When minimal becomes confusing – and sterile.

The flat design of visuals helped make the digital world cleaner, faster and more modern. It removed clutter, stripped away decoration and focused on function. But maybe it went too far: flat design introduced new problems, many of which were subtle and had a deep impact.

Flat design removed realism, texture and visual cues. This means that it also obscured meaning, reduced trust and made interfaces feel less approachable. This is especially so in high-stakes, high-emotion or low-literacy environments.

This article looks at what is lost when the design of visuals goes too flat and why minimal does not always mean usable.

Flat Design Assumes Comprehensibility

Flat icons are efficient and neat, but only if you already know what they mean.

·       A right-facing triangle  ▶ might mean ‘play’

·       A pill-shaped outline 💊might mean ‘medication’

·       A simple line drawing of a telephone does not always suggest it is a button.

In older, skeuomorphic design, the metaphor taught the user: “This trash icon looks like a real bin, therefore, it means this is where you throw something away.” Flat design removes that scaffolding.

The assumption with flat design is that the user knows the symbol. The reality is that many do not, especially older adults, younger children or users from different cultural or technological backgrounds.

Affordance Is Lost

‘Affordance’ means the visual clues that suggest how a visual can be used. Skeuomorphic buttons looked like something you could press, or dials looked like something you could turn and switches looked like you could toggle them.

This is all removed with flat design:

·       A button can often just be a coloured rectangle with no shadow.

·       Clickable icons do not visually distinguish themselves from decorative ones.

·       Interactive fields can look identical to static content.

In high-risk contexts, such as medical apps or informed consent forms, this can create serious usability issues. If users do not know what they can click, they either click nothing or click the wrong thing.

While pursuing simplicity, flat design can become ambiguous.

Emotional Flatness

While flat interfaces are efficient, they can also feel cold, sterile and robotic. They remove the metaphor, the warmth and visual personality of skeuomorphic icons. This loss is especially felt in systems where emotion plays a role in user experience. For example:

·       Mental health apps that feel uninviting

·       Educational platforms that lack engagement for children

·       Healthcare portals that feel impersonal or corporate.

Skeuomorphic design was not just about decoration, it also carried an emotional tone. A slightly textured notebook in a diary app felt inviting to patients. A realistic button for save on an eCOA reflect a very human experience. A shadow under a button suggested someone had thought about how it should look and feel to press it.

Flat design does away with all of that.

Visual Clarity Can Suffer

It is very ironic that flat design can also reduce clarity, especially in iconography. This is because when icons are reduced to pure shapes, they can lose meaning.

In skeuomorphic design, icon styling carried function and state. For example, a depressed button versus a raised one. This indicated a state of engagement with the button. In flat design, those distinctions are often invisible without motion or hover states. This will not work on mobile apps.

Flat interfaces can become too visually uniform, making it harder to scan or prioritise content.

Not Universally Accessible

Flat design assumes:

·       Visual literacy

·       Cultural familiarity

·       Screen confidence

·       Strong eyesight.

However, in practice, many users prefer and benefit from:

·       Contrast: shadows, outlines and depth.

·       Context: metaphors that map to real-life knowledge.

·       Cues: hover states, borders and icons that show ‘you can interact here’.

When design is accessibility focused, flat design must be used with great care, otherwise it brings in a whole new raft of barriers.

Flat Design in High-Stakes Interfaces

In critical User Experience applications, such as healthcare, finance, education, public services, flat design can fail quietly, leading to misunderstanding or non-action.

Examples include:

·       A patient is not sure whether they have successfully submitted a form or an eCOA / eDiary entry.

·       A flat icon sequence (💊 ➝ 💧 ➝ 😃) is not understood as “Take this pill with water to feel better”

·       A “call for help” button uses a flat handset icon with no label or outline and gets missed entirely.

In high-stakes interfaces, visuals need to:

·       Teach

·       Reassure

·       Direct clearly.

Often, when flat icons are not accompanied by support structures, such as labels or interaction feedback, often cannot do any of this on its own.

When Does Flat Work?

Flat design has a valuable role when used in:

·       Productivity apps, where the user already knows the patterns

·       Developer tools, where visual minimalism aids focus

·       Content platforms, where the content, and not the UI, takes centre is the focus.

·       Multi-platform systems, where scalability and performance matter most.

In other words, flat design is better suited to contexts where speed and structure matter more than emotion or onboarding. However, outside of those zones, especially in empathy-driven design, there needs to be caution: flat should be approached carefully. Moreover, flat icons should never be assumed to be self-explanatory.

Flat Is Not Always Enough

Flat design evolved to clean up the mess of skeuomorphism. It enabled a faster and more scalable Internet. However, in simplification, flat design sometimes went too far. Affordance, emotional tone and visual clarity were all lost to a large extent, as well as accessibility and guidance for non-experts. Too much is assumed.

Perhaps the pendulum needs to swing back a little and introduce a hybrid of flat with skeuomorphism. There needs to be a more balanced design of visuals that keeps in place what is good about flat but brings back ‘feel’: Semi-Skeuomorphic Design.

The next article will take a closer look at the intuitiveness of flat design.

Thank you for reading,

Mark Gibson

Sunderland, United Kingdom, June 2025