HACKER Q&A
📣 m0xai

How awful material design is?


Hello, i am a part time/student worker as Frontend Developer. Apple products are my personal devices and habe a windows laptop from the company i work for.

I saw obviously material design on my sites. But for the first time a task given me to remove Bootstrat from a project and use Vuetify (Matrial Design flavored) instead.

My experience is more than awful. Who think that the bounce effect on click can be a good thing? Why button texts have to be uppercase? Is the border at bottom really means something?

I can’t really engage with this design system and i can’t really understand why is this thing so popular. Am i alone?

  👤 seanwilson Accepted Answer ✓
> Who think that the bounce effect on click can be a good thing? Why button texts have to be uppercase?

This may just be personal taste, but I find the above distracting/loud/obnoxious too. Another is the circular loading indicator: instead of a smooth, slow rotating line stroke, the line whips around at different speeds while changing length, and when there's more than one indicator they're often not in sync with each other. UIs shouldn't be distracting like this.

I think most of the Material Design guidelines are good overall though but people shouldn't blindly copy all of it without thinking.

For what it's worth, I've worked with Vuetify before where I've turned off the click ripple/bounce effect, made buttons lowercase, and used a simpler loading indicator, so you can customise it without breaking stuff.

👤 JoeyJoJoJr
I agree. I remember finding a few valuable insights reading the design doc, but overall I don’t find the interaction feels snappy enough for my tastes. It’s too flat, too sharp, and doing too much with animation. I want the UI interaction to feel good overall but be completely transparent in the experience.

If you compare the current homepage for material ui and bootstrap, material ui has so many rough edges whereas bootstrap just looks simple, we’ll composed, and easy to interact with. It doesn’t seem to me like the scaling of material UI is quite right or that each component cohesively works with the rest. I feel this with every Google product, there is always just something off about how everything fits together.

👤 dartharva
Affinity/aversion to specific design templates is a personal thing. However, I think material design was promoted so much mostly as a result of Google's original design philosophies of keeping their web UX as clean, readable and clutter-free as possible, even at the cost of aesthetics and clarity. If you think about it Google has been against the old Web 1 frilly design styles right from the beginning - the original Google search home page is still almost the same as what it is today.
👤 leros
I agree that Material design looks awful. At least out of the box.

I've seen several sites and app use Material with lots of custom stylings and it looks decent.

I honestly don't why it's popular either. I know a lot of my developer friends like using it.