Neumorphism, visual accessibility, and empathy
Taking an empathic look at why Neumorphism is bad for accessibility and usability.
“A good UX designer has empathy”.
This is something every UX designer has heard at some point in their career. Empathy helps us get into the mindset of the user and build solutions that solve real problems. By having empathy, designers gain a deeper understanding of the user and can advocate for what’s truly important to them.
Neumorphism is the modern derivation of skeuomorphism, the concept of modeling designs after their real-world equivalent. Empathy is embedded in the idea of skeuomorphism. It’s about taking something novel to your users and designing in a way they already understand. This can be an excellent way for designers to help build a conceptual model that their users can understand and relate to. An example of this is the computer “desktop” as designed by Steve Jobs in the '80s, which uses the idea of a real-life desktop as a metaphor, complete with a trash can to move unwanted ‘files’ into, files as places to put content into and folders to put files into.
What started out as an effort to assimilate users into an uncertain environment has led to what we now know as “Neumorphism”, a low contrast, pastel color doting, minimalistic version of its predecessor. As designers, it is our job to design inclusive interfaces and as the golden saying goes, “You are not your users”. This is why the trend of Neumorphism has been so fascinating; it breaks affordances and sacrifices usability and accessibility for the sake of visual design. It tears down all of the empathy that went into skeuomorphism.
As new trends in visual design come into the limelight, we can sometimes be lost in their shiny newness and end up getting caught up in trends that can hurt our users. As humans, the things we cannot experience for ourselves are foreign and often reside in the back of our minds, but with 217 million people worldwide with vision impairments, it’s essential for us to design for accessibility and bring these problems to the forefront.
By now, you’ve probably read many articles and comments detailing exactly why Neumorphism is an affront to accessibility. Still, I want to reframe the problem, bring in empathy, and put us all in the shoes of our users. Let’s experience the Neumorphic user experience from the eyes of people with visual impairments.
For this experiment, I used the No Coffee Visual Simulator. This is a cool web extension that lets you simulate what different visual impairments might be like.
NOTE: These simulations may not be 100% accurate, but they provide an idea of what low visibility might look like.
Cataracts
A cataract is the cloudiness of the eye lens. The symptoms can also be double vision and blurriness. I set the cataract feature to 10, which is about 50% on the extension.
Diabetic Retinopathy
Diabetic Retinopathy is the vision loss associated with diabetes, and it’s characterized by spots and floaters in the vision. I set the diabetic Retinopathy setting at 50%.
Glaucoma
Glaucoma results from damage to the optic nerve. It is characterized by tunnel vision in advanced cases. I set the glaucoma setting to 50%.
Low Acuity & Low Contrast
This experiment tested blurry vision and low contrast at levels 4 for both settings.
As depicted, in every variation, the higher contrast design is easier to see. The low contrast colors famously used in Neuromorphism blend together and make it harder to understand the interface.
This is just a cursory look into why Neumorphism is getting so much hate. Although I visually showed the visual accessibility issues with Neumorphism, there are other issues with affordance and cognitive load.
With 217 million individuals with moderate to full vision impairment and 1.1 billion individuals with near-visual impairment, it is vital to consider the needs of these users.
I hope these images helped you empathize with people with visual impairments and see why Neumorphism, although beautiful, is harmful in the long run.
