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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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."<p>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.<p>[1] - <a href="http://www.google.com/design/spec/material-design/introduction.html#introduction-goals" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/design/spec/material-design/introducti...</a>
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
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>I tried to use Bing Maps but they have been copying Google Maps too closely therefore have also removed the droppable pin (?).
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.)<p>How have their APIs improved to allow developers to easily animate things in the way they demonstrated?<p>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.
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).<p>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.<p>I can't wait to see more.
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.<p>Google's opinion seems to be "It doesn't have to be intuitive because you'll eventually learn it".
Flat UI leads to usability problems. For example see Nielsen Norman group's report on Windows 8 usability: <a href="http://www.nngroup.com/articles/windows-8-disappointing-usability/" rel="nofollow">http://www.nngroup.com/articles/windows-8-disappointing-usab...</a>
Or read this site for iOS 7 issues: <a href="http://uxcritique.tumblr.com/" rel="nofollow">http://uxcritique.tumblr.com/</a><p>Now Google is acknowledging this deficiency of Flat design. See: <a href="http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en/us/design/material-design.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en/...</a>
They have a page titled "Dimensionality affords interaction." Google is bringing back some dimensionality because a pure flat UI is harder to figure out.
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.<p>Edit: Look at this screenshot/mockup: <a href="http://venturebeat.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/google-material2.png" rel="nofollow">http://venturebeat.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/google-materi...</a> - 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.<p>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.
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?
"Some elements, like containers, feel almost like a direct copy of Windows UI, to be completely honest."<p>"I initially thought about Windows’ Metro design upon seeing the new UI, but it looks like they have added their own spin on it."<p>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.
So I'm confused about this since google also has <a href="https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/" rel="nofollow">https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/</a> , how are they different or relate?
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<p><a href="http://adage.com/images/random/0209/pepsi-arnell021109.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://adage.com/images/random/0209/pepsi-arnell021109.pdf</a><p>which, while full of similar sounding "nonsense" nevertheless became Pepsi's new design.
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)
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.