Material Design: philosophy and practice
2 years have passed since Google developers first introduced their user interface design concept, called Material Design. We talked with Vladimir Ivanov, not just an admirer and follower of the idea, but a person who has been working with Material Design for more than a year in how it’s practical to apply this concept. application.
- Good day! Please tell us about yourself and your work.
')
- Hello! My name is Vladimir Ivanov, for more than 6 years I have been writing applications for Android (and not only). Previously, I was engaged in Kaspersky Safe Browser, and at the moment I work in a company that produces the universal communication application Fonum . True, we are still quite young: we only have an application for Android, and so far it is in some way behind popular messengers. However, we have several innovative ideas, due to which we plan to quickly catch up with competitors.
In the company, I lead the development of mobile applications, in particular, under Android.
- Your application is built on the principles of material design, i.e. with the concept you encounter at work?
- Yes, we initially chose the material design as the basis for the approach to the application as a whole. Those. we can say that Fonum fully embodies the ideas of material design. I literally live last year with this concept, imbued with the spirit and letter of this approach.
- Why did you, as developers (I mean your company), choose this approach?
- In our opinion, the material design combines the principles that make it possible to make a very user-friendly interface, aimed not only at users with perfect vision and hearing, but also, for example, at visually impaired people. Those. material design allows you to convey the convenience and meaning of the application.
Comparing the material design with all other approaches, for example, with the philosophy that iOS, or Metro-UI, which is widely used among Windows applications, now professes, we decided that the material design is the best that is on the market now.
- In addition to the opportunity you mentioned to reveal the meaning of the application, what other advantages does this concept have for an abstract developer?
- For the abstract developer, there are a lot of advantages here.
First, the material design is a concept that relies on the simple idea that modern technologies, in particular, modern hardware and software, can provide a very responsive, lively and user-friendly interface, without requiring any strong design skills from the developer. The concept itself turned out to be very mature, it immediately gives a high start, even if you have recently programmed and in design it is not enough that you understand. In other words, the developer, if he understands the material design approach, accepts it and tries to follow it, immediately receives a very high level of appearance of his application.
- Is the concept difficult to understand? Doesn’t the distribution of the concept prevent the abundance of documentation issued by Google at the same time by material design?
- I do not think. The documentation seemed to me well structured and quite accessible explaining the essence of the concept. I did not find dubious moments - everything is extremely simple.
Naturally, any developer who has his baggage of experience has a moment when he simply does not really want to accept something new (this is characteristic of human nature). But this is probably not a problem of the philosophy of material design, but a step in the study. We, as developers, need to always be open to everything new, because such is the nature of our industry.
- Is it possible to say that the concept of material design is focused only on applications with a simple interface (or, on the contrary, only on interfaces overloaded with information)? Or are the ideas embodied in it “universal”?
- I would not say that the material design has a certain specialization. In particular, material design, like any other user interface concept, does not tell you how to cram a lot of elements onto a small screen or how to organically present few elements on a large screen. These are questions not of a design approach, but of problems that are solved during the creation of an application by the developer, designer and designer. Unfortunately, there are no universal solutions and there can not be.
Instead, the material design tells you how the application screen should respond to a specific user request.
- How much does Google insist on introducing the concept in applications, in particular, for Android?
- Material design - a thing completely voluntary. Google behaves completely differently than Apple did before (Apple’s policy - if your application interface is not built according to guidelines, it is not allowed in iTunes; you can jump out of your pants, but the interface will have to be done according to their rules). The Google developers simply released the concept and did not even say that third-party developers should follow it. They simply presented a cool idea with documentation and examples, and at the same time the code that implements it, and the supporting libraries. And, frankly, I am very glad that the material design saw the light, and that we have the opportunity to use it. This is actually a wonderful design complex.
- How seriously has the concept won the market in the 2 years that have passed since its introduction?
- Unfortunately, I can not give quantitative estimates. But according to my feelings, the influence of material design is more than noticeable.
First, Google itself moved in all its Android applications to the material design, i.e. Google follows its own trend.
Secondly, all major players in the market for Android applications are trying to switch to material design. About half of the applications that I regularly use on my smartphone have already moved to material design to one degree or another.
- Does the transition take place on all platforms or only on certain ones?
- The transition is noticeable only in Android applications.
Here you need to separate the material design, which exists in Android, and the material design, as a concept that exists on other platforms (web, iOS and other devices). Purely technologically material design for Android is implemented very simply, since the concept is supported by Google and the community. In addition, there are libraries that provide support for the material design on platforms below 5.0. In other words, on Android, support for material design is close to perfect (although I have a whole list of flaws that Google could fix).
With other platforms more difficult. If resources appear for the web, for example, Material Up , which contains solutions and snippets for implementing material design on the site, then under iOS it’s almost impossible to provide support. Honestly, we tried to drag the material design to our iOS application, which is currently under development. But we did not succeed. The approach that Apple has implemented is not compatible with material design. As a result, due to the complexity of the implementation, we had to abandon a very large number of things, starting with the banal Action button and ending with a beautiful transition animation.
- Ie In fact, the global unification of the appearance of applications due to the material design does not work?
- While I do not see her. Material design is now a very strong story on Android, but there is no talk about globalization.
- Do all material design implementations succeed?
- Unfortunately no. Not all developers adequately evaluate and accept the spirit of material design. There is no need to go far for examples: in the latest update of the Twitter Android application from the material design, only the action button is implemented. More material design in the application there.
Similar examples show that people are trying to follow the “fashionable chip”, dragging 5% of the concept without understanding the meaning of the idea, and think that they have put a tick in front of the material design. But actually it is not.
- Can you talk about the most common mistakes in the implementation of material design, allowed by developers?
- The most common mistake is to assume that the material design ends with an action button. A number of developers (I think there are a lot of them) simply do not understand the principles of the concept. They consider that it is possible to limit oneself to some such small elements, with the introduction of which their application will be in the material design. But this is not true. Material design is not about buttons with shadow. This concept describes the entire interface, tries to bring it closer to the real world, forcing its individual elements to behave as in the real world. In addition, the material design is sharpened for visual assistance to the user in the perception of the application. Both the animation and the approach of perceiving each layer as a kind of material are all aimed at improving and facilitating user interaction with the application.
- Are there many such “unsuccessful” examples?
- I know a few companies that believe that such a realization of material design can be limited. Twitter is definitely not the only example, there are plenty of such applications.
- You mentioned that even in the implementation of support for the material design for Android there are things that I would like to correct. Can you name the most obvious moments?
- It is mainly about supporting the material design in Android up to 5.0.
In particular, one of the principles of material design is that any movement in an application should deliver some meaning (motion provides meaning). The most commonplace example is transition animation. Let's say in the messenger application you want to animate to show the transition from the list of contacts or chats to a specific chat (show that your card opens and turns into chat). And you use the animation of moving the user's avatars from the contact list to the header element of the chat. The animation there is great, but you can only implement it for Android 5 and higher, because under Android 4, no compatibility libraries will help.
Another example is the ripple effect, which provides an animated button response to pressing (a wave spreads; it looks very nice and gives the user the feeling that he really pressed the button). In the standard compatibility library this effect is absent, i.e. you have to go to github and see what indie developers have and if there is any implementation for Android 4 at all. Implementations are usually found, but they are not perfect and are not used by Google itself, which, of course, adds a spoonful of tar to the barrel honey material design.
- With such difficulties, does it make sense to pull the elements of material design into previous versions of the system? Maybe you should give up their support in general?
- Unfortunately, it still has, if uniformity of the interface is important to you.
Of course, we would most like to abandon Android 4 (we support 4.03, and there are enough of our own problems, not all of which are easily solved). But, unfortunately, 65% of our users still use Android 4. And since we are trying to use a beautiful interface, we are trying to drag everything that is possible to the 4th version.
- Does Google itself develop development tools for material design?
- Yes, and quite active. Constantly there are updates to the library compatibility for the material design. So one cannot say that they do not do this.
- Do you think it makes sense to transfer an application to a material design, which is not built within the framework of this concept and is being successfully sold?
- This is not a question for me, but for a business. The owner of the product (the one who pays for the application) must answer it, and he is unlikely to need my opinion. But personally, I would not do that. First of all, because if your application is not in material design, it will be difficult to remake it in material design. In fact, you will need to redo the interface. The concept dictates certain things, and your existing screens may not fit into the material design scheme. Naturally, reworking an application is always a certain risk, and I would not take it. But I know successful examples of how people rebuilt their applications in a fairly short time and benefited from it.
- And in your experience, how do end users react to material design?
- Within the framework of our application, design rather regularly calls the very “Wow” that we wanted to achieve.
In general, at one of the previous jobs I was taught a simple principle: it is very difficult to sell a working application that looks disgusting. But it's easy enough to sell an application that doesn’t work well, but it looks great. And I can say that this is true. Those. design, it is relatively easy for you to achieve a positive user response, even if everything is not working very well.
Thus, the concept, which, when properly applied, causes positive emotions to the end user, is not yet so easy to implement. Perhaps the cause will contribute to the efforts of Google and the community to support the material design, or successful ideas will have to give way to a more conservative approach until the natural change of Android versions of the vast majority of users (when compatibility problems with Android 4, described by a specialist, go to the background). But, despite the difficulties, for new applications now material design may well give a kind of “starting point” when building the interface.
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Useful links:
1. About Google's Material Design
2. More practical details in the report of Vladimir at the conference Mobius 2016 (June 4)
3. Report on UX from Android GDE Wiebe Elsinga to Mobius 2016
- Good day! Please tell us about yourself and your work.
')
- Hello! My name is Vladimir Ivanov, for more than 6 years I have been writing applications for Android (and not only). Previously, I was engaged in Kaspersky Safe Browser, and at the moment I work in a company that produces the universal communication application Fonum . True, we are still quite young: we only have an application for Android, and so far it is in some way behind popular messengers. However, we have several innovative ideas, due to which we plan to quickly catch up with competitors.In the company, I lead the development of mobile applications, in particular, under Android.
- Your application is built on the principles of material design, i.e. with the concept you encounter at work?
- Yes, we initially chose the material design as the basis for the approach to the application as a whole. Those. we can say that Fonum fully embodies the ideas of material design. I literally live last year with this concept, imbued with the spirit and letter of this approach.
- Why did you, as developers (I mean your company), choose this approach?
- In our opinion, the material design combines the principles that make it possible to make a very user-friendly interface, aimed not only at users with perfect vision and hearing, but also, for example, at visually impaired people. Those. material design allows you to convey the convenience and meaning of the application.
Comparing the material design with all other approaches, for example, with the philosophy that iOS, or Metro-UI, which is widely used among Windows applications, now professes, we decided that the material design is the best that is on the market now.
- In addition to the opportunity you mentioned to reveal the meaning of the application, what other advantages does this concept have for an abstract developer?
- For the abstract developer, there are a lot of advantages here.
First, the material design is a concept that relies on the simple idea that modern technologies, in particular, modern hardware and software, can provide a very responsive, lively and user-friendly interface, without requiring any strong design skills from the developer. The concept itself turned out to be very mature, it immediately gives a high start, even if you have recently programmed and in design it is not enough that you understand. In other words, the developer, if he understands the material design approach, accepts it and tries to follow it, immediately receives a very high level of appearance of his application.
- Is the concept difficult to understand? Doesn’t the distribution of the concept prevent the abundance of documentation issued by Google at the same time by material design?
- I do not think. The documentation seemed to me well structured and quite accessible explaining the essence of the concept. I did not find dubious moments - everything is extremely simple.
Naturally, any developer who has his baggage of experience has a moment when he simply does not really want to accept something new (this is characteristic of human nature). But this is probably not a problem of the philosophy of material design, but a step in the study. We, as developers, need to always be open to everything new, because such is the nature of our industry.
- Is it possible to say that the concept of material design is focused only on applications with a simple interface (or, on the contrary, only on interfaces overloaded with information)? Or are the ideas embodied in it “universal”?
- I would not say that the material design has a certain specialization. In particular, material design, like any other user interface concept, does not tell you how to cram a lot of elements onto a small screen or how to organically present few elements on a large screen. These are questions not of a design approach, but of problems that are solved during the creation of an application by the developer, designer and designer. Unfortunately, there are no universal solutions and there can not be.
Instead, the material design tells you how the application screen should respond to a specific user request.
- How much does Google insist on introducing the concept in applications, in particular, for Android?
- Material design - a thing completely voluntary. Google behaves completely differently than Apple did before (Apple’s policy - if your application interface is not built according to guidelines, it is not allowed in iTunes; you can jump out of your pants, but the interface will have to be done according to their rules). The Google developers simply released the concept and did not even say that third-party developers should follow it. They simply presented a cool idea with documentation and examples, and at the same time the code that implements it, and the supporting libraries. And, frankly, I am very glad that the material design saw the light, and that we have the opportunity to use it. This is actually a wonderful design complex.
- How seriously has the concept won the market in the 2 years that have passed since its introduction?
- Unfortunately, I can not give quantitative estimates. But according to my feelings, the influence of material design is more than noticeable.
First, Google itself moved in all its Android applications to the material design, i.e. Google follows its own trend.
Secondly, all major players in the market for Android applications are trying to switch to material design. About half of the applications that I regularly use on my smartphone have already moved to material design to one degree or another.
- Does the transition take place on all platforms or only on certain ones?
- The transition is noticeable only in Android applications.
Here you need to separate the material design, which exists in Android, and the material design, as a concept that exists on other platforms (web, iOS and other devices). Purely technologically material design for Android is implemented very simply, since the concept is supported by Google and the community. In addition, there are libraries that provide support for the material design on platforms below 5.0. In other words, on Android, support for material design is close to perfect (although I have a whole list of flaws that Google could fix).
With other platforms more difficult. If resources appear for the web, for example, Material Up , which contains solutions and snippets for implementing material design on the site, then under iOS it’s almost impossible to provide support. Honestly, we tried to drag the material design to our iOS application, which is currently under development. But we did not succeed. The approach that Apple has implemented is not compatible with material design. As a result, due to the complexity of the implementation, we had to abandon a very large number of things, starting with the banal Action button and ending with a beautiful transition animation.
- Ie In fact, the global unification of the appearance of applications due to the material design does not work?
- While I do not see her. Material design is now a very strong story on Android, but there is no talk about globalization.
- Do all material design implementations succeed?
- Unfortunately no. Not all developers adequately evaluate and accept the spirit of material design. There is no need to go far for examples: in the latest update of the Twitter Android application from the material design, only the action button is implemented. More material design in the application there.
Similar examples show that people are trying to follow the “fashionable chip”, dragging 5% of the concept without understanding the meaning of the idea, and think that they have put a tick in front of the material design. But actually it is not.
- Can you talk about the most common mistakes in the implementation of material design, allowed by developers?
- The most common mistake is to assume that the material design ends with an action button. A number of developers (I think there are a lot of them) simply do not understand the principles of the concept. They consider that it is possible to limit oneself to some such small elements, with the introduction of which their application will be in the material design. But this is not true. Material design is not about buttons with shadow. This concept describes the entire interface, tries to bring it closer to the real world, forcing its individual elements to behave as in the real world. In addition, the material design is sharpened for visual assistance to the user in the perception of the application. Both the animation and the approach of perceiving each layer as a kind of material are all aimed at improving and facilitating user interaction with the application.
- Are there many such “unsuccessful” examples?
- I know a few companies that believe that such a realization of material design can be limited. Twitter is definitely not the only example, there are plenty of such applications.
- You mentioned that even in the implementation of support for the material design for Android there are things that I would like to correct. Can you name the most obvious moments?
- It is mainly about supporting the material design in Android up to 5.0.
In particular, one of the principles of material design is that any movement in an application should deliver some meaning (motion provides meaning). The most commonplace example is transition animation. Let's say in the messenger application you want to animate to show the transition from the list of contacts or chats to a specific chat (show that your card opens and turns into chat). And you use the animation of moving the user's avatars from the contact list to the header element of the chat. The animation there is great, but you can only implement it for Android 5 and higher, because under Android 4, no compatibility libraries will help.
Another example is the ripple effect, which provides an animated button response to pressing (a wave spreads; it looks very nice and gives the user the feeling that he really pressed the button). In the standard compatibility library this effect is absent, i.e. you have to go to github and see what indie developers have and if there is any implementation for Android 4 at all. Implementations are usually found, but they are not perfect and are not used by Google itself, which, of course, adds a spoonful of tar to the barrel honey material design.
- With such difficulties, does it make sense to pull the elements of material design into previous versions of the system? Maybe you should give up their support in general?
- Unfortunately, it still has, if uniformity of the interface is important to you.
Of course, we would most like to abandon Android 4 (we support 4.03, and there are enough of our own problems, not all of which are easily solved). But, unfortunately, 65% of our users still use Android 4. And since we are trying to use a beautiful interface, we are trying to drag everything that is possible to the 4th version.
- Does Google itself develop development tools for material design?
- Yes, and quite active. Constantly there are updates to the library compatibility for the material design. So one cannot say that they do not do this.
- Do you think it makes sense to transfer an application to a material design, which is not built within the framework of this concept and is being successfully sold?
- This is not a question for me, but for a business. The owner of the product (the one who pays for the application) must answer it, and he is unlikely to need my opinion. But personally, I would not do that. First of all, because if your application is not in material design, it will be difficult to remake it in material design. In fact, you will need to redo the interface. The concept dictates certain things, and your existing screens may not fit into the material design scheme. Naturally, reworking an application is always a certain risk, and I would not take it. But I know successful examples of how people rebuilt their applications in a fairly short time and benefited from it.
- And in your experience, how do end users react to material design?
- Within the framework of our application, design rather regularly calls the very “Wow” that we wanted to achieve.
In general, at one of the previous jobs I was taught a simple principle: it is very difficult to sell a working application that looks disgusting. But it's easy enough to sell an application that doesn’t work well, but it looks great. And I can say that this is true. Those. design, it is relatively easy for you to achieve a positive user response, even if everything is not working very well.
Thus, the concept, which, when properly applied, causes positive emotions to the end user, is not yet so easy to implement. Perhaps the cause will contribute to the efforts of Google and the community to support the material design, or successful ideas will have to give way to a more conservative approach until the natural change of Android versions of the vast majority of users (when compatibility problems with Android 4, described by a specialist, go to the background). But, despite the difficulties, for new applications now material design may well give a kind of “starting point” when building the interface.
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Useful links:
1. About Google's Material Design
2. More practical details in the report of Vladimir at the conference Mobius 2016 (June 4)
3. Report on UX from Android GDE Wiebe Elsinga to Mobius 2016
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/283230/
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