I've enjoyed it for almost a week on my tablet. I find it well-regardable.
On a more serious note, it is well-regarded by at least a large number of well-regarded designers and UI people. Material design has kinda swept the blogosphere in designer/UI circles. And, Google don't play when it comes to usable UIs; they put serious resources into figuring out how people interact with their software, so if they say, "This is good enough to be our UI standard for the next several years in every product we ship." then the odds are, it really is pretty good.
[Google] put serious resources into figuring out how people interact with their software, so if they say, "This is good enough to be our UI standard for the next several years in _every_ product we ship." then the odds are, it really is pretty good.
Not necessarily[1]. Especially in cases like this, where the org is large enough, the cash is endless enough, and the goal is fuzzy enough; that principal-agent problems are inevitably bound to prevail.
Think Pontiac Aztec. Or Lotus Notes. Or, for that matter, the all-new Google Maps(TM).
Not necessarily...but, the odds are good. I do find I'm very angry at Google Maps a lot of the time, though, so maybe Google is getting worse at interfaces and Material Design is going to go down in history as a massive failure.
People seem to be tolerating Windows 8 "flat" design, though, and that is pretty much a nightmare for usability as far as I'm able to discern.
In short, I don't now what's right and wrong, but I know what I like. I like my new tablet, and I dislike most other "flat" designs I've used in the build up to Material Design.
> People seem to be tolerating Windows 8 "flat" design, though, and that is pretty much a nightmare for usability as far as I'm able to discern.
FWIW, usability is being able to do something with as little thought or confusion as possible. So there is nothing inherently wrong with a flat UI - its the design choices made using it that matter.
Agreed. I wasn't complaining about the "flatness" of the thing. Just the chaotic nature of it (to me). Though, I suspect that with experience Win8 would become more usable to me. I just don't spend significant time in a Windows environment, so it feels really confusing whenever I find myself in front of one. "Usable" often means "What I'm used to."
I think there is some truth to the concept of material design, but so far in practice I've seen a wide variety of implementations that vary from "subtle yet pleasant" to "what the fuck were they thinking" and "why is this happening?".
I think the implementation is a lot harder than people realize. It's not Bootstrap, you can't just apply it to your site and be done. You have to think about the interaction design in context with the actions in your application.
Google Inbox seems to be the best example of good material design components, however, I've yet to see another app/site that uses these principles well. The "material design" frameworks I've seen on github thus far (even the Google Angular one) are sorely lacking.
Agreed. The frameworks provide a veneer, without the behaviors that are actually the important part of the UI/UX.
I'm still reading about it, and our UI is so far behind the curve that anytime I bring elements forward to new paradigms it is a positive gain. Switching to all Material Design would be a vast improvement...but so would switching to all Bootstrap (plus some new interaction guidelines), which is what I'm mostly working on lately. I'll probably experiment with Material Design, as well, but I don't have confidence I could do it well without a lot more research.
On a more serious note, it is well-regarded by at least a large number of well-regarded designers and UI people. Material design has kinda swept the blogosphere in designer/UI circles. And, Google don't play when it comes to usable UIs; they put serious resources into figuring out how people interact with their software, so if they say, "This is good enough to be our UI standard for the next several years in every product we ship." then the odds are, it really is pretty good.