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Comment by akkawwakka | Hacker News Reader

>A material metaphor is the unifying theory of a rationalized space and a system of motion. The material is grounded in tactile reality, inspired by the study of paper and ink, yet technologically advanced and open to imagination and magic.

What does any of that even mean?

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A cynical translation: "We finally realised that Apple was onto a good thing with their minimalism, layered UI and UI as a metaphor for physically interacting with your data. So we're putting a lot of fancy words together to make it sound like we're doing something amazing and new, while all we're actually achieving is explicitly stating what Apple has assumed to be common sense for decades. After all if we want all these Android developers to conform to a common human interface guideline ruleset rather than inventing their own UI for every new application, we have to make that ruleset sound sexy and awesome!"

I love how the guy presenting on stage starts talking about a new material that will provide tactile feedback, as if Google is already launching phones with shape-shifting screens. Some Android fans are going to be mighty disappointed when we don't have tactile morphing screens in the stores for Christmas.

"Finally"? Apple announced iOS 7 barely a year ago, and they were far from 'minimal' before. Google has been using this design since Google Now was launched a year before that.

I think the parent was making a reference to the original Macintosh GUI guideline [1] (human interface guideline). They are quite famous in the UI / UX community as being a pioneering way[2] of explaining and thus unifying the look and feel of third party applications.

[1] http://interface.free.fr/Archives/Apple_HIGuidelines.pdf

[2] http://hci.stanford.edu/publications/bds/4p-guidelines.html

Oh I see. But that still doesn't validate his cynicism, as Google has been doing that for quite some time as well for Holo [1]. It's not as if this is the first time that Google has a "design language" for Android.

[1] http://developer.android.com/design/index.html

Let's get our history straight - Microsoft probably initiated the trend with Metro. Google launched Holo with Android 4.0 and Apple jumped onto this particular ship last of all.

(self reply) - I'd misread your post and thought you were making an 'apple invented flat' comment. Apologies.

"What does any of that even mean?"

The new guidelines are much better than what they had before. The new visual design is also much better. However, some of the language used to describe the new design sounds inflated and a bit pretentious (it's ripe for parody!)

They've gone for a clear and uncluttered visual look. Hopefully, the next iteration of their guidelines will also include simple, clear and unpretentious copy.

An example of a really well-written design patterns guide is from the gov.uk site. It's not an equivalent of the Google design guide, but in terms of how to write guidelines and recommendations, it's the best example I've seen

https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/user-centred-design/resour...

Their metaphor for materials is the combination of two ideas: A streamlining/optimization of screen area, and a set of rules that define how things move. The material metaphor is based on things we can touch in real life. However, this metaphor is not going to be strictly adhered to in order to take advantage of the technology it's implemented on and provide a good user experience.

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