Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited a common Sense Approach to Web Usability Steve Krug

No cursor = no hover = no clue
Before touch screens arrived, Web design had come to rely heavily on a
feature called hover—the ability of screen elements to change in some way
when the user points the cursor at them without clicking.
But a capacitive touch screen (used on almost all mobile devices) can’t
accurately sense that a finger is hovering above the glass, only when the
finger has touched it. This is why they don’t have a cursor.
5
5
 
Did you ever notice that the cursor was missing? I have to admit that I used my first iPhone for
several months before it dawned on me that there was no cursor.
As a result, many useful interface features that depended on hover are no
longer available, like tool tips, buttons that change shape or color to indicate
that they’re clickable, and menus that drop down to reveal their contents
without forcing you to make a choice.
As a designer, you need to be aware that these elements don’t exist for
mobile users and try to find ways to replace them.
Flat design: Friend or foe?
Affordances require visual distinctions. But the recent trend in interface
design (which may have waned by the time you read this) has moved in
exactly the opposite direction: removing visual distinctions and “flattening”
the appearance of interface elements.
It looks darned good (to some people, anyway), and it can make screens less
cluttered-looking. But at what price?
In this case the tradeoff is between a clean, uncluttered look on one hand and
providing sufficient visual information so people can perceive affordances

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on the other.
Unfortunately, Flat design has a tendency to take along with it not just the
potentially distracting decoration but also the useful information that the
more textured elements were conveying.
The distinctions required to draw attention to an affordance often need to be
multi-dimensional: It’s the position of something (e.g., in the navigation bar)
and
its formatting (e.g., reversed type, all caps) that tell you it’s a menu item.
By removing a number of these distinctions from the design palette, Flat
design makes it harder to differentiate things.
Flat design has sucked the air out of the room. It reminds me of the pre-color
world in my favorite 
Calvin and Hobbes
cartoon/comic/comic strip. (The
rest of the cartoon is at the end of 
Chapter 13
.)
CALVIN AND HOBBES © 1989 Watterson. Reprinted with permission of UNIVERSAL UCLICK.
All rights reserved.
You can do all the Flat design you want (you may have to, it may be forced
on you), but make sure you’re using all of the remaining dimensions to
compensate for what you lose.