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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system, not even asking to go as far as saying that plain ‘boxes’ do not represent any ‘material’ and drop shadows are outdated.

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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.

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