Material Design: Philosophy and Practice

    2 years have passed since the developers of Google first introduced their concept of user interface design, called Material Design. We talked with Vladimir Ivanov, not just a fan and follower of the idea, but a man who has been working with Material Design in his own practice for more than a year about how far the practical application of this concept has gone and what Material Design is for ordinary developers today. application.



    - Good afternoon! 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, but at the moment I work in a company that releases the universal communication application Fonum . True, we are still quite young: we only have an application for Android, and while it is in some way lagging behind popular instant messengers. However, we have several innovative ideas, due to which we plan to quickly catch up with competitors.
    At the company, I lead the development of mobile applications, in particular, for Android.

    - Your application is built on the principles of material design, i.e. with the concept you come across at work?

    - Yes, we initially chose material design as the basis of the approach to the application as a whole. Those. We can say that Fonum fully embodies the ideas of material design. I literally live the last year with this concept, saturated with the spirit and letter of this approach.

    - Why did you, as developers (I mean your company), choose this particular approach?

    - In our opinion, material design combines principles that make it possible to create a very convenient interface, focused not only on users with perfect vision and hearing, but also, for example, on visually impaired people. Those. material design allows you to convey the convenience and meaning of the application.
    Comparing material design with all other approaches, for example, with the philosophy that iOS now professes, or Metro-UI, which is widely distributed among Windows applications, we decided that 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 for the abstract developer does this concept have?

    - For an abstract developer, there are a lot of advantages.
    Firstly, material design is a concept that is based on the simple idea that modern technologies, in particular, modern hardware and software, can provide a very responsive, lively and convenient 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 program not so long ago and there is not enough in the design that you understand. In other words, the developer, if he understands the material design approach, accepts it and tries to follow it, immediately gets a very high level of appearance of his application.

    - Is the concept difficult to understand? Is the abundance of documentation once released by Google on material design hindering the concept from spreading?

    “I don't think so.” The documentation seemed to me to be well structured and quite accessible explaining the essence of the concept. I did not find doubtful moments - everything is extremely simple.
    Naturally, any developer who has his own 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 more likely not a problem of the philosophy of material design, but a step in the study. As developers, we always need to be open to everything new, because this 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, conversely, only on interfaces overloaded with information)? Or are the ideas embedded in it “universal”?

    - I would not say that 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 big screen. These are not questions of a design approach, but tasks that a developer, designer, and uixer solve during the creation of an application. Unfortunately, there are no universal solutions here and cannot be.
    Instead, material design tells you how the application screen should respond to a specific user request.

    - How strongly does Google insist on introducing the concept in applications, in particular, for Android?

    - Material design is a completely voluntary thing. Google doesn’t behave at all like Apple did before (Apple 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). Google developers just 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 auxiliary libraries. And, frankly, I'm very glad that 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 conquered the market in 2 years since its introduction?

    - Unfortunately, I will not be able to give quantitative estimates. But according to my feelings, the influence of material design is more than noticeable.
    Firstly, Google itself has moved in all of its Android applications to material design, i.e. Google follows its own trend.
    Secondly, all the major players in the Android application market 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.

    - The transition occurs on all platforms or only on any specific?

    - The transition is noticeable only in applications for Android.
    Here you need to separate the material design that exists in Android, and material design, as a concept that exists on other platforms (web, iOS and other devices). Purely technological material design for Android is implemented very simply, because the concept is supported by Google and the community. In addition, there are libraries that provide support for material design on platforms below 5.0. In other words, on Android, material design support is close to perfect (although I have a list of flaws Google could fix).
    With other platforms it’s more difficult. If resources appear on the web, for example, Material Up, which collected solutions and snippets for implementing material design on the site, it’s almost impossible to provide support for iOS now. Honestly, we tried to drag material design into our iOS application, which is currently under development. But we didn’t succeed. Apple’s application approach is not compatible with material design. As a result, due to difficulties with 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.

    - I.e. essentially global unification of the appearance of applications due to material design does not work?

    - Until I see her. Material design is now a very strong story on Android, but globalization is out of the question.

    - Are all material design implementations successful?

    - Unfortunately no. Not all developers adequately evaluate and accept the spirit of material design. You don’t have to go far for examples: in the last update of the Twitter Android application from material design, only the action button is implemented. There is no more material design in the application.
    Such examples show that people are trying to follow the “fashion chip”, drag 5% from the concept, not understanding the meaning of the idea, and think that in this way they 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 made by developers?

    - The most common mistake is to consider that 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 believe that you can limit yourself to some such small elements, with the implementation of which their application will be in material design. But this is not true. Material design - not about buttons with a shadow. This concept describes the entire interface, trying to bring it closer to the real world, forcing its individual elements to behave like in the real world. In addition, material design is focused on visual assistance to the user in the perception of the application. Both the animation and the approach of perceiving each layer as a certain material - all this is aimed at improving and facilitating user interaction with the application.

    - How many similar “unsuccessful" examples?

    - I know several companies that believe that such a realization of material design can be limited. Twitter is definitely not the only example; there are enough such applications.

    - You mentioned that even in the implementation of material design support for Android there are things that I would like to fix. Can you name the most obvious points?

    - This is mainly about support for material design in Android up to 5.0.
    In particular, one of the principles of material design is that any movement in the application should provide some meaning (motion provides meaning). The most commonplace example is transition animation. Suppose, in the messenger application, you want to show an animated transition from the list of contacts or chats to a specific chat (show that you have a card open and turn into a chat). And you use the animation of moving the user's avatar from the contact list to the chat header element. The animation there is great, but you can only implement it for Android 5 and above, because under Android 4, no compatibility libraries will help.
    Another example is the ripple effect, which provides an animated reaction of a button to pressing (a wave breaks; it looks very nice and gives the user the feeling that he really pressed the button). There is no such effect in the standard compatibility library, i.e. you have to go to github and see what indie developers have, and is there any kind of implementation for Android 4. In general, implementations are usually found, but they are not perfect and are not used by Google itself, which, of course, adds a fly in the ointment honey material design.

    - With such difficulties, does it make sense to pull elements of material design into previous versions of the system? Maybe you should completely abandon their support?

    - Unfortunately, it has so far, if the uniformity of the interface is important for you.
    Of course, most of all we would like to abandon Android 4 (we support 4.03, and there are enough of our problems, not all of which are easily solved). But, unfortunately, 65% of our users still use Android 4. And since we try to use a beautiful interface, we try to drag everything that is possible in the 4th version.

    - Does Google itself develop material support tools?

    - Yes, and quite active. Updates on compatibility libraries for material design are constantly coming out. So it cannot be said that they are not doing this.

    - Do you think it makes sense to transfer to material design an application that is now built not within the framework of this concept and successfully sold?

    - This question is not for me, but for business. The owner of the product (the one who pays for the application) must answer it, and it is unlikely that he will 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, alteration of the application is always a certain risk, and I would not go for it. But I know successful examples of how people rebuilt their applications in a fairly short time and benefited from this.

    - And how, in your experience, how do end users react to material design?

    - As part of our application, the design regularly provokes the very “Wow” that we wanted to achieve.
    In general, at one of the previous places of work 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 looks great. And I can say that this is true. Those. By design, you can relatively easily achieve a positive user response, even if everything does not work very well.

    Thus, the concept that, when used correctly, evokes positive emotions in the end user, is not yet so easy to implement. Perhaps Google and the community to support material design will contribute to the cause, or successful ideas will have to give way to a more conservative approach until the natural change of Android versions for the vast majority of users (when the compatibility problems with Android 4, described by a specialist, go by the wayside). But, despite the difficulties, for new applications already now material design may well give a kind of “starting point” in the construction of the interface.

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    Useful links:
    1. About Google Material Design
    2.More practical details in Vladimir’s talk at Mobius 2016 (June 4th)
    3. Android GDE UX talk by Wiebe Elsinga at Mobius 2016

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