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Comment by eivarv | Hacker News Reader

    If you ever wonder "why the fuck can't I tell where one piece of the UI ends and the other begins"

When Material Design was first launched to the public, I was astonished of just how bad some of it was – and how Google, with all its experts and resources, had managed to ignore so much basic HCI.

I wasn't able to recognize and distinguish different types of widgets from one another, and the design language broke with established principles. It wasn't evident how to interact with an element on the screen based on its visual qualities.

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I assumed for weeks that the original Material Design launch video was parody. I'm a Brit, and sometimes American comedy just doesn't click with me.

I can still remember the feeling of surprise, followed by something more like horror, as I realised they were actually being serious, and that with their weight behind it, this mess of glaring flaws that numerous critics had picked up on from day one was likely to dominate a lot of UI work for the next several years. And sure enough, many of those flaws are still there today, hardly changed.

It’s been shocking to me how much Material Design has been worshipped in the design community and nobody has dared to pick out even the basic flaws in the design system, not even asking to go as far as saying that plain ‘boxes’ do not represent any ‘material’ and drop shadows are outdated.

Here's a 2019 Google blog post about Google's user studies to redesign their Material Design text field. They ran three separate studies testing over 140 combinations of 7 text field characteristics with 600 participants. The end result is better but they basically just discovered that users couldn't identify text fields that had only subtle visual affordances (like a light gray underline instead of a black rectangle). The exercise reminded me of the Google designer story about testing "63 shades of blue links".

https://medium.com/google-design/the-evolution-of-material-d...

Agree. When I commented how Material Design was so bad when it came out, many got offended. So I thought it must be a subjective personal thing. Now it's relief knowing I'm not the only one who think it's bad and full of UX anti-patterns. Flat design should be a thing of the past. It's unintutive e.g. hyperlink and button can be indistinguishable, no clear navigation UI. If any company should lead industry with a design framework, it should be Apple.

I had to adjust the contrast on my monitors to see the boundaries of Google+ posts and UI elements, because light gray on lighter gray has been Google's favorite UI pattern for ages...

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