifestation of a license, an unencumbered and freely transferable token with which ownership of a game is immutably entangled. Future games could well ship with an essentially empty disc, relying on the network for everything else, yet the advantage of the disc-anchored license would remain undisputed. The disc allows one to, as memorably demonstrated in Sony’s 2013 response to Microsoft’s aborted digital-only Xbox play, simply hand that license to someone else.

All this then invites the question: Why does it have to be a disc? Why does a console need a noisy, mechanically complex, and expensive optical drive just to read a license? Professional software has long used USB peripherals, or dongles as they are semi-affectionately known, as the physical manifestation of licenses. The disc has become a dongle, so why not just use a dongle?

A few kilobytes and an encryption scheme are all that’s required to tie licenses to a physical device today. A tiny, inexpensive USB device could serve as the retail form factor for future games, ushering in an all-download future that retains nearly all the benefits of physical legacy formats. It could perhaps even, via firmware update, add “physical media” support to both the digital-only Playstation 5 and Xbox Series S.

Polarizing would be closer. But even that may not quite capture the divide between those who don’t care what the products in their homes look like, and those who may end up delaying a purchase until Sony ships a mark-two version. It’s not so much a love-it-or-hate-it situation as it is a don’t-care-or-hate-it.

“Aesthetics are subjective,” a skeptic might say. And to some degree they are. But the design language of the Playstation 5 goes beyond subjective qualities into the objectively measurable. And by these measures, it is a sizable regression.

“Good design is long-lasting,” reads one of Dieter Rams’ Ten Principles of Good Design. Rams explains: “It avoids being fashionable and therefore never appears antiquated. Unlike fashionable design, it lasts many years – even in today’s throwaway society.”

One need only look at some of Rams’ most iconic Braun products to see this principle in action: The RT20 radio was released in 1961, yet its minimal aesthetic would be at home in a modern appliance nearly sixty years later. Rams’ work famously inspired Jony Ive, and perhaps the best example of this in the present day is the MacBook Pro, whose core aesthetic of black keys on bare aluminum has remained unchanged for over a decade.

Sony itself is no stranger to long-lasting design. In one of the company’s category-defining products, industrial designer Norio Ohga hewed to Ramsian principles with the Walkman. The Walkman’s spare lines and thoughtful layout hold up well today, something that can hardly be said for competing devices that came out decades later, such as this early-2000s Aiwa.

Sony Interactive Entertainment, the division within the sprawling Sony corporate structure responsible for Playstation, has had its hits and misses, but mostly hits. The first generation console, for all its associations with the 1990s, wouldn’t look terribly out of place today with its tidy geometry. Playstation’s biggest miss was almost certainly the infamous “Boomerang” controller originally floated for the Playstation 3: Amid a “very vocal reaction,” in the words of a Sony executive at the time, it was ultimately replaced with an evolution of the proven DualShock controller.

What makes design long-lasting? Another of Rams’ Ten Principles is “good design is honest.” Circuit boards, optical drives, and other electronic components are rectilinear forms. An honest enclosure reflects this in its shape: It’s no coincidence that the Aiwa portable linked above looks terribly dated with its assemblage of arbitrary arcs and ovals, while the rectilinear 1979 Walkman, neatly enclosing its components, looks newer despite being older.

This brings us to the Playstation 5. Decked out in a panoply of curves, convexity and concavity, high-contrast materials, and even what amount to fins, Sony’s latest is an Aiwa, not a Walkman. It’s not honest about what’s inside; its sweeping, organic forms amount to a misdirection, one that will likely date as quickly as that curvy, early-2000s cassette player.

Even the best sometimes make this mistake. Jony Ive himself flirted with this kind of misdirection in the late 1990s: After the honesty of the original iMac’s curved forms built around its cathode-ray tube, the first iBook attempted to encase the rectilinear forms of its LCD and components in a skeuomorphic mimicry of the iMac, a mimicry that was quickly abandoned in favor of honest forms.

Returning once more to Rams, “good design is unobtrusive.” Consumer products “are neither decorative objects nor works of art.” According to SIE chief executive Jim Ryan, the intent of the Playstation 5’s design is to “grace most living areas,” its loud design and large size presumably serving as more of a centerpiece than as the humble provider of the game you’re playing.

Perhaps, as with the Boomerang, Sony will realize its desire to innovate (itself one of Rams’ principles) came at the expense of both the formal honesty and the long-lasting design of its next-generation console. Here’s hoping the legacy of Rams and of Ohga returns sometime soon to the Playstation line.

Allow me to posit the following: Despite its slow-burn pacing, fine cast, and frequently gorgeous production design, Ex Machina is not particularly smart. It is in reality a fairly staid rehash of tropes that have evolved little since Ridley Scott’s 1982 classic Blade Runner, and are actually less relevant today than they were thirty years prior.

In the 1960s, rogue AI was not only a novel premise, but one with a distinct air of possibility. Computers were new, they could do math hundreds of times faster than humans, and it hardly seemed a stretch to imagine that by, say, 2001, a computer might capably manage an entire space station while carrying on natural-language conversations in a soothing, Douglas Rain voice. Casually murdering you when you jeopardized the mission simply came with the territory.

By 1982, it might have been a little more ambitious to imagine that all the technology necessary to create Blade Runner‘s “more human than human” replicants would develop in the next thirty years, when we were neither closer to human-like machines nor human-like AI than we were when Philip K. Dick wrote the film’s source material. But in 2014, Alex Garland set his story in an unspecified near future – one that looks largely indistinguishable from the year of its release. Out of this timeline, we are asked to believe a nascent Pris Stratton could emerge.

The precise moment, however, in which Ex Machina takes a turn into irremediably bad science fiction is when Caleb enters the lab in which the robotic Ava was created – and we see it is empty. There are no teams of AI researchers. There are no robotics engineers, no material scientists, no battery chemists in Nathan’s bunker. Ava (and her fellow robots), comprising what seems like the better part of a century’s worth of technological advancements in all the aforementioned fields, are all attributed to the singlehanded efforts of tech CEO Nathan. There isn’t even a guy who “just does eyes.”

This is Ex Machina’s cardinal sin: a tech CEO who presumably employs hundreds if not thousands of software engineers, researchers, and designers to build what is implied to be a popular social media website and mobile app, needed not so much as a single assistant or domain expert to solve a set of problems that are more complex by orders of magnitude. Beyond this mortal blow to suspension of disbelief, the character of Nathan resolves to little more than a fill-in-the-blanks mad scientist template. A tech-CEO beard and V-neck have merely been painted on to add a nanometers-thin veneer of “relevance” to what is otherwise an archaic trope stretching back to Mary Shelley.

Ultimately, the problem with Ex Machina, as well as other contemporary androids-take-over scenarios such as HBO’s Westworld or Quantic Dream’s Detroit: Become Human, is that they warn of a future that has thus far proven completely implausible. The state of the art in robotics and AI is barely any closer to Roy and Pris in 2020 than it was in 1982. For all her practical abilities, Alexa remains a much closer relative of ELIZA than HAL. Despite impressive kinesiological displays by Boston Dynamics (and really only Boston Dynamics), a fully autonomous humanoid, let alone one that would pass for a human, remains firmly within the domain of fantasy.

And that is where Ex Machina fails as science fiction: It’s really nothing more than fantasy. It’s a taut drama, to be sure. But it asks no relevant questions about our world, settling for a thought experiment that has been played out long before.

That announcement is today, in fact. Your interest having been piqued by leaks and rumors, you call up the media event’s livestream in a corner of your office computer screen just as it starts. After several, seemingly interminable minutes touting business metrics, Tim Cook segues into an unveiling of the iPhone 8. It’s the first iPhone with wireless charging.

He introduces it with a new brand name: AirPower.

The analysts were wrong. Apple has not thrown in with the Wireless Power Consortium, opting instead to build its own, proprietary wireless charging protocol, called AirPower. Cook brings a VP onstage to go into an accessible, yet detailed technical discussion of AirPower’s superiority to the industry-leading Qi standard: It’s faster! You don’t have to center your phone on the charging pad! And, most importantly: You can charge multiple devices, in any arrangement, on a single pad. You sure can’t do that with Qi!

The AirPower Wireless Charger is introduced in two sizes: single, for $79, and multi, for $149. Both ship alongside the iPhone 8, to rave reviews.

Tech commentators debate the merits of Apple retracing its path of the proprietary Lightning cable. By 2020, there are two distinct markets of wireless chargers: “Android chargers” that use Qi, and more expensive, MFi-certified “Apple chargers” that use the AirPower protocol. Only Samsung has tried to market a Qi-based competitor to Apple’s multi-device AirPower charger, cleverly named “S Power,” which it later recalled due to overheating.

All this, of course, is not what happened.

Back in our own timeline, the iPhone 8 and X were introduced not with a prorprietary Apple protocol, but with Qi. Apple used the AirPower name not for its own charging technology, but for its attempt to bend Qi to its own ends, to throw its engineering might behind an ambitious, multi-device, positioning-agnostic, Qi-based, wireless charging mat. One that became a rare example of Apple announcing something upon which it ultimately could not deliver.

We don’t know that proprietary wireless charging is something Apple ever considered, though it would seem very un-Apple to have not at least explored it. Either way, I tend to think Apple’s vision of an advanced, multi-device charger would have had a much better shot at viability had its engineers been starting from scratch instead of adapting a pre-existing technology originally developed to power an Amway-branded water filter.

This counterfactual exercise might read as a lament for what could have been – but it’s not. I don’t think this trade-off would have been a good one. In a world where phones play such an outsize role in our daily lives, wireless charging is a significant convenience, and dividing that convenience into two camps would have defeated much of it.

Proprietary solutions like AirPlay or AirPods’ W1 system are great, but only because their advantages can always be exchanged for the flexibility of an industry standard, Bluetooth. Proprietary wireless power, due to the physical requirements of coils, would almost certainly have been to the exclusion of Qi. And even without AirPower, you can buy multi-device chargers, just not ones with Apple’s enhancements. 

We often think of Apple as uncompromising when it comes to its vision of user experience. But we should be glad Apple compromised on wireless power. That compromise has undoubtedly yielded the better experience.

Musings, commentary, and essays were worse. Rather than imagining others to find your unedited memoirs worth following, you would need to imagine your observations and ideas to be novel enough for an audience to consume. Indeed, mine was the greater hubris!

I would like to think, at least, that it was not wholly misplaced. If you read Interuserface at its peak, you might have read a piece on owning shapes that got linked by Daring Fireball. A piece on “delayed passive confirmation” that was cited in a book by Lukas Mathis. Pieces not-inaccurately predicting Apple developments. I wrote on design, and for awhile, it worked. I enjoyed writing it, and at least a few people enjoyed reading it. And then, I can only surmise, my enjoyment ceased.

I love writing. I love reading good writing. So why did I stop blogging? I continued to tweet and write comments on Hacker News, so it wasn’t for lack of things upon which to opine or the motivation to do so. I wrote at least one Medium piece on something so niche that a new version of the software it was written about has since rendered the point moot. But why not write at Interuserface?

What I’ve learned is that for me to enjoy writing, it cannot be caught up in my own expectations around its audience. I realized that I’d painted myself into a corner with Interuserface, where each new article had to meet a certain set of criteria to be on-brand, to engage with what I imagined the audience to be. What I really wanted was to write in a way not particularly calculated to burnish any pretensions of being smart, iconoclastic, or a “thought leader” – to write, in other words, for enjoyment.

Interuserface was a blog about design. It will remain so, but now also so much more. If I am to cultivate a new specialty, perhaps it will be in cold takes. There is, among other things, a critically-acclaimed movie that came out in 2014 for which I have been biding my time to write the ultimate contrarian review.

I do not imagine that I will abandon other media, be they tweetstorms or HN comments. But there is something liberating about writing away from these more interactive venues. A blog is a place you can call your own; it is home. It is where the heart is.

Last week, Apple announced the iPad Pro, its most ambitious move yet to position the iPad as more than a casual-use (and niche-use) device. The hardware is unquestionably up to the task – Apple boasts that it’s faster than 80% of laptops sold in the past year, with a screen packing more pixels than Apple’s own Retina Display MacBooks. Yet even with all this, the iPad Pro will be held back not by its hardware, but by its operating system. A bigger form factor may signal professional ambitions, but what’s truly needed for the iPad to rival desktop environments is not an iPad Pro, but an iOS Pro.

The iPad as it stands fits the needs of some professionals. Viewed in a jobs-to-be-done framework, there are some jobs for which many will find it the best hire, but these tend to be all of a kind: They are performed by a single application with a narrow scope, such as a note-taking app to brainstorm or a marine navigation app to pilot a boat. The iPad pro is being pitched to professionals whose needs center around using more applications, with broader scopes, with deeper networks of relational structure (that is to say, more files used together), none of which iOS was originally designed to work with. A big screen, a keyboard, even a high-fidelity pointing device do nothing to address this.

In this series of posts, I want to examine some of the shortcomings iOS has in offering a versatile, professional, creative environment, while proposing some potential solutions to them. The first is multitasking.

Limitation: Multitasking

iOS 9, in anticipation of the iPad Pro, adds split-screen multitasking. It’s clear a lot of thought went into this particular approach, and it’s naturally much cleaner than wrangling a mess of floating windows. But it has one major drawback that stems from the very core of the iOS app-centric model.

It’s actually a little absurd: In the on-stage demos, Microsoft’s Kirk Konigsbauer demonstrates the ease with which you can load up a Word document and a PowerPoint deck side-by-side. What he doesn’t show is that the moment you want to load a second Word document into that other pane, something possible since Microsoft’s Multiple Document Interface in the late 1980s, iOS will stop you: There’s simply no way to do it, because the app-centric paradigm of iOS has no room for document-level UI separation.

Solution: Share the metaphor

It’s not too hard to imagine a solution that can leverage the app-centric paradigm of iOS into something supporting multiple documents from the same app. Apps and documents both share the metaphor of the window on the desktop, so why not let them share the iOS pane model?

In an application that supports it, the slide-over menu gains a new option at the bottom for the current app. Tapping that instantiates another view of the app, defaulting to the document management or “open” view. The underlying iOS process model would likely need an overhaul for this to become a reality, but it’s a necessity.

Next

Efficient management of multiple applications and multiple documents is a critical part of many professional workflows, but it’s far from the only part. The next installment will look at the concepts of files and projects in our hypothetical iOS Pro.

Five years ago, Apple’s last new product category, the iPad, was unveiled. In just a few days, the company’s next new product category, the Apple Watch, will make its debut. So I’m going to do something I haven’t here since 2010: I’m going to make some informed (if almost certainly wrong) speculation about one of the biggest remaining unknowns: In this case, pricing.

Pricing is an often-overlooked part of design, something we tend to think of as purely the domain of business, to be taken care of by MBAs rather than product designers. But pricing is just as interwoven with design constraints and user psychology as any other design choice, and I’m nearly certain Jonathan Ive’s team played a part in the process.

Mind the gap

The one thing we do know about the lineup’s pricing is its floor: Apple Watch Sport is $349. We have wild speculation for the ceiling: five, ten, even twenty thousand dollar price points have been proposed for the top-end, solid-gold Apple Watch Edition. That’s uncharted territory, but what’s most interesting in terms of price design is the mid-range, un-suffixed Apple Watch.

Consensus seems to be that the steel-clad Apple Watch will start at nearly twice the price of the aluminum Sport. While this is hardly unreasonable to expect for a semi-luxury item, it would leave a huge hole in Apple’s usual pricing structure: Ever since the introduction of the iPhone, Apple has priced all its mobile devices in $100 increments, and it’s become a proven strategy for the company. Edition notwithstanding, I can’t really see them abandoning it for the Watch.

Finding the right variable

Apple’s upsells for mobile products have included storage space, screen size, and in the case of previous years’ models, hardware revision, all priced with the same $100 increments. But the Apple Watch has none of these easily-tiered variables.

As for screen size, it’s highly unlikely the four-millimeter step from the 38mm to the 42mm version will be enough to carry a $100 premium (for aluminum and steel, at least); even $50 seems like a stretch. All Apple needs to cover the cost of are the additional metal (a few cents to a dollar?) and a few more pixels of OLED ($12?), for which a $30 bump seems just about right to maintain the product’s margin. And the $30 increment is a familiar one, used with iPads for which the $100 increment alone wasn’t sufficient to maintain the margin on cellular radios.

So that’s a $30 increment, but still no $100. How about color? Even though John Gruber has suggested a possible return of the 2006 MacBook’s “black tax,” Apple has been selling black versions of its hardware for the same price as all other colors since the iPhone 3G in 2008.

Stepping up

The magic of the repeated $100 increment is the negotiability it engenders in the buyer’s mind. Whatever you’re considering buying, the next step up is never more than $100 away – it’s right there, tempting you. It’s for this reason that Apple more or less has to have something at a $449 price point, and with no premium bands in sight for Sport, only a modest premium likely for screen size, and equal color pricing, that leaves the entry-level steel version to cover the gap.

From there, however, I think Apple has plenty of flexibility to maintain its $100 increment strategy with premium bands, each tier falling into the groups outlined by Gruber in his piece.

The market versus the margin

There’s no doubt that premium watch buyers are used to spending more than this for a quality steel watch. Perhaps Apple could charge higher prices to signal competition with quality mechanical watches, but I think they will lowball simply because they can. A steel-housed smartwatch doesn’t cost twice as much to build as an aluminum-housed one, and I don’t think Apple will price it as such.

I could be entirely wrong about this, but historically, Apple doesn’t really seem to care about charging a lot as much as they care about charging enough to maintain good margins. Remember Steve Jobs’ deft anchoring of the iPad at $999 before announcing it would be half that? However the Apple Watch ends up being priced, I think it’s going to be based more on the margins Apple can make than on how high the market might be willing to go.

The newly-announced Apple Watch is a curious fusion. It blends ingredients of both an old and a new version of the largest company in the US: On one hand, it’s a throwback to the days when Apple experimented with products designed not to change your life, but to improve a very specific facet of it. On the other, it is loaded with subtle signals of a substantial change in the way Apple approaches the market. It is simultaneously an extension of the iPhone in the same way the iPod was an extension of the Macintosh, while charting a fascinating new direction for the post-Beats-acquisition Apple.

On repeat

The iPod was, in the big picture, not a game-changer. It was not a product that would usher in the digital age of several creative industries like the Mac did, or kickstart a variety of entire markets and even subcultures as did the iPhone. It was not a product that would enable you to do amazing new things like instantly translating words on a sign, but one that would simply take something you already do, listening to music, and make it slick, seamless, and more fun. It was a device that nobody needed, but one that millions grew to want.

In this way, the Apple Watch seems to closely follow the iPod playbook. Despite what many industry watchers have breathlessly proclaimed about the dawn of the wearable era, one would be hard-pressed to call the Watch, or indeed any smartwatch a socio-technological shift on the level of the smartphone or the tablet. At the end of the day, all of them – Pebble, Android Wear, and now even the Apple Watch, are conceived of purely as extensions of the smartphone. By and large, they enable new modes of doing the same things you could do with a smartphone, where the smartphone enabled you to do new things altogether.

And that’s not a problem, at least for Apple. Because this time, they’re trying what appears to be an entirely new strategy to out-iPod the iPod.

The category path

“New product categories” were the enigmatic, ear-perking words with which Tim Cook teased the Apple Watch (among other things) earlier in the year. But beneath the glossy presentation of a new Apple product and category, between the lines of the messaging both verbal and visual, is where a new, uncharted Apple becomes apparent.

Each “new category” Apple has entered over the past thirteen years has seen the debut of a product with a singular cachet. The first iPods, at $400 (almost $540 in 2014), grew to become a pop-culture icon of consumer tech luxury, until the $250 iPod mini, and ultimately the $99 Shuffle, made them accessible to the mass market. The iPhone, introduced at the $400 price point on contract, was most visibly adopted by tastemakers for whom the Motorola Razr had become culturally and economically diluted, only to eventually have its past models offered free on contract. Even in a world with a 5.5″, gold iPhone 6 Plus, the mere presence of the cracked-glass iPhone 4 toted by a broke college student dilutes the iPhone’s cachet from its cultural height.

Built to last

It seems that Apple is attempting to build a new business that is immune to this dilution. An unabashed luxury (though as always, attainable luxury) sub-brand. If its desktop computer and mobile device segments sell you beautifully-designed options for things you need, Luxury Apple sells you the things you don’t need, but want.

It’s written all over the details. The new typographic standards, abandoning friendly Myriad for the more sophisticated and transatlantic DIN, all-caps at that. The new industrial design language that dispenses with the practical surfaces and materials of Apple’s computing hardware and adopts the language of jewelers, with not-entirely-necessary engraved detail text, mirror-finish metals, and extensive, first-party customization with the sorts of materials you might find composing products at Angela Ahrendts’ old employer. Make no mistake, Apple is speaking a new language with the Watch.

In this light, the Apple Watch is about more than smartwatches. It isn’t even particularly about wearables. It’s about building a new business on aspirational products now that its original aspirational products have become accessible. Will Apple succeed at this, or will annual updates of thinner, more capable devices from this new luxury side take the same path to the mass market as every other one of Apple’s successful premium devices?

An earlier version of this post misquoted Tim Cook and has been corrected.

I don’t remember exactly where I first encountered it. But at some point in the past three years, I, along with a large contingent of user interface designers, fans, and industry followers, learned a new word: Skeuomorphic. A skeuomorph in the UI world, so the popular definition goes (even if the rigorous scientific definition of the word makes “skeuomorphic design” an oxymoron) is a GUI or elements of a GUI that borrow from a physical analog of their functionality. It seemed like a useful concept in defining the execution of user interfaces, with an added benefit of sounding exotic in conversation – but I think we may have outgrown it.

Everyone loves a feud

Somewhere along the way, this newly-popularized concept gained that one thing critical to capturing our collective imagination: a foil. Where skeuomorphism was tied to the familiar, the tactile, the rich, the warm, this dark horse was divorced of the familiar, lived in platonic ideals, was simple, cold, mathematic. Despite drawing most of its theory from the 20th Century’s signature design movement, Modernism, it was nonetheless given its own, rather less impressive (and more prescriptive) name, “flat design.”

As the story goes, each of these poles had its champion, with Apple raising the varnished-oak banner of its increasingly unified mobile and desktop design language, and Microsoft carrying the solid, rectilinear flag of what was briefly but indelibly called its Metro design language. A war was brewing in the UI design world between flat and skeu: Apple’s rumored “move to flat” would stir more design-office conversation than a betrayal in Game of Thrones.

Not so flat

There is a problem with this narrative. Much of the interaction that users have with iOS devices is with UI elements having no physical analogs apart from the most basic, localized physical metaphor, the button – most of these are even just black Helvetica on a white background. And for all of Microsoft’s eschewing of texture, shading, and object references, one cannot escape that its many boxes and encircled icons ultimately draw affordance from our associations with a physical object, the humble pushbutton.

So if much of iOS is “flat,” and Windows Phone is loaded with a thousand tiny skeuomorphs, what are we left with? An important realization: “Flat design” is not nearly as flat as it looks. Skeuomorphism is a critical part of interaction design, and is everywhere.

How, then, do we verbalize the many clear differences between the examples of iOS and Windows Phone? The answer is to build a more nuanced framework than “flat” versus “skeuomorphism.”

Building a more useful vocabulary

Instead of imagining a fun-to-follow, yet ultimately empty battle between the forces of skeuomorphism and flat design, a more productive pursuit would be to construct a vocabulary around the toolset these concepts offer. Here are a few tools I see:

Functional object reference (“skeuomorphism”)

Propellerhead Reason, Apple Calendar, Microsoft Windows Phone 8 dialer

This is the sort of visual metaphor that ties an object from the physical world to a virtual tool. Ideally it is for purposes of building affordance from familiarity (turning pages in iBooks), but it can easily be misused (non-functional pages in iOS Address Book). Regardless of how realistically it’s rendered, a physical object can be useful as a reference so long as it is recognizable by the user and responds in the same way.

Material/texture reference

Apple Game Center, Quantum WordPress theme from Themesorter, artist’s rendition of 1990s CD-ROM menu

The difference between this (which you may call skeuomorphism as well; I won’t stop you) and the previous example is that the metaphor is implicit, if present at all. Ideally, there is some implied metaphor: Apple’s Game Center may not actually play backgammon, but its material references to a vintage board game case can put the user’s mind in a conceptual space for gaming. Often, this tool is simply used for decoration, but tasteful decoration can still aid user experience.

Depth cues

Apple Notification Center settings, Apple Maps, GitHub for Mac

Whereas the previous two tools always use concrete references, depth cues may or may not have such a clear analog. Their primary purpose is to imply what can be done if the user interacts with the controls they adorn, not referencing real objects themselves, but rather mechanical aspects of them.

Shape / color cues

Calvetica settings, Android lock screen, Solve for iOS

Contrasts in shape and color are often used in conjunction with depth cues to further increase contrast and create visual hierarchy. The trend of “flat design” is to use them with minimal application of the other aforementioned tools, which can be successful so long as the application of shape and color contrasts are sufficient to create an affordance of user action.

Addition and subtraction

My current one-liner for when the subject comes up is “‘flat design’ is approximately as useful a term for user interfaces as ‘red design’ or ’round design.'” Far from being a shot at the popular aesthetic of relying heavily on it, though, it’s meant to provoke thought: Flatness and depth are tools, just like color and shape, affordances and analogs.

Don’t just practice flat design or skeuomorphic design. Use the tools that are right for the interface that’s right for your users.