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Comment by JoshMnem | Hacker News Reader

> The new "Refresh" design looks more closely to a user interface designed using the rules and guides from Google's visual design language known as "Material Design."

That's the most worrying thing about it. Material Design has serious accessibility problems (motion and color) and is full of some really bad design ideas. It encourages people to abandon aesthetic restraint. If you walk around smashing cymbals together, your data will show that you are getting people's attention, but it won't necessarily mean that it's a good idea.

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I have a hard time telling which elements are clickable, and which are not, with material design. Flat buttons , of course, are similar to labels.

Using underlines for input boxes is not clear. And the animation everywhere is very disturbing. I have high sensitivity to visual motion, which is a useful thing in most other situations, but the web is becoming increasingly difficult to use.

Even worse, both Chrome and Firefox have been building Material Design style animation in to the browser rendering, and I haven't figured out if there is a way to turn it off. Even on my own sites, where I don't want any animation, the pages are rendered with unpredictable animation.

> I have high sensitivity to visual motion, which is a useful thing in most other situations, but the web is becoming increasingly difficult to use.

Designers seem to not realize that the human brain is fantastic at doing visuals diffs. We don't need animation hints anywhere near as much as they seem to realize and in many cases will actually undermine the brain, like when the change is to slow for the brain to register it.

I think it might be more a case of that you seem to be misunderstanding that the web is there to show you ads, not information.

That web design seems explicitly designed to make your normal way of looking at things fail is not a bug. Also I bet those designers judge themselves (and get performance evaluated) based on how long people look at those sites.

Considering how obvious the other buttons are, the flat ones feel really out of place. I didn't even know what you were talking about until I went here: https://getmdl.io/components/index.html#buttons-section

Yup, those are the ones I'm talking about. And they aren't rare. They show up in Gmail quite a bit.

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