If you design an application that runs on Windows but doesn't look exactly like Windows, so the old argument goes, the effect will be unsettling for users. But sticking to the native look and feel (L&F) should not be the end-goal of designers.

In May of 2007 Bill Higgins penned a thought provoking blog post called, “the Uncanny Valley of user interface design.”  His assertion was that any UI that tries to emulate a modern Windows look and feel (L&F) but is not exactly the same as the native operating systems L&F (i.e. Windows, Mac, Linux), will be unsettling to developers. He refers to this as the “Uncanny Valley.” 

The Uncanny Valley is a theory proposed by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970, that says that people’s impression of robots grows more empathetic as robots become more human looking – but only to a point. There is a point at which the designers make the robot look almost human, but not quite. Humans find this less-than-perfect emulation unsettling and are thus put off by the robot.



Figure 1: The Uncanny Valley