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Comment by jb1991 | Hacker News Reader

jb1991

Good. Whether it’s on a device or on the web, I find material design to be a terrible aesthetic. Any kind of flat design in general is often very difficult to understand, the UI components blend in with things that are not interact-able.

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Maybe it's me being biased as an Android app developer, but I find Material very much okay on Android (but very out of place on desktop for example). At a time when Apple just made everything fully flat and had a kid draw their icons, having actual depth with shadows felt welcome.

Though I have to admit, I did like the Holo aesthetic more. And I do miss affordances in UIs, and non-flat UIs, in general.

For me, material design evokes feelings of being in kindergarten making crafts with colored construction paper.

Material UIs are not perfectly flat; there is usually a shadow, so I can tell an element is distinct from the layer below it. The problem for me is that it often feels about as organized as the mind of a kindergartener.

Consistency of look-and-feel is important, but consistency of organization is even more important. How confusing would GUIs in the 90s have been without the File and Edit menus?

Can you elaborate on what you mean by the organization of material design?

So what I'm reading is: there's nothing wrong with Material Design aesthetically, but the design choices commonly made when choosing Material Design are regularly poor.

That's fair.

Unlabeled hamburger menu buttons and gear icons placed every which area (sometimes multiple!) are great examples of (admittedly common!) abuse of what can be a powerful UI concept.

Anecdote-not-data warning:

I gave an Android tablet to a 90-something year old. She got on ok but there were a few frustrations. Stuff would close when it shouldn’t, button here just hard to reason about or get to etc. She asked if it was an iPad, obviously some brand awareness there. Switched to iPad as a bit of a fun surprise, and most issues went away. More stuff was where she thought it would be. (She has a feature phone from 14 years ago so it’s not iPhone preference.) She just turned 101 and you can’t take her iPad away from her. Loves it.

We can all get used to whatever. Try it on the edge cases and your opinion might shift because that’s where the differences emerge.

I’m holding back a lot of iOS rants here :) Selecting a single word is often many clicks. I’d love to be able to forget individual words that it insists on autocompleting to.

It is the copious amounts of whitespace that I find so very offensive in Material UI.

My secret guilty pleasure at work is shooting down any mention of using Material UI design in any of our software haha.. it is just silly how much pleasure I get from it :)

Large amounts of whitespace became vogue around the same time as skinny scrollbars. I don't mind the whitespace -- it makes it easier to see how things are grouped on the screen. But give me back usable scrollbars on non-touch devices, please! As I age I find it harder and harder to see and click on small things, so these newfangled design languages that make UI elements smaller feel very unaccessible.

Maybe I'm just nostalgic but I preferred dense UIs of the 90s. At least those which didn't have too much empty space, and communicated grouping with boring stuff like fieldset.

Now it seems I must scroll forever and there are no discernible anchors to link to. When studying web design in the early aughts the popular Nielson book ("Designing Web Usability") argued for separate pages over a lot of scrolling. For informational sites I think that approach is superior.

IMO the best approach is some kind of amalgamation between scrolling and paging. For example infinite scrolling, but with clear separation between pages and with URL changing to the corresponding page (so I can bookmark it and return to this page later, for example). Infinite scroll as a concept is good. If I'm at the bottom of the page, chances are high that I want to get next page anyway, so why don't you show it for me already. If I don't need it, whatever. If I need it, it's there.

Infinite scroll as a concept is good.

Infinite scrolling doesn't work with scrollbars, and somehow people still think it's okay to put important links in the page footer... on an infinite scrolling site where it's literally impossible to ever reach the page footer.

Be cooler if you could implement Material Design in a more usable way than even Google, no?

Sure, material design is not perfect. Its just all other design systems for mobile are worse and less consistent. Apple's own UI is very lacking in components and guidelines are mostly absent.

I feel the exact same way. Google's design sense in general is terrible.

YouTube is a UX nightmare. Gmail and Maps are probably the only two half-decent products but they're both becoming very heavy and bloated these days.

I'd argue that YouTube has a better UX than a large majority of sites on the internet. If it was actually terrible, no one would use it.

They have a monopoly. What other video sharing site is even remotely on the same traffic level (not including social networks like fb)

I couldn’t agree more. I can’t stand using Google’s own apps on iOS because they look jarringly out of place to me, like running a Mac app that looks skinned to look like Windows.

Obviously not everyone agrees and that’s OK. I acknowledge this is purely a personal preference thing. But for me, I detest Material apps on my phone and iPad.

Yeah every time Chrome accidentally opens on iOS I cringe at the shoehorned design choices

This probably happens because i clicked a link in gmail

I find that flat design was the answer to having too much emphasis (in my opinion) on design and designers being too involved in the process which (again, in my opinion) collided with the engineering work..

Which non-flat design language do you like most?

Windows up until the downfall starting with Windows 8.

Windows 95, the pinacle of UI design. Honorable mentions: Gnome 2 with Clearlooks or Mac OS 9.

On the modern side, SerenityOS is going the right way.

OS X circa 10.6 – 10.9. Aesthetically pleasing, with lots of tonal contrast and touches of color to highlight important items. Clickable elements are clearly clickable, and the UI is reasonably dense, but it never looks overcomplicated or busy.

I could never understand the hatred of skeuomorphic design.

Material design seemed to me to add an unnecessary overhead to interaction especially with colors bleeding in. I love a strong, and arguably ugly, contrast ratio of 7:1

It all comes down to the fact that doing a skeuomorphic design is a lot more work than blurting a few colored rectangles.

It's also more confusing, distracting, and dated. Also super lazy. Good clean song is harder, but more enjoyable to use.

Let's come to a reasonable compromise: skeuomorphic is dated and material is super lazy.

It’s a generational change - much easier to make a career by discarding what came before rather than competing with it. You will see this in a lot of areas of society.

It's funny how a "generation" left Apple and suddenly they're rolling back all kinds of changes to how they were before that generation "made their mark".

It also gets a lot of emphasis because armchair ui architects think it’s cool to show they know this ‘big word’.

The Santa Claus effect by design makes everything made by “adults” obsolete.

Same. I wonder how it would have fared in the world of Apple Pencil, where the feeling of literally writing notes on a yellow pad could have been extended out of the device and in to the world. I like the current stuff and think skeuomorphism ran it's course, but I never hated it and never understood why people did. Apple didn't even come up with it - remember Microsoft Bob? It was just a product of a time when computers had to be more friendly and feel like real stuff and not the other way around.

Skeuomorphic design simply doesn’t work. Turning knobs and dials on a touchscreen? It’s a three dimensional interface slapped on a 2d canvas.

Doesn’t work? The old Apple podcasts app worked just fine. It’s the modern one that breaks and has UI jumping all the time.

You can't judge the success or failure of ANYTHING by the podcasts app (except the podcasts app itself, of course).

Remember old QuickTime with wonky drawers and knobs everywhere? Everyone hated it, and rightly so, and switched to alternatives in every case where they could.

I really like the three “wheel” picker on iOS (used for dates, at least): for coarse changes, I “flick” the wheel a couple times and let “inertia” do its work, then I fine tune it when I’m close.

Sure but I still think shadows and 3 dimensions work.

It can work just fine, just like it can be applied inappropriately.

"skeuomorphic" came into being as a scary label. We should prefer "realism" or something else

It's lazy, ugly, inefficient, unclear, and ugly to look at

Lazy? Unclear?

I would imagine it takes much more work to design something skeuomorphically than it would something flat. And clarity is the top priority - you should instantly know what the thing does upon seeing it.

One of the big factors in modern design is reducing cognitive load by reducing visual distractions. In other words, one goal of simple, clean, non-skeuomorphic designs is to make it easier to understand the interface. I’d be interested to see studies comparing good variants of skeuomorphic and minimal designs.

I wonder if the actual problem is that minimal designs are easier to get wrong. Skeuomorphic designs might be easier to get right just because you’re almost “cheating”: you don’t have to decide on the best way to represent X digitally. You just copy/paste X from the real world as best you can, and people will get it because they already know the IRL interface. As many users are very comfortable with touch interfaces now than 15 years ago, that’s less important.

Frankly, probably the only thing worse than the flat designs are the skeuomorphic designs. Bring back the Windows95-like. Give me edges, shadows and colours, all clearly indicating what the heck this bunch of pixels is meant to be. But without pretending it's a yellowing leather-bound notepad.

I've never been a fan of skeuomorphic design. I'm sure there are good examples of it somewhere. My memories of early apple and iOS apps implementations with fake physical things e.g. desks or bookshelf's, rendered in the background and such made the app feel cheap and had less class. I felt this way even before skeuomorphic design started to become less fashionable.

Right, I think bad skeuomorphism incorporates textures whereas good skeuomorphism incorporates shadow, lighting, and depth

> made the app feel cheap and had less class

This is about usability and familiarity, not eye candy. "flat" stuff is way too abstract for many users thus the very definition of not inclusive design.

When (old and younger) people can't tell what your icon does because you decided to go "flat" at any cost, you failed as a designer.

flat is also boring has no personality. It's appropriate in some contexts (a web form), but not necessarily in others.

Trend and hype drove the change from skeuo to "everything is flat", this was never about good design.

I believe this is partially due to end of the "pixel perfect" era by introducing Retina displays. They did well both until iOS6 but they had limited variant of dpi for their devices. Now they have vary dpi iOS/iPadOS devices like Android.

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