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Good. Whether it’s on a device or on the web, I find material design to be a terrible aesthetic. Any kind of flat design in general is often very difficult to u
by jb1991 5y ago
Good. Whether it’s on a device or on the web, I find material design to be a terrible aesthetic. Any kind of flat design in general is often very difficult to understand, the UI components blend in with things that are not interact-able.
- whalesalad 5y agoI feel the exact same way. Google's design sense in general is terrible. YouTube is a UX nightmare. Gmail and Maps are probably the only two half-decent products but they're both becoming very heavy and bloated these days.
- potatoman22 5y agoI'd argue that YouTube has a better UX than a large majority of sites on the internet. If it was actually terrible, no one would use it.
- whalesalad 5y agoThey have a monopoly. What other video sharing site is even remotely on the same traffic level (not including social networks like fb)
- fabiospampinato 5y agoWhich non-flat design language do you like most?
- unicornporn 5y agoWindows 95, the pinacle of UI design. Honorable mentions: Gnome 2 with Clearlooks or Mac OS 9. On the modern side, SerenityOS is going the right way.
- gsich 5y agoWindows up until the downfall starting with Windows 8.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Wowfunhappy 5y agoOS X circa 10.6 – 10.9. Aesthetically pleasing, with lots of tonal contrast and touches of color to highlight important items. Clickable elements are clearly clickable, and the UI is reasonably dense, but it never looks overcomplicated or busy.
- drevil-v2 5y agoIt is the copious amounts of whitespace that I find so very offensive in Material UI. My secret guilty pleasure at work is shooting down any mention of using Material UI design in any of our software haha.. it is just silly how much pleasure I get from it :)
- cout 5y agoLarge amounts of whitespace became vogue around the same time as skinny scrollbars. I don't mind the whitespace -- it makes it easier to see how things are grouped on the screen. But give me back usable scrollbars on non-touch devices, please! As I age I find it harder and harder to see and click on small things, so these newfangled design languages that make UI elements smaller feel very unaccessible.
- paulryanrogers 5y agoMaybe I'm just nostalgic but I preferred dense UIs of the 90s. At least those which didn't have too much empty space, and communicated grouping with boring stuff like fieldset. Now it seems I must scroll forever and there are no discernible anchors to link to. When studying web design in the early aughts the popular Nielson book ("Designing Web Usability") argued for separate pages over a lot of scrolling. For informational sites I think that approach is superior.
- vbezhenar 5y agoIMO the best approach is some kind of amalgamation between scrolling and paging. For example infinite scrolling, but with clear separation between pages and with URL changing to the corresponding page (so I can bookmark it and return to this page later, for example). Infinite scroll as a concept is good. If I'm at the bottom of the page, chances are high that I want to get next page anyway, so why don't you show it for me already. If I don't need it, whatever. If I need it, it's there.
- nitrogen 5y agoInfinite scroll as a concept is good. Infinite scrolling doesn't work with scrollbars, and somehow people still think it's okay to put important links in the page footer... on an infinite scrolling site where it's literally impossible to ever reach the page footer.
- grishka 5y agoMaybe it's me being biased as an Android app developer, but I find Material very much okay on Android (but very out of place on desktop for example). At a time when Apple just made everything fully flat and had a kid draw their icons, having actual depth with shadows felt welcome. Though I have to admit, I did like the Holo aesthetic more. And I do miss affordances in UIs, and non-flat UIs, in general.
- cout 5y agoFor me, material design evokes feelings of being in kindergarten making crafts with colored construction paper. Material UIs are not perfectly flat; there is usually a shadow, so I can tell an element is distinct from the layer below it. The problem for me is that it often feels about as organized as the mind of a kindergartener. Consistency of look-and-feel is important, but consistency of organization is even more important. How confusing would GUIs in the 90s have been without the File and Edit menus?
- ink404 5y agoCan you elaborate on what you mean by the organization of material design?
- atatatat 5y agoSo what I'm reading is: there's nothing wrong with Material Design aesthetically, but the design choices commonly made when choosing Material Design are regularly poor. That's fair. Unlabeled hamburger menu buttons and gear icons placed every which area (sometimes multiple!) are great examples of (admittedly common!) abuse of what can be a powerful UI concept.
- richardw 5y agoAnecdote-not-data warning: I gave an Android tablet to a 90-something year old. She got on ok but there were a few frustrations. Stuff would close when it shouldn’t, button here just hard to reason about or get to etc. She asked if it was an iPad, obviously some brand awareness there. Switched to iPad as a bit of a fun surprise, and most issues went away. More stuff was where she thought it would be. (She has a feature phone from 14 years ago so it’s not iPhone preference.) She just turned 101 and you can’t take her iPad away from her. Loves it. We can all get used to whatever. Try it on the edge cases and your opinion might shift because that’s where the differences emerge. I’m holding back a lot of iOS rants here :) Selecting a single word is often many clicks. I’d love to be able to forget individual words that it insists on autocompleting to.
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y agoSure, material design is not perfect. Its just all other design systems for mobile are worse and less consistent. Apple's own UI is very lacking in components and guidelines are mostly absent.
- leroman 5y agoI find that flat design was the answer to having too much emphasis (in my opinion) on design and designers being too involved in the process which (again, in my opinion) collided with the engineering work..
- 1cvmask 5y agoI could never understand the hatred of skeuomorphic design. Material design seemed to me to add an unnecessary overhead to interaction especially with colors bleeding in. I love a strong, and arguably ugly, contrast ratio of 7:1
- varjag 5y agoIt all comes down to the fact that doing a skeuomorphic design is a lot more work than blurting a few colored rectangles.
- DenisM 5y agoIt’s a generational change - much easier to make a career by discarding what came before rather than competing with it. You will see this in a lot of areas of society.
- Oddskar 5y agoIt's funny how a "generation" left Apple and suddenly they're rolling back all kinds of changes to how they were before that generation "made their mark".
- tinus_hn 5y agoIt also gets a lot of emphasis because armchair ui architects think it’s cool to show they know this ‘big word’.
- 5y ago
- kstrauser 5y agoI couldn’t agree more. I can’t stand using Google’s own apps on iOS because they look jarringly out of place to me, like running a Mac app that looks skinned to look like Windows. Obviously not everyone agrees and that’s OK. I acknowledge this is purely a personal preference thing. But for me, I detest Material apps on my phone and iPad.
- vmception 5y agoYeah every time Chrome accidentally opens on iOS I cringe at the shoehorned design choices This probably happens because i clicked a link in gmail