A large part of it is certainly my personal preferences. And even if Material were itself good, completely disregarding the UI pattern the rest of the phone follows in your apps to implement your own is still going to be jarring.
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.
Also not OP, but I too dislike Material. My main issue is that interactable controls don't stand out. Sometimes it takes me multiple seconds to recognize a button.
Apart from that, I simply dislike the look. It oft reminds me of Windows' Metro due to the sharp edges and corners. I'd prefer Apple's UI design over Metro although I am a Windows / Linux user.
One more thing, looking at Android apps, they sometimes use many different color tones without any underlying meaning. Or such an obscure meaning, that I still struggle understanding it.
My beef with Material Design is that it's too clever by half. It's often pretty, the animations are pleasant, but the interaction is just not intuitive enough for primetime.
To wit, I've encountered them for years and I still have no idea what a floating circle with a plus sign in it is supposed to represent. Almost every time I've clicked one, it's begun a process of flow that was not my intention, so I've learned to avoid them.
What Material Design is trying to do is to create a universal design language, based on the assumption that different apps designed in all sorts of different ways is a bad thing. While I admit that bad design comes in many shapes and forms, I actually feel like the context of an app should dictate how it is designed, and that in many cases it will call for something other than bold colored boxy components with assorted degrees of box-shadow.
I'm just not a fan of Material. I've tried to like it, but it just won't stick.
I know a lot of people think Material=Professional. But I think Material looks more like a small business using a drag-and-drop home page builder. Yes, that goes for the Android interface, too.
I never understood the hatred for skeuomorphism. It's intuitive. It's pretty. It's colorful. It's artistic. A bunch of stacked squares isn't any of those things.
Fortunately, I still have a launch day iPhone that I occasionally use for music, and it can't be "upgraded" out of its skeuomorphic splendor.
It's all subjective, of course, but if a Material app starts getting more complex the bare bones nature of the UI actually starts making it more confusing to use in my opinion. Maybe I just haven't used it enough, but every time I look at a Google Cloud Platform console or something it takes me longer than I think it should to find what I'm looking for.
I have yet to see an enjoyable material design app. With the same underlying motivations, I have better appreciation of Apple iOS interface guidelines.
Material Design needs to evolve on the desktop side. I like it on mobile and I think to focus on interaction minimizing everything else is great, but on desktop with navigation implemented according to it, Material Design is just a huge waste of space and very unintuitive.
I would like to have an even broader meta framework than Material Design that makes it possible to use different colors and fonts and maybe even different features to distinguish hierarchy. That way you could implement your own version of Material Design, that does not look googly.
I agree. I'm not a big fan of Material design either. Too flat and I find the color palettes a little odd.
One thing that really bothers me is Google designing their iOS apps with Material design rather than using the system iOS design. They just don't feel like they're part of the iOS ecosystem with how jarring their design is.
I agree with both of you actually, app is great but I don't don't like Material when I see it usually unless it's skinned well enough to not instantly tell it's Material. Something about that default theme...
Mostly from taking existing designs and iteratively improving on them.
Material Design is a great skeleton. It has UX and accessibility built in. For example, buttons are big enough to click, text colors push the limit of what's accessible. Navigation is generally intuitive, and writing guides are sensible.
But it's also ugly. And flawed. A lot of people are dismissive of Material because of this, but why throw out the whole batch? Fix the colors, fix transparency, fix the ALL CAPS buttons.
Most good, unique app designs probably some 80% similarity with Material. For example, buttons might be roughly 36 dp in height to be clickable. Why not 48 or 14, like in some games or hybrids? It's a sensible baseline, and a lot of thought and research have gone into it.
If you're going to design though, you should design with your own distinctive style. Google has attempted to suggest that Material should be a universal design pattern, but that's silly: It's pretty much Google's brand at this point, given their tendency to slap it on everything, including iOS, where it makes no sense.
And the weakness of Material as a design pattern or common language is that Google's own apps and websites don't bother to consistently apply it.
Material Design makes more sense in mobile apps. It meant for extremely simple UX/UI which mobile apps are naturally fit for. Thanks for the great work!
inline ask-HN : Do you guys really prefer it for complicated web apps ? Do you think it provides better user experience ? is everything flat and chromeless better on eyes when there is so much stuff on screen?
Google isn't some all-knowing authority on UX/UI. In fact, their UI is pretty terrible for most applications. It's hard to tell what you can or can't click. There are hidden controls everywhere.
You can decide to blindly follow standards or do some real user testing and see how well your UI works for people. Stand over someone's shoulder while they use it for the first time and see how quickly they figure it out. Do some A/B testing.
For the record, the UX/UI community in general had a lot of negative reactions to Material when it was introduced:
I think that material is great design, but terrible strategy and in the end may land up resulting in the Android design space being worse, not better.
For years google (and many members of the design community) made a very successful argument that android apps should look and act like android apps, and iOS apps should look and act like iOS apps and web apps should act like web apps. Trying to achieve design consistency across platforms was going to annoy your users. Instead you should strive for _branding_ consistency across platforms and use native interaction patterns.
A significant problem for Android has been iOS designs just copied over without adapting to the platform. The apps look and feel weird. As a user I find them confusing and frustrating to use. However progress was being made and people were starting to understand that if you want to build for Android you are going to need to design for Android.
Material throws that out the window. It says it right there in the goals[1]: "Develop a single underlying system that allows for a unified experience across platforms and device sizes."
IF we take it as given that our apps should look the same on all platforms, then why choose Material? Because I know my customers are going to say: "We have this great iOS design sitting right here, that we have already paid to have built. Lets use that! Besides we don't want to re-code our iOS app to suit Android". Or, they will come up with their own cross platform design to "differentiate themselves" and stand out.
But I always come back to Material's "Up" button when asked for an example: https://material.io/guidelines/patterns/navigation.html#navi...
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