
Top designers react to Google’s new ‘Material’ design language - harrisonweber
http://venturebeat.com/2014/06/27/top-designers-react-to-googles-new-material-design-language/
======
luke_s
I think that material is great design, but terrible strategy and in the end
may land up resulting in the Android design space being worse, not better.

For years google (and many members of the design community) made a very
successful argument that android apps should look and act like android apps,
and iOS apps should look and act like iOS apps and web apps should act like
web apps. Trying to achieve design consistency across platforms was going to
annoy your users. Instead you should strive for _branding_ consistency across
platforms and use native interaction patterns.

A significant problem for Android has been iOS designs just copied over
without adapting to the platform. The apps look and feel weird. As a user I
find them confusing and frustrating to use. However progress was being made
and people were starting to understand that if you want to build for Android
you are going to need to design for Android.

Material throws that out the window. It says it right there in the goals[1]:
"Develop a single underlying system that allows for a unified experience
across platforms and device sizes."

IF we take it as given that our apps should look the same on all platforms,
then why choose Material? Because I know my customers are going to say: "We
have this great iOS design sitting right here, that we have already paid to
have built. Lets use that! Besides we don't want to re-code our iOS app to
suit Android". Or, they will come up with their own cross platform design to
"differentiate themselves" and stand out.

[1] - [http://www.google.com/design/spec/material-
design/introducti...](http://www.google.com/design/spec/material-
design/introduction.html#introduction-goals)

~~~
nostrademons
I think the idea is that there are ready-made toolkits for Material that will
give you the same design across iOS, Android, and web, and so if it's easy to
develop in, why not use them? As a startup founder, I have to say it makes a
lot of sense. My core competency is finding & serving my own market, I don't
have time to wrestle with designing for 3 platforms.

I'm guessing that the strategic advantage is to cut off Apple's knees. Apple's
key differentiator has been design; this filters down into all the apps
written for their platform, so that consumers say they choose iOS "because the
apps are better-designed". Google wants a critical mass of iOS & web
developers to choose Material instead, and make the Material design good
enough that users won't prefer native iOS apps over Material apps. Then iOS
becomes a fragmented mess of native, Material, and Cordova/PhoneGap apps,
while Android is all unified Material design down to the OS, and mobile
websites just look like Android.

IMHO it's brilliant strategically, though it's kinda dick-ish toward Apple.
There are a couple huge unknowns though, like whether startup founders will
adapt Material, whether those that do become large mobile successes, and
whether Apple will even allow Material apps into the app store (they've been
known to ban PhoneGap apps before for not following native look & feel
guidelines).

~~~
luke_s
Yikes! Its embrace/extend/extinguish applied to design, and we just hit extend
:-)

Frankly though, I can't see any of your huge unknowns ever coming to pass.
Almost all startup founders and designers I know use iPhones. Many still have
trouble understanding why they should pay attention to Android design at all.
If material ever does start to pick up momentum on iOS I can see Apple
wielding the ban hammer liberally. Everything they have done in the past shows
they are not shy about removing apps they feel aren't in Apple's best
interests.

~~~
jamesaguilar
There is no way google, or anyone, could accomplish the extinguish phase of an
eee operation against design.

~~~
luke_s
Ah - I think perhaps what I meant wasn't clear. Its not against design - its
against Apple. The medium the attack is conducted in is design.

Also, because this is the internet and tone doesn't come through very well, my
comment is meant to be a bit tongue in cheek. I think the idea that google
wants to conduct eee against Apple using design is just a little too far
fetched, though there may be a tiny grain of truth in there somewhere.

~~~
AJ007
Presumably the end purpose of design is differentiation. Whatever Google is
trying to do, Google has borrowed heavily on flat UIs other designers have
been producing for some time. Rather than leading the pack, 'Material' is
getting all of the stragglers to catch up. If all cars looked like Ferraris,
Ferrari would change.

------
emehrkay
I've always felt that iOS was more polished than android and couldn't quite
explain why. Here is an example: open up mail in iOS and go to an inbox. Open
up a message and slowing do the swipe right thing to bring in the previous
screen. Look at the headings and how they move and fade into each other. The
current Android doesnt have that little granular level of detail. Material
does. I think it is exciting and it makes me want to design something

------
Someone1234
The death of flat/minimalism cannot come soon enough. Unfortunately Google
Maps seems to have been swallowed up by it. The current (new?) UI is simply
unusable.

All I wanted to do earlier was drop the pin at my current location (which
Google Maps couldn't divine due to no GPS) and then "Search Nearby" for eating
places.

Well the pin has gone and now all you get is the street view thingy (yay?) and
search nearby is also absent unless you're on a GPS device which can pinpoint
your location.

I tried to use Bing Maps but they have been copying Google Maps too closely
therefore have also removed the droppable pin (?).

~~~
hhsnopek
I don't know what you see - I think the new Google Maps is wonderful. Download
the are of the map your most in for offline usage. You can also just click on
the spot you want to go and it gives you a details about it under the search
bar. I don't use Street View at all, takes a little bit longer to load,
instead I just use the flat colored map. Embrace the change or be let in the
dust of old technology - I see a wonderful new UI that will attract more users
and allow other to easily use Google Maps and other products. They have
brought a new touch that Apple holds all of the time.

~~~
ewoodrich
I mostly agree, but I've found many Google UI changes to be lacking in terms
of discoverability. On both Android and web apps I've been baffled by icons
and buttons with no hints or explanation. Through trial and error I'm
generally able to grok the new conventions, but I still get frustrated
initially when presented with opaque symbology.

~~~
alttab
I hate the hidden swipe features. If there is no UI space for it, I'm not
literally going to click and swipe around to "discover" shit.

using an app, I dont want to have to discover, I want to easily be able to
find what I'm looking for.

Swiping between map results at the bottom of the new maps was completely
unintuitive for me. I was still pinch zooming and clicking on individual
results on the map. To "teach" me, they overlayed instructions on the search
results, which was really frustrating when I was trying to read it.

~~~
eric_the_read
I had no idea you could swipe between map results! Wow. Talk about
undiscoverable; if they had overlayed instructions for me (which they probably
did), I probably just dismissed them without reading because I was trying to
find my results.

~~~
alttab
Yup!

------
interpol_p
One of the things I noticed about Google's design demos was that they looked
very bespoke. Each app had some really cool but very custom animations. (For
example the play button in the music app jumping out and filling a rect with
an animated circular fill.)

How have their APIs improved to allow developers to easily animate things in
the way they demonstrated?

It's great to have a strong design direction, but providing the APIs to make
it easy to realise that design is just as important.

~~~
luke_s
Well, Disclaimer: I haven't actually used the API's. However on paper they
look quite good:

[http://developer.android.com/preview/material/animations.htm...](http://developer.android.com/preview/material/animations.html)

For example the play button jumping out would probably be a single call to
ViewAnimationUtils.createCircularReveal()

One of the problems with the old Holo design language was that people were
doing great things with it, but much of it had to be custom made. The API's
simply weren't meant to be stretched and pulled in the directions people were
going. At the moment it appears that this is one of the major problems
Material is addressing.

~~~
interpol_p
That's excellent to see, thanks for finding that.

------
rdtsc
I like it! I am not a designer, just a user of Android and this looks good. I
just never liked or bought the complete flatness idea. Maybe I am too
brainwashed by skeumorphic buttons shadows and whatnot. But we just don't live
in the 2D world, the world is 3D and shadows, textures, depths help us
interact with the real world (it is there without anyone explicitly adding it
in, as in objects in the world are inherently 3D).

This is sort of the middle ground. I think the pendulum has swung too far with
the Windows and Metro design (and I do commend MS for being bold and going for
it, that was fantastic I think). But now I think the pendulum has swung
slightly back to a little more skeumorphic design, a little more shadows here
and there, use some basic textures. Still flat not fake 3D buttons that look
like ancient light switches but paper -- something in between.

I can't wait to see more.

~~~
petilon
Agreed. Here's an article that explains this reasoning in more detail:

[http://blog.tobiasandtobias.com/post/37179466962/in-
defense-...](http://blog.tobiasandtobias.com/post/37179466962/in-defense-of-
allegorical-design)

Excerpt: Even ‘digital natives’ live in the physical world. We start learning
how it works before we ever touch a computer, and even the most dedicated nerd
spends more time interacting with physical objects than with digital
interfaces. It doesn’t take additional learning to know that an object casting
a shadow on another is in front of that other, for example. Failing to
leverage that existing knowledge is tantamount to shutting down whole swathes
of users’ brains.

------
greggman
I don't know if the Android camera app is considered to use "Material" but
it's massively unintuitive to use. It's not obvious at all that to see a
picture you just took you need to swipe to the left. Nor is it obvious that
the small shutter icon once you have swiped means "edit" or "refocus" or
whatever.

Google's opinion seems to be "It doesn't have to be intuitive because you'll
eventually learn it".

~~~
MaxDPS
After you take a picture you can see that the picture is "stored" to the
right. There is a little animation showing where the picture is going. I dont
think its as hard to figure out as you are implying.

~~~
greggman
I know it's hard because I'm actually an iOS user who happens to own a Nexus
5. I only use the Nexus 5 for testing. About once a month I pull it out to
show someone the re-focus feature. It almost always takes me several minutes
to figure out where it is. Finding the camera app is easy. Figuring out how to
get to that feature is hard.

------
petilon
Flat UI leads to usability problems. For example see Nielsen Norman group's
report on Windows 8 usability:
[http://www.nngroup.com/articles/windows-8-disappointing-
usab...](http://www.nngroup.com/articles/windows-8-disappointing-usability/)
Or read this site for iOS 7 issues:
[http://uxcritique.tumblr.com/](http://uxcritique.tumblr.com/)

Now Google is acknowledging this deficiency of Flat design. See:
[http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en/...](http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en/us/design/material-
design.pdf) They have a page titled "Dimensionality affords interaction."
Google is bringing back some dimensionality because a pure flat UI is harder
to figure out.

------
gurkendoktor
The best thing I can say about iOS 7 is that the information density is still
tolerable. Now look at the Material address book screenshot... :|

------
Illniyar
Not a single negative reaction? that seems weird, surely there should be
dissenting voices, what do they say?

------
currysausage
Not directly related to Material, but to Android L: I always thought that the
battery/antenna icons in the taskbar are way too bulky, which becomes more
annoying as everything else on the UI is becoming thinner and thinner.
Actually, I think this might be of the most noticeable design flaws in Android
4. I'm surprised that they didn't fix this in L, which seems very polished
otherwise, and surprised that nobody seems to have mentioned that yet.

Edit: Look at this screenshot/mockup:
[http://venturebeat.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/google-
materi...](http://venturebeat.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/google-
material2.png) \- Battery and antenna certainly aren't the pieces of
information we want the user to focus on, yet they really stand out simply
because they are so bulky, at least compared to the other UI elements.

Edit 2: The screenshot also shows one of the things I like most about
Material/L: Text elements are finally neatly aligned. Randomly aligned text
elements are among my top pet peeves.

~~~
alphapapa
Your comment is an example of everything that's wrong with software and UI
design today.

> Battery and antenna certainly aren't the pieces of information we want the
> user to focus on...

Stop telling me what I should be focusing on! Stop acting as if a simple icon
is reaching out of the screen and dragging my eyeballs toward it, like I have
to be protected from this horrible, "distracting" icon by sanding away all of
its distinctiveness and making it blur into the background, making it useless!

When I need to know what my battery charge is, or what my signal strength is,
I look at the icons, and they need to be distinct and clear! When I'm finished
doing that, guess what--I don't look at them, and they are not a problem! It's
not as if the stock Android battery and antenna icons are flashing and
twirling around!

Stop it with this minimalist dogma! It's madness, and these self-appointed
design "experts" are dragging the whole industry down with them in their
mindless pursuit of blandness and their personal ideal of beauty--which they
put upon an altar and worship, while ignoring _usefulness!_

A cell phone's screen is not a fashion statement, nor a work of art! It's a
_tool_!

~~~
currysausage
I believe your answer is a little emotional considering that I only suggested
making three icons a little less bulky. Generally, however, I do share many of
your sentiments towards today's UI design.

 _> A cell phone's screen is not a fashion statement, nor a work of art! It's
a tool!_

Exactly. And if the 4″ screen just threw all availabe information at you,
lacking any visual hierarchy, _it wouldn 't be a very useful tool._
Information design serves a purpose _beyond_ making things look better.

And yes, good information design can mean making things look less slick.
Helvetica Ultralight in iOS 7 definitely looks slick. And I guess we both
agree that its readability is subpar. It is a very unfortunate UI design trend
to value slickness higher than utility.

I don't want to make these icons any less useful, and I certainly don't want
to hide them away. As a matter of fact, if Google were planning to do so, I
would protest as loudly as you do. I'm _not_ at fault for "everything that's
wrong with software and UI design today." I'm just a friend of solid
information design.

------
yannis
Certainly they can do better explaining the "design language". Cliches and
corporate lingua such as: "... A material metaphor is the unifying theory of a
rationalized space and a system of motion. Our material is grounded in tactile
reality, inspired by our study of paper and ink, yet open to imagination and
magic". Come again?

------
Tsutsukakushi
Google is the first big player to do flatness well imo.

~~~
psbp
I remember thinking that Apple would introduce "ink"-like effects at some
point after seeing their new design in iOS 7. I'm surprised that Google did it
first, and actually did a great job with it.

------
CmonDev
"Some elements, like containers, feel almost like a direct copy of Windows UI,
to be completely honest."

"I initially thought about Windows’ Metro design upon seeing the new UI, but
it looks like they have added their own spin on it."

I am glad people are giving Microsoft a well deserved credit. And to think
Google's top designer was bashing Metro in past. Now we just need Jonny Ive to
confess.

------
derengel
So I'm confused about this since google also has
[https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/](https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/)
, how are they different or relate?

~~~
mynameisvlad
They're completely different. Web Fundamentals are good practices for web
development, things like how to make a responsive page and what that means,
etc., while Material is a guide and common elements for good mobile and web
design.

A company can have several guides and guidelines on similar topics.

------
bane
I'm guessing some of the weird explanation used to describe the new design
language is some of the design world's terms of art bleeding out into layman-
land where it sounds ridiculous, but may be full of meaning inside the design
world. It reminds me of this

[http://adage.com/images/random/0209/pepsi-
arnell021109.pdf](http://adage.com/images/random/0209/pepsi-arnell021109.pdf)

which, while full of similar sounding "nonsense" nevertheless became Pepsi's
new design.

~~~
dhruvmittal
While I'm sure that was all super meaningful to actual designers, that was
probably the funniest thing I've read all week. Particularly page 21's
"magnetic dynamics."

------
aashishkoirala
The first two reactions politely say that they essentially ripped off Windows,
don't they?

~~~
aashishkoirala
Wow that was a speedy downvote. It's almost as if someone's got their finger
on the trigger constantly. Stressed much?

~~~
CmonDev
You are not supposed to just go and say "The king is naked". Just politely say
"iOS 7-8 and Android L are a nice spin on Microsoft's Modern GUI ideas".

------
Alupis
Maybe I'm nit-picking... but "Material" is not a language... it's a design
guideline. (the article, and the articles the article link to repeatedly call
it a language when it's not)

~~~
dag11
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_language](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_language)

~~~
Alupis
I stand corrected. Seems wrong, but hey, I'm a programmer... not a designer
;-P

~~~
alphapapa
Don't drink the koolaid, man. You were right the first time. Calling it a
"design language" is their way of obfuscating what they do, making it sound
like it's something that only they can do. Therefore you, a mere programmer,
should listen to them and do what they tell you, because you aren't qualified
to "design" things. Hey, you didn't even know what a design language is!

I think we are witnessing the collision between two worlds: art and
engineering. People that would have been designing books and magazines and
advertisements and refrigerator facades a few years ago are now applying the
same techniques to computer interfaces. They're actually trying to stake out
their claim to this relatively young field, and they use their own jargon and
obfuscated ideas to discourage non-designers from getting involved.

This is a problem because software interfaces are _tools_ , not works of art
that merely exist to be gazed upon. They should first be engineered, then made
to look pretty. There is a reason you can walk into many places of business
and see computer terminals with text-mode UIs, even monochrome ones: because
they _work_ and are _efficient._ Now those same interfaces could be made to
look nicer by using high-res, color screens with nice widgets, without
changing _how_ they work--but hand that task to a designer and watch him pull
back in disgust. No, it's got to look like a piece of modern, minimalist art,
and all usable controls must be hidden away so as not to "distract" the user
from what he "should be focusing on."

The average person who just wants a phone he can talk to people with and get
directions with is left to suffer in bewilderment as he drowns in a river of
constant, unnecessary changes. Every few weeks an app he uses suddenly looks
and behaves differently--usually right when the person needs to _use_ it for
something, _not relearn how to use it._ This person is the collateral damage
as the two worlds collide and deposit their flaming debris on the peasants
below who can only take what they are given and try to fumble through.

~~~
bluthru
Your comment is a great example of not understand what design is. Design is
not something that is applied at the end, or something that is in conflict
with function.

Your contempt is the product of ignorance. You'd benefit greatly from some
formal design education.

~~~
programmer_dude
>Design is not something that is applied at the end

Strawman alert! He never said that.

>Design is not something that is in conflict with function.

It should not be. If it is then it's useless. But nevertheless we do see
examples of such absurdity as a common place occurrence.

~~~
sbuk
The OP may not have, but the implication certainly is there. _" They should
first be engineered, then made to look pretty."_ That statement, by the way,
is wrong. Engineers _design_ , which ever way you look at it or phrase it.
_Design_ is the process of solving a problem, be it visual or otherwise. It
follows that tools must first be designed and then the design is implemented.
That design is seen as merely making something pretty says a lot about a few
of the "engineers" that post here.

------
ape4
The Emperor has no clothes. I hate huge swatches of solid color that doesn't
mean anything.

------
scotty79
I thought it was going to be one of those videos that show people's horror and
disgust at what they are shown.

------
pervycreeper
So much wasted space. Looks like any random "responsive design" website.

------
plg
I sort of like the design. Too bad google's business model is still offensive
though. At least with iOS I know the deal is: I give Apple money, they give me
a widget. With Google the deal is they give me services, I give them ... gobs
of information.

