Peter Merholz notes how the discourse around digital product design has shifted towards the superficial. To him, debates over flat versus skeuomorphic, color schemes, parallax scrolling and other presentational techniques are a distraction from the lower strata of his colleague Jesse James Garrett’s five planes of user experience rubric. His position is not altogether condemnatory, but rather cautious.

I’ve realized I’m grateful for the passionate conversation around Surface — it means that people care and are engaged. Still, we must be vigilant in maintaining similar attention to those deeper layers, precisely because their abstraction makes them more challenging to discuss.

Read the full article at Peterme.com.