Google for Developers
4 HN mentions · mentioned in 4 months, 2014–2016
0:49 · 4.5M views · Jun 25, 2014
Google's 2014 reel introducing Material Design, a visual language based on a paper-and-ink material metaphor and a system of motion. It is a short promotional video.
HN mentions it as the polished design-team vision that Android's actual implementation fell short of.
4 comments from Hacker News
I'm prepared to be convinced otherwise! Like I said, I'm speaking only from intuition. I have a piece of paper on my desk. I put my hand on it and slide it. It does pretty much what I ask it to. I would say it's 'well behaved'. If I have some slippery surface and a slippery jell(y|o)-like object, it will wobble. To me, that's a sign that I need to pay more attention to it because it's not 'well behaved'. Modelling not-well-behaved objects for interfaces seems counter-intuitive and (I suggest) takes more mental energy to interact with. This is the point I (hope I) made above. As for the rotation, the origin-normalising in my previous comment is both affine and rotational (yes, I didn't consider that when writing it). But if you look at the examples, they also have rotational momentum. Paper doesn't have that, as it's got low mass and is dampened by the friction. The closest I could get to the Facebok examples is waggling a piece of paper about on the end of a stick, or moving a heavy object on a slippery surface, and that's not how I'd model an interface! I just clicked 'compose' in GMail and the compose 'window' just appears. Likewise in my text editor, and creating a new window in Mac OS Finder and creating a new tab in my browser. Granted, there are lots of subtle (and not so subtle) movements in various operating systems. But it's a world apart from Google's Material Design demo video [0] and the 2d and 3d waggle [1]. Mac OS introduced the bouncing icon in the dock about a
"Animation is not 'extremely' important and never has been or how would we have survived all these years?" Animation definitely has an important role to play in interface design and it's been used in applications for decades. For example, this video snippet of Mac OS 7 (released in 1991 - over 25 years ago) shows the animation that occurs when a new finder window opens. [LINK] Can you imagine minimizing and maximizing windows without some subtle effect to show the window shrinking or expanding? Without animation, the transition would feel clunky and abrupt. Animation can be overdone of course (even for minimising a window). And that's the real problem with animation in UI design: when it's used purely for decorative puposes or if it slows you down, it quickly becomes irritating. Previously, animations were subtle and focused on individual actions (and limited by what the hardware was capable of). Today, animations are smoother, faster but also longer (hence the term "Motion UI") and actions are conveyed with multiple, simultaneous animations. It means that sometimes the UI can feel too busy and overdone with movement. But maybe it's also a generational thing? Taste and fashion change and perhaps users today aren't fazed or distracted by fast motion graphics? this video
Completely agree - I'm an Android fan, but it is unbelievable that the performance is still such an issue. Even the Nexus 6P drops frames quite regularly, and that's even with it doing much simpler animations than is common on iOS. You can see this with the Material Design specs as well - the rendered demo videos (e.g. this video ) from the Design team are amazing, but what's actually been implemented on Android is far less sophisticated and even then they frequently skip frames. Interestingly, many of the Google apps are much closer to the Design specs and perform better on iOS and even on the web, at least in Chrome. Hopefully this will finally be resolved with the Chrome OS merge (Chrome OS has great performance) - It must be extremely frustrating for the Google Design teams when they can't implement their designs properly on their own platform.
Material Design Reel Video: this video There are soft button differences when they display the nexus devices, could these possibly be part of Googles Re-Design for the next Android release?