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Comment by sirtastic | Hacker News Reader

I can think of one. Google's material design. I love it and feel it tied their apps together while making them easier to use.

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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.

Material design ruined Google News on the desktop.

Yes, a thousand times, yes. To me, this is the worst and most offensive redesign of something so pivotal to research, investigative reporting, everything beyond the surface. Being able to dig and dig and find out who is reporting what pieces of the story. I don't CARE if there are 12 articles about the same thing if there are truly 12 different legitimate reports about the event of interest. I want to see all 12 sources in their original place, date stamp, author, etc. The original links are where the real stories hide... not in this curated crap.

Thomas Jefferson said: "Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper." Google already has all the news indexed; why it is choosing to provide less surface area over which to sell its ads is something that makes absolutely no sense.

Company press releases are a gold mine of information. These used to be so prominent in news.google.com; they are completely gone. Multiple pages of results. Gone. All so the already-digested news can belch all over cell phones.

I see it as an attack on our democracy. Basically, censorship. But apparently they don't care.

I stopped using it for what I used it before. But I haven't found a replacement yet.

I found myself laughing the other day when I went to Bing for what I used to use Google news for... because of all the alternatives tested, it seemed to provide the best breadth of what I was looking for.

Redesigns like this make me wish more designers thought in terms of a toggle option for users who don't want the slick and shiny. Seems like such an obvious, idiot-proof solution to pissing off your users en masse.

Material design just doesn't work on desktops. Speed and information density are the way to go, and I'd argue they played no small role in reddit's ascendance.

I'd disagree. I like some of the Material related changes to Google Maps, for example, others seem like they were only done for consistency's sake with no benefit to Google Maps UX. Also IMO they managed to make YouTube even worse with the recent attempts to shoehorn it into their Material design.

The problem with a unified design language is you end up with the lowest common denominator for vastly different products. Material works great for Google Now, somewhat okay for Google Maps, pretty meh for GMail and terribly for YouTube. But that's just, like, my opinion, man.

There's few things in the world I hate more than Google's design. Maybe GoDaddy's control panels. Possibly Ubuntu's installer.

It's absurdly wasteful in terms of space on desktop applications. So many uselessly gigantic buttons with no effort to describe what they do other than an icon.

It tied their apps together, but I don't think it made them easier to use. I feel like I get around in the apps that I use most frequently just by rote. In an unfamiliar app, it's often unclear if something's a touchable option or just a text label. In previous versions, buttons stood out more from the background. I liked that, and I think it was clearer and easier to use.

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