The more I think about this design failure the more I want to write an article explaining some of the biology behind how our eyes work, how we are mostly blind most of the time, our vision is a blurry mess and why that makes this such an objectively terrible design change. https://twitter.com/Freerunnering/status/1275832747895009283

Our eyesight working like a flashlight we flash at the point we are looking at. The rest of our vision being a blurry mess that our brains invent most of. Removing all colour, contrast from everything means we actually have to read each one, we can’t object recognise the icons.

There are similar points about borders, row separators, and alternate row colours. How they serve a purpose. Removing all these visual affordances and replacing them with “extra padding” means you have to use sooo much more spacing, show so much less content, and is less clear.

So much of “trendy” modern design is just objectively terribly thought out “bad” design.

People think of their eyes as super HD video cameras and they are right for a true ‘retina’ quality VR headset would need something like (from memory) a 32k screen per eye.
But that’s really only the exact center.

The rest is a low res blur that our brains use to invent our high res view of the world from (+ our eyes have blind spots it really does just completely invent the content of).

Plus every time we move our eyes we go blind.

Try watching your eyes move in a mirror (not the font camera, that has a delay). You can’t see them move, they jump from one point to another, because we go blind while our eyes move. Then our brains use predicted motion and ret-con when things happened to pretend we didn’t.

So big bold, high contrast, distinct colours on icons and UI elements mean you can see and know where things are without looking exactly at them.
If everything is a gray blob outside the few cm in front of you then you need to actually look slowly at each icon to know what it is.

Side point: motion is processed sort of separately and can bypass most of the slow conscious stages of our vision system (hence why we can flinch and dodge a ball thrown at us before fully realising what just happened).

So things like the dock icon bouncing for notifications

Besides all the normal arguments against this super minimalist, flat, empty UI trend being terrible design, it’s actively working against how our eyes and vision system actually work.