Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Material Design Color Tool

material.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 95 posts

Re: Material Design Color Tool

#41

Post by mattmanser »

duiker101 wrote: post #10
julius_set wrote: post #2

Imo Googles new material design is not impressive. It does however help developers who are not good designers build a cookie cutter app.

I don't think it's as much a design for designers but a design for users. It's a guideline that all apps can follow so that the user doesn't have to relearn every single app and is more likely to know where to find stuff. As far as aesthetics go it's not the greatest yes, but it doesn't have to be. Having a good looking foundation on which to base your app is great. If you really want it can always be innovated. Ther…

I think it's been a misfire precisely because it was bad for users.

They couldn't get buttons right! The one button to rule them all thing was a flop that even their own apps have ditched, the only place I still see it is in myfitnesspal (and it's super annoying). It's surprising you can launch what's supposed to be UI/UX guidelines and get buttons wrong.

It was obviously untested and had no basis in actual UX satisfaction. They had an unproven theory at what a good UX would be and presented it as fact. I think because of that, the Material guidelines should be regarded as irrelevant. They were at best a designer's bad guess at what a good UX is.

In my opinion, there's loads of other components in there that are bad, for example the side menu, the experience of all material apps on desktops, it's a bad UX.

I don't think you should follow their guidelines.

Re: Material Design Color Tool

#42

Post by mseebach »

jacquesm wrote: post #23
foldr wrote: post #14

"And the wheel," said the Captain, "What about this wheel thingy? It sounds a terribly interesting project." "Ah," said the marketing girl, "Well, we're having a little difficulty there." "Difficulty?" exclaimed Ford. "Difficulty? What do you mean, difficulty? It's the single simplest machine in the entire Universe!" The marketing girl soured him with a look. "Alright, Mr. Wiseguy," she said, "if you're so clever, yo…

HHGTTG. Excellent reference, if you're going to spend time on picking the 'right' colors rather than just any set of half decent colors and then move on you might miss out on that important little thing called functionality without which it really doesn't matter what color it will be. Once you're established and you're tuning the last 0.3% of the market that you might catch if only you used the 'right' colors you can…

Rational, practical people have always been quick to dismiss aesthetics in favour of functionality, but it turns out it's actually pretty important. People will use the ugly, functional thing if they have to, but they'll leave if they get a chance. I think this dynamic alone explains a large part of the success of a number of SaaS apps priced as is often advocated here to allow individual managers to buy it on a corporate credit card without going through procurement.

As an extreme worst-case scenario, consider post-war high-density architecture. With a few exceptions, they are various degrees of slum today, not because they lacked functionality (that came later when they were left to deteriorate), because anyone with the resources to left.

Back to software, I have had the pleasure of replacing a good number of ugly but functional line-of-business systems, and the eagerness with which users will adopt the new thing, almost entirely because it's pretty (it often doesn't much new for many users, the main improvements are on the backend and for power users), always catches me a bit off guard.

On the personal level, I've found that investing a bit of time up front in making a new thing pretty increases my personal level of happiness working on the thing, even if I end up changing entirely away from the original look as features evolve.

Re: Material Design Color Tool

#43

Post by Larrikin »

Illniyar wrote: post #25
cyberferret wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can look at it in much the same way that the early versions of Windows enabled programmers to build applications that looked exactly alike. In much the same vein, Material's "paper" concepts are designed to minimise confusion for lay users - i.e. "What does clicking the '+' button do?". Once you standardise the symbols and appearance of certain widgets, it removes the "have to think about it" barrier. You could a…

Well, frankly there are tons of apps where I have no idea what the + button do until I click it. Many times, it's not what I would think it would do.

How down the button and it'll say what it does.

Re: Material Design Color Tool

#45

Post by jacquesm »

mseebach wrote: post #42
jacquesm wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HHGTTG. Excellent reference, if you're going to spend time on picking the 'right' colors rather than just any set of half decent colors and then move on you might miss out on that important little thing called functionality without which it really doesn't matter what color it will be. Once you're established and you're tuning the last 0.3% of the market that you might catch if only you used the 'right' colors you can…

Rational, practical people have always been quick to dismiss aesthetics in favour of functionality, but it turns out it's actually pretty important. People will use the ugly, functional thing if they have to, but they'll leave if they get a chance. I think this dynamic alone explains a large part of the success of a number of SaaS apps priced as is often advocated here to allow individual managers to buy it on a corp…

I've seen the opposite as well: ugly looking terminal or DOS based but very productive software was replaced with spiffy looking windows or web based software that was slightly slower or unable to keep up with the type-ahead of the users and this led to huge disappointment.

I'm firmly believe if it doesn't work it doesn't matter how good it looks and if it works but looks bad that's better than the reverse.

Then once you've figured out what to build you can always make it look pretty.

Re: Material Design Color Tool

#46

Post by colmvp »

julius_set wrote: post #2

Imo Googles new material design is not impressive. It does however help developers who are not good designers build a cookie cutter app.

I think what's interesting is they canonized the bottom navigation (https://material.io/guidelines/components/bottom-navigation....), a notable move given that many popular Android apps have historically opted to design the navigation of their app around the navigation drawer(https://material.io/guidelines/patterns/navigation-drawer.ht...), a philosophy that made the Android platform UI a bit distinct from iOS.

Personally, I find a bottom navigation of primary functionality to be far more pleasing than having to tap twice. For example, on iOS Spotify was quite arduous to navigate when they tried simplifying the aesthetic by having all the navigation within side menus. Their later re-design to move content back into the bottom navigation was met with a lot of praise amongst users.

Re: Material Design Color Tool

#48

Post by lolive »

mseebach wrote: post #42
jacquesm wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HHGTTG. Excellent reference, if you're going to spend time on picking the 'right' colors rather than just any set of half decent colors and then move on you might miss out on that important little thing called functionality without which it really doesn't matter what color it will be. Once you're established and you're tuning the last 0.3% of the market that you might catch if only you used the 'right' colors you can…

Rational, practical people have always been quick to dismiss aesthetics in favour of functionality, but it turns out it's actually pretty important. People will use the ugly, functional thing if they have to, but they'll leave if they get a chance. I think this dynamic alone explains a large part of the success of a number of SaaS apps priced as is often advocated here to allow individual managers to buy it on a corp…

Would you buy WinGrep?

Re: Material Design Color Tool

#49

Post by pimlottc »

jacquesm wrote: post #23
foldr wrote: post #14

"And the wheel," said the Captain, "What about this wheel thingy? It sounds a terribly interesting project." "Ah," said the marketing girl, "Well, we're having a little difficulty there." "Difficulty?" exclaimed Ford. "Difficulty? What do you mean, difficulty? It's the single simplest machine in the entire Universe!" The marketing girl soured him with a look. "Alright, Mr. Wiseguy," she said, "if you're so clever, yo…

HHGTTG. Excellent reference, if you're going to spend time on picking the 'right' colors rather than just any set of half decent colors and then move on you might miss out on that important little thing called functionality without which it really doesn't matter what color it will be. Once you're established and you're tuning the last 0.3% of the market that you might catch if only you used the 'right' colors you can…

As a partially-colorblind person, I can attest there are quite a few developers who couldn't pick a decent set of colors to save their lives.

Re: Material Design Color Tool

#50

Post by nkkollaw »

jacquesm wrote: post #23
foldr wrote: post #14

"And the wheel," said the Captain, "What about this wheel thingy? It sounds a terribly interesting project." "Ah," said the marketing girl, "Well, we're having a little difficulty there." "Difficulty?" exclaimed Ford. "Difficulty? What do you mean, difficulty? It's the single simplest machine in the entire Universe!" The marketing girl soured him with a look. "Alright, Mr. Wiseguy," she said, "if you're so clever, yo…

HHGTTG. Excellent reference, if you're going to spend time on picking the 'right' colors rather than just any set of half decent colors and then move on you might miss out on that important little thing called functionality without which it really doesn't matter what color it will be. Once you're established and you're tuning the last 0.3% of the market that you might catch if only you used the 'right' colors you can…

Why must it be one or the other?

You're implying that if one uses the color tool, he's going to spend hours playing with it and forget about implementing important features. The tool will save you time instead of waste it, since you don't have to make up a color combination yourself, giving you more time for implementing stuff.

I also disagree than making an app look good will make it more appealing to only 0.3% of users. People are very design-oriented nowadays, and non-technical people will judge the quality and reliability of an app mostly by the way it looks. Personally, I _always_ try the better-looking app first, and if it works I stick with it and never even try the ugly one.

Post reply on HN