So true. People seem to forget that the reason we went with fake 3d UI in the first place was because people were having trouble with the previously-obtaining flat design. For a while, there was a nice simple visual grammar that told you what was editable, what was functional, and what was structural. Now I feel like we're falling back in the days of early Sierra videogames where some puzzles just required you to keep clicking around the screen until you found the invisible path. Skeumorphism was out of control but the trend has gone too far in the opposite direction, to the point where 'beautiful' has been turned into an empty marketing buzzword - it's now a synonym for obscurantists minimalism.

Exactly...I don't understand it :(

The new Azure portal looks very similar and it's borderline unusable. Unless I'm just resistant to change and will eventually warm up to it but it seems to violate a lot of fundamental design principles.

Kinda of topic but from the PoV of a third-party developper who had to test a lot of workflows in this new Azure portal: it's indeed a nightmare. Why do I have to click so many times and watch so many panel opening/closing animations before getting to basic features?

Also closing 5 panels before opening a new one feels like a huge waste of time.

I can assure you, it's not just you. To me, this is more of an artistic style than a design. A designer needs to communicate usability to the user. You need to know what's a button and what's not. You need to know the borders. And you need to be able to look at the interface without it causing undue strain (this is the part that google got wrong- bright colors are an easy way to make something look fresh but they increase eye strain.)

The impact isn't so bad, though because once you get past this style into an app you're looking at a mostly white screen with color for the buttons and the buttons are well placed in standard places most of the time so you can know they are buttons.

Exactly. This style just screams Windows 8 MS Surface design, and it's popping up all over. I think designers are having trouble blending "touchable" with "informative". The emphasis seems to be on touchable from the ground up now.

That's inspired by Windows Metro, not Material Design. In fact Material Design was created partly as a reaction against that style of design.

This is not material design.

Also material design is not a safe guard for implementing crap user interfaces. In this case, if you decide to have moving tiles that disorientate the user and think 'well its material design', no that's actually just poor design.

I actually like that homepage. It seems like a nice alternative to tabs, especially if they put useful information in the collapsed tiles (essentially becoming Windows Live Tiles or whatever they're called).

It might look kind of cool at first, but it puts additional barriers in between the user and actually doing something useful like entering data in a form, booking a flight, etc.

For example, if I haven't been to the site before, I might have to explore the interface a bit before I get to the part of the interface I want. Clicking on those tiles makes things shift and bounce around, the content portion of the screen constantly moves left to right.

Way too much difficulty for doing something so simple.

Designs should be visually appeasing, but not at the expense of ease of use or ease of understanding.

That site is very clean, readable, understandable and (it seems) perfectly usable.

The contrast of the blue text(62a9e3) in the dropdown menu against the pure white background fails all WCAG guidelines. So it is not perfectly usable.

Do you have a link to that guideline? I know there are a bunch about allowing users to override whatever the webdesigner specifies, and about having sensible contrast.

WCAG 2.0 level AA requires a contrast ratio of 4.5:1 for normal text (14 point and bold or larger) and 3:1 for large text (18 point or larger). Level AAA requires a contrast ratio of 7:1 for normal text and 4.5:1 for large text.

http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/

http://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/

It's better than the current setup. But there are still some oddball things in there.

For example: why is that credit card ad hanging off the center tile like that? Why isn't it shaped like the other tiles?

There is something about the search form I can't put my finger on - not enough contrast or dimensionality? Anyway, it didn't jump out as a "put your details here and press search" action, and my eyes kinda glossed over it while looking over the page.

Woah, it's like a mashup of the old site and Windows 8 live tiles...