Insiders #179: Reverse Skeuomorphism: The New-Old Face of Digital Design

“I’ve got it!” the PM exclaimed. “We’ll load up a cart as they add items to it, and when they’re ready, they literally push the cart to the checkout!”

This happened in 2010 on a global eCommerce account.

I was mortified. I was leading strategy, and the PM assigned to this project was i told about the “best practices” that govern the web (and that they should stay in their lane).

“The web has become more abstract,” I said. Users don’t care if their hamburger menus have two all-beef patties or special sauce; they know how to use the web now.

You can’t blame them. The PM was part of a lineage of naturalistic thinkers who spent forty years aiding the transition to digital interfaces. The early days of eCommerce were full of bold ideas constrained by real-world metaphors.

“We don’t need to overcomplicate it, or reintroduce real-world metaphors,” I quipped. We’re past that.

Well, it’s time for me to eat my words. I think we’re tipping back into a new and bold era where literalism in digital commerce interface design isn’t a bug; it’s a feature.

The Skeuomorphic Boomerang: When Digital Design Comes Full Circle

Today, we’re experiencing reverse skeuomorphism: The process where digital abstractions, once derived from physical skeuomorphism, become literal within digital spaces.

Traditional skeuomorphism helps people understand how to use digital interfaces without up-front knowledge or training. By designing a computer interface to look and behave like the surface of a desk, a user might develop an intuition about how to use it. They instinctively know what the ‘Trash’ does or what a folder or file is.

We’re witnessing a slow-moving pipeline which is evident in all areas of culture: from art to commerce. What began as ornate realism in architecture, literature, typography, and fine art has become abstracted and reimagined in various other parts of culture.

1. ‍Ornate Realism. Ornamentalism in real life. Buildings, department stores, paintings, religious icons; anything expressed in intricate detail that shows a mastery or the medium.‍
2. 2D Simplification. Reduction of three-dimensional forms to two-dimensional representations. Modernism comes with simplification and commodification; in art and commerce it acts as a disruptive force.‍
3. Minimalist Reduction IRL. Extreme simplification. Distillation of forms to their most basic geometric shapes. “Just Walk Out” shopping and one-click checkout IRL. Amazon Dash.‍
4. Consumer Abstraction. Commercialization of minimalist forms in both experiences and products. Minimalist nativity sets sold by retailers like Pottery Barn.‍
5. Digital Reinterpretation. Ornamentation returns in digital spaces. A return to more literal, tangible representations in digital environments. Virtual shopping carts in Roblox, digital box offices in metaverse spaces.

This week, we saw the launch of “Escape from The Afterlife,” a Roblox activation by Warner Bros. in support of the forthcoming legasequel release of Beatlejuice, Beatlejuice. The Roblox land features the usual silver screen adaptation fare: minigames featuring sandworms and a virtual graveyard.

Curiously, the land also features a Fandango box office in the style of a multiscreen cinema, complete with a marquee. When entering the box office, a Roblox user may buy tickets for a film at an upcoming real-world show time.

This is an area of strategic growth for Roblox—turning the platform into a transactable marketplace. This land is the third in a series of examples of “IRL Commerce” activations on Roblox, which has seen Walmart introduce both vending machines and shopping carts into the virtual space.

In both cases, this is evidence of the real world leaking into digital design.

But reverse skeuomorphism is different because it demands that a digitally native experience become more literal. For example, Fandango (a website and app) takes on a less abstract form (a cinema) when entering these multiplayer and spatial universes.

During the IOT boom of the late teens, we saw a bevy of reverse skeuomorphic launches, including the canonical example of Amazon's Dash Button. This physical device allowed one-click ordering. It took the concept of digital convenience and frictionless experience and made the abstract “one-click” concept into a literal, tangible form.

Dash was discontinued in 2019 “due to the rise of voice assistants” (the Amazon PR line)—but more likely because a court in Germany found them to be illegal. The Dash Button is a peculiar study of the sympathetic and cyclical nature that digital and physical worlds have on each other and how they interplay.

A more recent example is how Apple Pay begat the Apple Card. Apple Pay launched in 2014 as a preferred payment method within the iOS and later MacOS ecosystems. The user primarily interacted with Apple Pay as a button, a payment option available when using preferred browsers and apps.

Released in 2019, the Apple Card is a credit card designed to be primarily managed through the iPhone's Wallet app. However, it also exists as a physical titanium card, embodying a physical manifestation of a digital-first product.

Physical Abstraction and Back Again: Art Becomes Commerce

Abstraction can leap from illustrative, 2D forms to 3D/IRL experiences in other areas of culture and commerce. Among them are notable examples in art history.

Abstract painting began in the early 20th century, with artists like Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian leading the way. This 2D abstraction laid the groundwork for 3D abstraction in sculpture, influencing artists like Constantin Brâncuși and Henry Moore. Brâncuși’s Bird in Space and Moore's organic forms can be seen as three-dimensional explorations of the same principles that abstract painters pursued—simplifying forms to their essence and exploring the interplay of shapes, space, and material.

Christian art has clear examples. Early Christian art depicted the mother and child in realistic, naturalistic forms (e.g., early Roman frescoes), which became more abstract and symbolic in Byzantine icons (e.g., the Hodegetria). During the Renaissance, artists like Raphael reinterpreted these abstract forms again into more realistic, humanistic depictions (e.g., Sistine Madonna).

Henry Moore’s “Mother and Child: Hood” (1983) is displayed at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. The work depicts the Madonna and Child as shapes, the abstraction becoming three-dimensional after centuries of planar depiction.

Curiously, in 2022, we saw “minimal nativity sets” go viral across myriad price points from retailers like Pottery Barn. The “minimalism” is indeed abstraction, dressed up in the language of commerce.

The viral trend that began on Pinterest launched a flurry of think pieces as the “minimalist nativity sets” became a topic of debate. The legibility of individual sets as a “nativity” set certainly has a lot to do with the context (including the season in which it is encountered). Still, the point of physically abstract idealized forms remains.

Likewise, the context of a reverse skeuomorphic literalized form changes the nature of a user’s desire to interact with it. A metaverse Fandango is useless to someone whose goal is not to see a movie tied in with the experience. This was one of the chief criticisms of the metaverse movement—any intent to recreate the entirety of the real world without the context necessary is fatalistic.

Why create a “virtual shopping mall” if you don’t have the same real-world constraints that created the physical shopping mall in the first place? The shopping mall is hardly a platonic ideal for a user experience.

Unlearning the Rules: The New Challenge in UX Design

Humanists have the same critiques of graphical user interfaces. In Performative Materiality and Theoretical Approaches to Interface (2013), cultural critic and UCLA studies professor Johanna Drucker argues that logicians have gatekept user interface design and imposed elements of friction that are counterintuitive to the user:

But the basic model of the user-centered, task-driven, goal-oriented approach to interface design remains... The situation arises in part because the dominant vocabulary (graphical and conceptual) for interface design has come from the engineering community.

Consider the necessary fields of study and expertise for developing user interfaces today, and ask yourself how many of these disciplines are required to reimagine an abstract user interface like Fandango as a cinema:

In The Language of New Media (2002), Lev Manovich discusses how digital interfaces evolve from and reference earlier media forms, exploring how abstraction and skeuomorphism play roles in interface design. This is because interfaces are designed, and design is inherently a scientific expression in an artistic medium.

Quoting Drucker, “An interface is a space in which a subject, not a user, is invoked. Interface is an enunciative system.” Suppose the context of most experiences in the planar 2D interfaces of eCommerce past was subjective (buying). In that case, the new context in a multiplayer, multifunction space like Roblox, where numerous goals (many highly contextual) must be more user-oriented. Or, all of the needs of the user are more carefully considered when reinterpreting the once-abstract interface as a real-world example.

The Fandango cinema is the way that it is not because of a law of cyclicality in online-to-offline mediums but because it simultaneously accomplishes the goal of the company and the user.

Considering that the goal of “Escape from the Afterlife” is to engage with a film and its associated universe, in any other context, these two ideals will compete with each other (shopping and exploring). Because Roblox's stated goal over the next decade is to commercialize its 50M monthly active users and transform into an “IRL Commerce” platform, we may see skeuomorphism and reverse skeuomorphism at odds.

Revisiting Old, Bad Ideas as New, Good Ones

In 2010, a PM's suggestion to "push a virtual cart to checkout" was dismissed as outdated, literalistic thinking. Yet I’m watching Roblox users line up at digital box offices and navigate virtual Walmart aisles. The intuitive, naturalistic interfaces once rejected are now at the forefront of design.

This shift presents a new challenge: unlearning the abstract rules we've spent years ingraining in users. As we bridge the gap between digital and physical experiences, we're not just redesigning interfaces – we're reshaping our fundamental interactions with technology.

The future of digital design may well lie in these reimagined "old" ideas, proving that in the world of UX, everything old can indeed become new again.

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References and Footnotes

1. "Escape from The Afterlife," Roblox activation by Warner Bros. for the release of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.
2. "Beetlejuice sequel tickets available in Roblox via Fandango," Marketing Dive, https://www.marketingdive.com/news/beetlejuice-sequel-tickets-roblox-fandango-metaverse
3. "In-Depth: How Roblox Real-World Commerce Works," Future Commerce, https://www.futurecommerce.com/the-senses/in-depth-how-roblox-real-world-commerce-works
4. Amazon Dash Button, discontinued in 2019.
5. "German Court Says Amazon Dash Buttons Are Illegal," New York Magazine, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/01/german-court-says-amazon-dash-buttons-are-illegal.html
6. "Minimalist nativity sets" trend, 2022.
7. Johanna Drucker, "Performative Materiality and Theoretical Approaches to Interface" (2013) https://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/7/1/000143/000143.html
8. Jesse James Garrett, "The Elements of User Experience" (2002) https://www.academia.edu/33276128/The_Elements_of_User_Experience_Jesse_James_Garrett
9. Lev Manovich, "The Language of New Media" (2002) https://dss-edit.com/plu/Manovich-Lev_The_Language_of_the_New_Media.pdf
10. Image credit: Peter Smith, photograph of Henry Moore's sculpture "Mother and Child: Hood".
11. Image credit: Laren Wzorek Earl/Szklo Glass, "minimalist nativity scene".
12. "How to Make a DIY Modern and Minimalist Nativity Set," Curbly, https://www.curbly.com/14540-how-to-make-a-diy-modern-and-minimalist-nativity-set