The mechanism here is that whatever esthetic and psychological principles are in play, an interface must also present the needed info and functionality. Craigslist and HN do that in a more-or-less bullshit free way. UX designers can get caught up in other concerns.

In fact there is a systematic bias: since we know that users don't like too much information, UX pros will want to hide info and functionality. But since no one likes boring designs, they also want to add cooling-looking (i.e. distracting) stuff.

... which, after you learn how to use them, often work much faster than the alternatives.

There are anecdotes a-plenty here like our local (tiny) bank who held out replacing their terminal based with their Windows version because in tests the keyboard based, archaic, every-on-one-screen application was far more productive than the new one and this particular application is only to be used by seniors in this bank who, because of the size, are not replaced / added very often. The Windows version, although not even that well designed, has been created to be faster to learn for new employees and the screens have been designed to be aesthetically pleasing and therefor sparsely layed out over many more pages.

The old staff hates it, the new staff (not very many) is just used to this kind of easy to learn, nothing to master kind of thing.

They don't have to be exclusive though; what happened to the 'expert mode' in apps/applications? That button you ram if you are an expert and suddenly 100 screens are packed into one, keyboard navigation is switched on and I can do my work much faster than clicking HUGE easy to learn, text heavy buttons?

In a throw-away society, all this interaction design makes sense; no-one is at a job long enough to really get into software and you don't get through the trial period if you don't learn using it fast enough. In that regard you need big empty pages with videos explaining what everything does and a boned out interaction process that has been carefully thought out.

I think we need that if the budget is there, but I think we need the expert mode as well and that, as far as I have seen in my life time, (interaction) designers are not very good at packing dense nor is it needed; if you are an 'expert', you'll cope (or don't care in some cases) about the (interaction) design.

And frankly the mouse, and more recently touch screens, seems to have made interface designers ignore the value of haptic feedback.

If only there was room for a UX person as well. Let them do the 'Sprint 0' before someone even touches a computer.

This has been true in recent years with the trendy but awful design. It's not just the typography. The obsession with flat design and giving up all the distinctiveness and affordances of other styles might even be worse.

It's also been going on for a long time with assuming if Google says it in its guidelines for webmasters then it must be good, as opposed to being good for Google's search engine.

It's even going on with software, specifically the various libraries and tools these organisations produce. Some of those libraries and tools are competently executed, but few are as remarkable or transformative as the hero worship might suggest.

This culture of emulation naturally leads to the kind of bland, homogeneous, poorly conceived work that is all too prevalent in our industry today. How could it not?

Ironically, I was just reading another HN post about a jobs board for older geeks, and the related discussion about the endemic problem with ageism in our industry. What we are talking about in this discussion is literally what happens when you hire a bunch of very young, very inexperienced, very untrained people, given them very snazzy hardware for their very good eyesight and their very dexterous hands to work with, give them effectively unlimited resources but very limited accountability and management, and leave them to run the show.

Anyone who wants to do better certainly can do it, just by studying relevant fields like graphic design and usability and by acquiring the necessary skill and experience (or, for businesses, by hiring people like that). But unsurprisingly, the people who are willing to go against the grain tend to be those who have been around for long enough to have other ideas and to have seen the same sorts of mistakes made before, and who wants to listen to them when you can go watch someone from the Apple team wax lyrical about their new barely legible font, someone from the React team misunderstanding basic MVC, or someone from Google who has never run a small business web site in their life telling everyone what makes good quality content?

More so than that, looking at website design from a monetary perspective: It's fast, cheap, and easy. It takes alot less time to put together a sleek modern website that utilizes the flat but nifty new CSS3 features than sitting down at the drawing board and creating something truly beautiful... which, when you're done, may or may not turn out how you dreamed. With websites in high demand, it shouldn't be any wonder than a typical but FAST-and-CHEAP-to-produce site will win out for the majority of cases.

That said, it's about nuances... In the end, I find that starting text only, and laying things out in a text editor (like an ansi menu screen) is a pretty good place to start... If you can't fit it on an ansi screen 80x25 for desktop and 40x50 for mobile, then you need to adjust your workflow to be simpler.

You don't need everything on one screen with magic scrolling effects... by the same note, if it's a simple form, you don't need to make it a wizard across six screens either.

Problems with Material Design include:

    - overly bright/saturated colors
    - too much animation
    - obnoxious easings
    - an overly dry look -- kind of like formal stationary or plastic
    - centered text and content at the tops of pages (I don't know if the specification encourages this, but it's become more common)
    - bad usability with forms. A text input should be a box, not a line, and it doesn't need to distract users with animation when clicking on the input.

Animation, if it doesn't detract, or actually adds to the experience, sure, but agreed, some of it is superfluous.

Easings, that goes with the animations.

The dry/stationary look, I think is intentional, and I like it.

Centered text/content is arguable, I think it depends on the form and can vary.

As to the text inputs being lines, I actually prefer the material way, it's closer to what you'd see on paper forms... it's less intuitive compared to what we're used to on a computer, less so when you compare to many paper forms. The boxing that you get in say Bootstrap, by comparison I find a little more distracting than the placeholder->label animation you get, which is similar, but different to a paper form... and works exceedingly well for phones/tablets, though less impressive on a desktop, but that leaves room for additional details.

The docs say:

"Material takes cues from contemporary architecture, road signs, pavement marking tape, and athletic courts. Color should be unexpected and vibrant."

Things like pavement marking tape, road signs, and athletic courts are not aesthetically-pleasing models of design, and it shows in the final result.

Recommended colors like #e91e63 and #ff5722 look terrible on many monitors. Looking away from the monitor leaves a reverse impression of the color in my vision.

These recommended color schemes are distractingly unpleasant: https://material.google.com/style/color.html#color-color-sch...

Many sites these days don't consider that some people get disoriented by animation. If I'm trying to read an article, and parts of the page are animating with parallax effect or growing/shrinking, it pulls my attention away from the content. I don't want components to flip over, bounce, or use other "cute" easings. I sometimes stop using websites just because of that.

> Centered text/content is arguable, I think it depends on the form and can vary.

Centered text is the Comic Sans of page layout. It's one of the tools that people who don't know about design reach for first. Centered text should only be used extremely sparingly, so that the viewer doesn't really notice it. Lately, centered text is becoming the focal point of web pages. Some sites are even creating "pyramids" of focus at the tops of pages, using centered text with a user profile picture on top. It looks really bad.

> As to the text inputs being lines, I actually prefer the material way, it's closer to what you'd see on paper forms

A web page is not paper, because you can't "write" anywhere on a webpage. It should be clear where one can enter text -- a line does not communicate that well.

Also, having the line animate when clicked on does nothing useful except distract. When I click on an input, I will know that it's focused by the existence of a cursor in the text area.

The end result is that multiple areas of a page are animating at the same time. The interfaces become confusing, because animation says "look at this part of the page", but multiple areas are animating without coherent reason.

Meetup.com's new app and color scheme is a recent example of the serious problems with Material Design. Even my group's members are complaining about it.

Basically, Material Design has a very strong personality, and it's the kind of personality that many people are not compatible with. In my opinion, it might be okay for a niche product, but is not a good choice for websites aimed at large audiences.

I'm afraid this is probably the main reason flat design caught on. It's achievable by developers with little design background, and can be implemented with little more than a bit of boilerplate from some CSS framework for a web site or the equivalent in a UI builder for an app. No need to hire anyone with digital artwork skills or experience designing more complicated UIs, and no need to prepare and serve the associated assets as part of your site/app.

Unfortunately, from a usability and accessibility point of view, current trends in design and typography are still objectively awful in various ways, and from a brand distinctiveness point of view, it's still a severely limited style to work within. There's an (actually quite reasonable) argument that a lot of designers and marketers who promote branding aren't generating particularly good returns until you get to large, well established, well known businesses anyway, but the usability and accessibility flaws hurt everyone.

I think these incremental steps are good, but it's going to take the equivalent of the Bauhaus to solve this problem. You need a strong foundational movement to anchor people's work. You're right that the problems have been solved, but they aren't being upheld very well.

There is something to be said from experience as an ansi artist and a sysop in the bad old days before the web.

First time users are probably what you focus on, the rest just has to be a tad better than the competitors. First time users need to be convinced by pretty design and a super simple linear workflow that solves just one problem.

Power users couldn't care less about design (SAP is still alive). They love it feature packed and want to access as many options as possible with few clicks. The extremes are icons without labels, color coded shortcuts on every keyboard key¹ or command line interfaces.

¹Avid-Keyboard for Video editing: http://www.drted.com/IMG_1225.JPG color coding in general is mostly ugly, but helpful.

edit: but in the end there is just a lot of bad design, that at best makes things pretty, but often not more useful.

It's old, but still useful.