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Comment by ajoy39 | Hacker News Reader

Material Design isn't just about Android Apps though. They make libraries for websites too, and have guidelines for all types of devices built into the spec. Google isn't using MD in their iOS apps to bring Android design to iOS they're using MD in their iOS apps because they believe MD should be a universal design paradigm for applications and web apps. You can argue that it shouldn't be, you can not like it as a design framework in general, but it's not about Android vs iOS it's about Google's vision of application design regardless of platform.

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Isn't it kinda ridiculous to believe your design should be the universal design for all apps?

Their motivation makes it even worse in my opinion. It's something they should know, and we all know, will never happen. That's why the article sees it this way, and I agree.

Google wants to automate the design process as much as possible. They have so many products that if they want to achieve any kind of consistent branding in their interfaces, they have to do this.

They've probably gone to far. I have, more than once, logged into a Google product I haven't used before and been confused about which product it was because it looked so similar to 3 other products.

Their efforts to automate whatever is possible to automate is laudable, however, and I think they've pushed the field of interaction design further than just about any other web company in the past decade.

The company who for close to a decade was criticized soundly and was the butt of many jokes for their terrible design capabilities has now "pushed the field of interaction design further than just about any other web company"?

You're right that Material Design, like the iOS "flat" design, is meant to automate or simplify the design process, but the reason is simply because they want to make more money. If your standards are such that you need to hire a real graphic designer to meet them, then it's more expensive to design an app, therefore there are less apps in your store, therefore you make less money running an app store.

Material Design, and iOS flat design for that matter, have done virtually nothing with respect to pushing design forward other than lower the bar so that it's cheaper and easier for a non-designer to adhere to those standards.

The article's point still stands though: sticking to a platform's design == jarring user experience.

Not to say that I agree that it's necessarily bad: his example of Word on Mac vs. Windows is actually interesting bc, given sufficient differences, users would have a hard time switching between the two if they own both platforms and the applications look completely different. I think it should be possible to retain certain UI paradigms (e.g. back buttons, toolbars) while staying uniform across all platforms in other respects.

Is it a jarring experience though? I imagine many Google product users use more than just one app, be it Gmail on iOS and the web browser, or docs, etc. Material design creates a consistent experience across devices and platforms for Google apps.

I think the result is not jarring but a feeling of familiarity.

It's jarring, because basically EVERY OTHER iOS APP behaves similarly.

If you spend all your time on Android and the Web, an for some reason occasionally use a Google app on an iPhone it may feel familiar to you.

But if you have an iPhone chances are you spend a lot of time using other iOS apps (including the system ones) and are used to that design language.

It's nice that it's consistent with other Google products, the problem is that's the wrong thing to do on iOS because it feels so out of place. You can still use your colors and many of your other schemes, but basic platform conventions like share buttons and menu locations should be respected.

but if you're a google docs user isn't it safe to assume you probably use it on more than one device, and google docs looking and working the same across devices is more important than the individual docs iOS app looking like all your other iOS apps?

Answered here (since you posted a similar comment):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11786857

>but basic platform conventions like share buttons and menu locations should be respected.

most iOS users I know don't use share buttons anyway. I always get a stupid screen shoot of a web page with a url

I use the share screen quite a bit, but I also recognize that it sucks. Hopefully they'll fix it.

I imagine part of the problem is they added it 5+ years into the platform when most people already had a way of doing things, even if it was sub-par, and they haven't been able to convince people to use it much.

Which is true enough. Maybe they should look at iTunes on Windows for a good example of why it's horrible to ignore the host UI designs.

Or maybe QuickTime.

They could look at iTunes on any operating system for examples of horrible UI design.

I've always felt like people who were buying Office for Mac probably cared more about having a consistent experience than having a Mac-like one and they probably should have hewed more closely to the Windows look and feel. It's like emacs -- how many people choose to use Aquamacs or something instead of just the traditional one?

In my experience, the people buying Office for mac care most about seamless interoperating with all the people who insist on using Office to for all their business needs.

And you don't think a consistent interface is part of that seamlessness?

Anyway, at least in 2011 it failed in that metric too, because documents would look quite different on the Mac version than on the Windows version in many cases.

What I really wanted, at the time, was the exact same experience on both platforms, from feature set, to way of use, to the look of documents rendered, and since it didn't really deliver that I was disappointed.

> And you don't think a consistent interface is part of that seamlessness?

No, not at all. I don't care that my UI is consistent with yours. I care that you can open the doc I sent you.

> I've always felt like people who were buying Office for Mac probably cared more about having a consistent experience than having a Mac-like one

Why would you assume that someone buying Office for Mac is more familiar with Office for Windows than the Mac they own that they want to run Office on?

That could be true for some customers. It's certainly not true for all customers. It's probably also not a given that even someone very familiar with Office for Windows would want Office for Mac to act like that, instead of like a Mac app.

> Why would you assume that someone buying Office for Mac is more familiar with Office for Windows than the Mac they own that they want to run Office on?

Because Windows had like 90% of the market share?

That's the 90% that didn't buy a Mac. Why does the 10% want a Windows-feeling app when they didn't buy a Windows device?

Well it was certainly true of me and I think it's true of a lot of people who want to buy Office because it's what they use at work and are familiar with. I think if you cared more about a Mac-like experience you'd buy Pages and such (although it is not as feature-rich, to be fair).

As AdrianN pointed out, the primary use case for Office for Mac is interoperability. If you don't care about interoperability, you probably would buy Pages. Or just use Google Docs. You buy Office for Mac because that's the format your office uses, or your professor expects, or whatever. You probably don't buy Office for Mac out of some longing for a Windows interface.

If "familiarity because I use it at work" is the primary criterion, you'd probably have bought a PC.

I basically think of it like something like emacs, where it doesn't conform to the OS at all but instead works exactly the same throughout different platforms (and users who are intimately familiar with it expect that). The interop in Office for Mac was also just about as lousy as Pages for a long time although I think more recent versions may have improved it.

I don't think the two are comparable. Emacs is a bizarre beast that fits no common UI paradigm/design language/whatever. It has its own shortcut system, its own undo/redo behavior, its buffer concept, etc. Everything about it is EMACS. If you use Emacs, it's specifically because you want to use Emacs and all it's uniqueness. It's consequently a love-it-or-hate it tool, and it's extremely niche relative to Word, or I bet even gedit.

Office, on the other hand, you probably use because you need to create Office-formatted docs. Very few people are likely buying Office because they long for the Office interface. Office doesn't even have a consistent interface paradigm. They've reinvented it repeatedly, culminating in the Ribbon UI. But at the end of the day, Office's interface is a Windows interface. They've done their own thing, but it's still clearly Windows, and shoehorning that interface onto a Mac feels out of place in a way it doesn't on Windows.

I can't comment on interop. It's been a while since I used Office for Mac. I don't recall any notable interop issues, but I mostly used the mail client (Entourage, later Outlook). I used Word sometimes but wasn't exactly writing for publication.

I guess I use Word in a different way than most? I used to be a major user of advanced features like the VBA editor, style editor, etc., and having that all work totally differently bothered me.

If you just want .doc files lots of programs will do it cheaper.

It's also a jarring experience if I switch from using Google Maps on Android to using Google Maps on iOS and it's totally different. Granted this is less common.

The whole 'app consistency' vs. 'platform consistency' ignores that most users (probably very close to 'all users') change back and forth between apps on a given platform far more than they change between platforms for a given app. I use Google Inbox, and I switch between that and iOS Mail, Tweetbot, FB Messenger, etc. extremely often. I can't imagine a circumstance where I would have an Android device and switch back and forth between Google Inbox on iOS and Google Inbox on Android more frequently than switching between apps on iOS.

Switching to Google Inbox to read an e-mail and then not being able to swipe back, like you can in basically every other iOS app, is jarring and ridiculous. There's no reason for it, other than arrogance. They could keep 'material design' and still make it feel like an iOS app, but they don't bother. Likewise, they seem to have reimplemented text input and text fields, and done so extremely badly, for no reason that I can tell, causing significant problems with selecting text or using third-party keyboards.

If you're switching from Windows to Mac (or Android to iOS) and back frequently, then you're going to be frequently switching UI paradigms, but you'll be dealing with consistency in a given context. You use iOS for a bit and everything behaves one way, then you pick up an Android device and everything works another way.

When you pick up an iOS device and all your paradigms change, except for this one app where they change back and nothing you're used to works, that's more jarring than switching to iOS and having Google Inbox behave like an iOS app, the way every other app on that device works.

In other words, it's not even about material design; it's about fundamental interaction with the app and breaking all of the user's expectations and habits, for no real gain other than, maybe, developer time.

The article explicitly covered that point. MS used to say the same thing.

As an iOS user, it's still jarring as hell to have a native app feel like something from other OS. I don't want to learn another platform's conventions to use my own platform.

On Android it makes sense, they make android. On the web it's OK because websites all look different. But all iOS apps generally work the same and when you stand out it's annoying.

You know all those people who complain about Java applications not feeling right? Yeah, same kind of thing. As a long time Mac user you can tell when the program you're using is a lazy port from Windows because it doesn't fit in.

but if you're a docs user wouldn't you expect docs to look and feel the same everywhere? That's the choice google has to make. Do we worry about our app matching YOUR OS's design patterns, or do we keep our applications consistent across all platforms?

I expect the content of my document to look the same everywhere.

I expect the app that I use to view my document to behave like other apps on the platform.

It is Google's choice to make, the article is arguing that they made a poor choice. They can still make the app very Google-y in looks and organization but make it much nicer for iOS users by following a few platform conventions.

There is a very wide variety of iOS apps that look completely different but feel similar due to following the guidelines. Google should be able to fit into that.

The funny thing is that Microsoft had a tendency to do the same thing on their own OS.

For example, Office would come out with some new paradigm – draggable toolbars, for example – that didn't exist anywhere else in Windows, and wasn't part of the standard libraries that other developers had access to. They'd use that for a while, and slowly those features would make their way into other Windows apps (first- and third-party), and right when that started to get standardized, Office would do something else – like the ribbon – which, again, didn't exist anywhere else.

In other words, Microsoft had a tendency to eschew standard OS behaviours even on their own OS, and kept pushing the bar by making new UI paradigms as fast as everyone else could try and keep consistency with them.

Programming languages are interfaces too. Google saying MD should be the universal design is like saying Java should be the universal programming language.

True, and even if they could add little changes to make diehard mac users happy, without compromising their vision, it would still be a bad idea. Creating different user interfaces for a functional application is just wasting resources and increasing the likelihood for bugs.

That's the most '90s-Microsoft comment I've seen. Google aspires to have such a pervasive monopoly that its design paradigm should be treated as universal.

The concept that everyone everywhere should adopt Google branding as their design style isn't even reasonable or sane. When you look at a website using Material that isn't made by Google, you know one of two things: Either the designer is a hopeless fanboy, or they were just too lazy to design their own website.

I don't view using googles Material Angular library any different than I view people using bootstrap.

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