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Comment by harrybr | Hacker News Reader

Honest question: why would you want to use this? Material design is intended for Android native apps isn't it?

It strikes me as a strange idea:

- Material design uses lots of UI idioms that work well for an OS (user will learn them), but not so well for a website (that needs to be instantly usable on first use, or user will leave for a competitor). The overflow icon (three vertical dots) is one example.

- Material design is the Google "branded" look and feel. No sane web business would want to give up their own look and feel. It even strikes me as a weird choice for @minimaxir's personal blog. If you're going to skin your site with another brand's look and feel, why not Uber? Amazon? etc?

- It's never going to feel quite right. Uncanny valley between native app and website.

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Actually no, material design is suppose to unify design for the web and native apps.

Many Google properties on the web are Material Design now (Play Music, Google Photos, Google Plus...

And generally have really awful experiences on both desktop and mobile.

On desktop there is tons of wasted space, key actions are generally hidden behind pointless hidden menus or silly + buttons that do multiple things even though there's loads of space to fit multiple buttons. Google Drive, Sheets, etc. are total jokes now. And I personally find Google play music is an incredibly bad user experience now for my habits. I like listening to my thumbs up playlist (unnecessarily hidden behind a slide out menu) and I like seeing my shuffle playlist (hidden behind a button that opens an idiotic floating modal).

On mobile, everything is too spaced out so you can only see 5 out of the 50 things you might need to actually see. A perfect example is the calendar which is an unusable joke compared to the old one. Another good example is the new clock app where the alarms only show 3, and the timers are bizarrely stacked with only a tiny indicator showing there are multiple timers running.

Material is a tablet design paradigm masquerading as a total solution.

I went to go add a new spreadsheet to Google Sheets and it took me at least thirty seconds to find the big + button in the bottom right. It makes sense (sort of) on my phone where my eyes can see the whole screen but on a monitor I literally had to scan the whole page before finding the button (the bottom right corner is the last place I would look for something like that!)

Who knows what they were thinking when they thought that putting it down there would be a good idea.

I personally have zero respect for Material, I think it's a complete joke. Their previous redesign, as fractured as it was, was better thought out than this not-at-all-responsive 'responsive' design.

Material has nice animations and transitions, but is a catastrophe of UX. Just look at [design.google.com](https://design.google.com/).

I don't actually like the animations either, quite a few are really, really bad. Fucking idiotic in fact, and I'm not saying that lightly.

The click/tap ones are the worst offenders. Why is the animation of the button dependant on where I click the button? Because it's an uneven animation my mind immediately gets drawn to it and thinks "Woah, what just happened there, did something go wrong? What was that".

And so after having done a simple action I spend a second or two with my mind replaying what just happened to try and figure out if something's wrong or not. And it still happens today, even though I know about it and I use several interfaces with Material design extensively. Because it's not consistent.

It's literally the opposite of what an animation should be. It's incredibly intrusive and unsettling instead of being subtle but reassuring you that your desired action happened.

I haven't used much Material in real life, but that's what I suspected: animations are nice, not functional.

I have to agree-MD isn't "off" by a whole lot but just enough to hinder the user experience. In particular, headers and topbars are oversized beyond what's reasonable, margins are excessive in content elements, and ironically this combination makes interfaces feel very boxed-in AND with poor data density on top of that...

So if it's basically just for Google owned sites then why are the rest of us meant to be interested in this?

It is not only intended for mobile. Check out https://developers.google.com/ for what I think is a great use of material design. I agree that using it in your site may be somewhat Google branding of your site though.

Also https://photos.google.com.

>Honest question: why would you want to use this? Material design is intended for Android native apps isn't it?

Material Design aims to be a design language for any form factor, including the desktop. Some Google properties on the web have already started moving to a more 'material-esque' design, like Photos or Drive. The reasoning is that some metaphors can be borrowed so there is a much familiarity as possible when discovering the same app on another form factor. Material is not supposed to be uniquely Google branded but Google might have dropped the ball here when they decided to use it on their iOS apps as well. Their justification is that most many material elements have been used in iOS apps before,which is true, but they might have wanted to find a middle point instead (use the parts of material that feel native to iOS, ditch the rest).

I've noticed that some designers are really copyists. They can't create an original look for a website. They merely copy whatever style is popular. They moved from faux wood finishes to completely flat, and now they seem to think "material" is a design movement, and not a limited set of guidelines from Google. No doubt, they will get jobs making everything look material, until the next fad rolls along.

> Honest question: why would you want to use this?

To be hip obviously. Not for usability reasons, that I can assure you. :)

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