UI Design: Why modern UI sucks and how to fix it

How leveraging accessible morphic styles in an era of boring design can help you stand out from the crowd, and engage with your users more effectively.

Overview

Most modern UI bores users to tears. There, I said it.

In our quest to make interfaces that were “clean” and “professional” with an absolute focus on raw mobile performance, we ended up creating UI’s that both look and feel like reading an encyclopedia, cover-to-cover, in one sitting.

This is 2023, consumers were promised flying cars and 15-hour workweeks, the LEAST we can do is give them some some UI that’s actually interesting to work with.

Let’s get into it.

Making a “modern” button

• Typeface: Open sans
• Size: 20
• Weight: semibold
• Text: Button
• Shift + A to create an autolayout frame
• Set padding to 20 and 12
• Set the background of that frame to #C9C9C9
• Set text color to #101010
• Set border radius of your frame to 8

You should now have something that looks like this:

Let’s turn it blue for fun, make it “pop”.

Yup, that’s accessible.

Job done, right? Everybody clap, back-pats all around, pop the champagne, we can go home.

The problem with this approach

Here’s the rub: this approach works, and that’s why it’s been so widely adopted, used throughout the spread of flat design, material design, and to lesser extent modern minimal design as a whole.

The problem with it is that while everyone knows that this is a button, the human brain has a funny way of filtering out things it sees a lot…