The recent creators update Microsoft released for Windows 10
may sound very unattractive and unartistic, but the truth is the is filled with
artistic potential and useful features that will give users a timeline to
manage complex work sessions, APIs that tie all of Microsoft's services
together and, notably, a new design paradigm intended to radically overhaul the
flat-rectangle user interface it's known for. Microsoft's Fluent Design System
focuses on five tenets to help developers build more creative and engaging user
interfaces: depth, material, light, scale and motion.
Light
If you are a filmmaker then the read is worth it. You will
to know just how important lighting is in a scene. With design, it's no
different: How bright or dark an interface is can change how the user perceives
it. It creates atmosphere, lending an
app design a sense of place. That's true enough, but when it comes to designing
an interactive menu or app interface, it's also an important tool for drawing a
user's attention. An illuminated button can teach customers how to use an app,
or highlight a program feature they might otherwise pass over.
Depth
With earlier versions, Windows has almost relied on square
frames to present users with information and tools. Microsoft is challenging
developers to kill that paradigm by breaking information and objects free of a
traditional 2D frame With Fluent Design.
Instead of the usual flat traditional calendar, for example,
Microsoft's Build presentation imagined an "at-a-glance" agenda
zooming in and telescoping important events toward the user -- creating an
illusion of depth by layering and sizing more important appointments to appear
larger. The hope is that by using depth to lend interfaces the illusion of a
physical environment, Windows apps will be able to keep their users engaged for
longer.
Motion
An amazing animated interface is indeed an engaging one, and
the "motion" edict is all about keeping a user's attention by giving
her something active to look at and interact with. The use of motion in Fluent
Design to a director using movement is being likened to lead the viewer to the
story they want to tell. "Motion design has a special power to bring all
of our experiences to life," Belfore says, "and lead people from one
task to another with a cinematic ease."
Microsoft illustrates this with the Xbox One's live pop-in
menu, music visualization in a media player and with a motion graphic
transitioning a simple graph to a more dynamic, brightly colored array of
representational shapes -- all examples that quickly draw the attention of the
user to the task at hand, be it controlling music, managing game settings or
simply keeping the viewer engaged with a dataset.
Material
Similar to most of Fluent Design's concepts, "material" almost seems
like a dig at the visual style of Windows' past. The functional squares of the
traditional Microsoft interface may be, well, functional, but it lacks a
connection to the physical world. Belfiore suggests that the key to making
users love Windows' app design is to emulate the "sensory and
invigorating" feel of the materials that make up the real world.
"We want to bring more of that character to our designs
in the right way, with a physical quality," he says. "Inviting people
to touch and interact." This statement could easily be dismissed as an
effort to give apps more interesting textures -- but with Windows 10, the idea
of making a PC interface inviting to touch holds some merit. We may think of
PCs as simple, traditional keyboard-and-mouse interfaces, but the Fall Creator
Update leans hard on better voice control, better touch interaction and
natural-feeling stylus input. Building an interface that invites that kind of
interaction makes a lot of sense.
Scale
Microsoft's recent design language seems surfaced with
improvement on the traditional computing environment -- objects under glass
controlled with peripherals and accessories. "Scale" is a bit
different. Here, Microsoft is looking toward its own future. Specifically, the
scale of digital objects used in 3D interfaces and virtual/augmented reality.
The relative "size" of digital assets happens to
be something VR developers have been working on for a few years now -- an
object that might be properly scaled when viewed through a computer monitor
might seem incredibly large or surprisingly small when viewed through an AR or
VR headset. Getting the size of virtual objects right is paramount to building
a good first-person interface. By challenging developers to think about the
scale of their interface in terms of a 3D environment, Microsoft is asking them
to imagine how their product might look through the company's Hololens
headgear.
It's quite too early to say for sure how Fluent Design will
work out, but Microsoft is clearly thinking about its user interface in a
completely new way. It's a little odd but the idea that the
next version of Windows could look completely different is absolutely exciting.
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