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I dunno about rounded corners for beauty - but there are cases when I find them function over form.

Recent HN discussion about the wyze cam app - it was pointed out to me that a feature I had never been able to find (and only put in a less than half-assed attempts to find tbh) - was via a HUGE green button on X screen.

Seeing as though I have used this app many many times over the past year plus, I went looking for it - and wham - it is actually there.

But.. it's a large sharp cornered bottom of the screen - which made it look like a header / footer / name of page to me.. it never dawned on me that it was a 'button' - if it had rounded corners and a drop shadow it would have be obvious to me.

Of course I had other expectations as well - that the 'thing to push' would be above the half way fold of the screen to access such an important function - and that the naming conventions would be done better - but I digress.

Now I did like the 'beauty' of slightly rounded corners back in the day when everything was sharp, and many web pages had 'sidebars' - I liked the look of a round corner there.

Sadly most content is absorbed via the mobile devices and such 'form' is not as much about beauty / style as it is to show function these days it seems.

Small data points, but another perspective that may not have been considered nonetheless.



Well this was fundamentally one of the issues with ms office when they went to the ribbon. see: https://www.jegsworks.com/lessons/numbers-2/intro/ribbon-off...

No one could figure out how to print because it turns out that round thing in the upper left was basically the old file menu, but since it didn't look like anything else on the screen people were really confused, so much so, that as you see from the link above they just moved it to the tabbar/ribbon in the next version of office.

So, its doubtful it has anything to do with how round something is, and more to do with the drop shadowing and whether people expect a button in that location, and whether it looks like one.


thanks for the extra info - I do feel that location is also a big issues for the problem I ran into - I am apt to agree that location, size, even gradients as another mentioned; basically all the things button-ey make / made a different..

so I can see how if all the other factors were aligned, that roundness would not be an issue - so you are right - but given that the other things were out of whack in the wyze screen issue - non-roundness vs roundness would of made a difference for sure.. but yeah, if the location was better and the sizing a bit better - I can see how roundness would not matter / make much of any difference.


this has more to do with the fact that all buttons are flat now instead of gradients. Gradients are our natural way to recognize depth instantly, it is a pity that designers hate it so much. Without gradients, i guess rounded corner is the next best way to make a button look like a button .... until designers decide that they hate that as well and start using invisible ink buttons




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