And generally have really awful experiences on both desktop and mobile.
On desktop there is tons of wasted space, key actions are generally hidden behind pointless hidden menus or silly + buttons that do multiple things even though there's loads of space to fit multiple buttons. Google Drive, Sheets, etc. are total jokes now. And I personally find Google play music is an incredibly bad user experience now for my habits. I like listening to my thumbs up playlist (unnecessarily hidden behind a slide out menu) and I like seeing my shuffle playlist (hidden behind a button that opens an idiotic floating modal).
On mobile, everything is too spaced out so you can only see 5 out of the 50 things you might need to actually see. A perfect example is the calendar which is an unusable joke compared to the old one. Another good example is the new clock app where the alarms only show 3, and the timers are bizarrely stacked with only a tiny indicator showing there are multiple timers running.
Material is a tablet design paradigm masquerading as a total solution.
I went to go add a new spreadsheet to Google Sheets and it took me at least thirty seconds to find the big + button in the bottom right. It makes sense (sort of) on my phone where my eyes can see the whole screen but on a monitor I literally had to scan the whole page before finding the button (the bottom right corner is the last place I would look for something like that!)
Who knows what they were thinking when they thought that putting it down there would be a good idea.
I personally have zero respect for Material, I think it's a complete joke. Their previous redesign, as fractured as it was, was better thought out than this not-at-all-responsive 'responsive' design.
I don't actually like the animations either, quite a few are really, really bad. Fucking idiotic in fact, and I'm not saying that lightly.
The click/tap ones are the worst offenders. Why is the animation of the button dependant on where I click the button? Because it's an uneven animation my mind immediately gets drawn to it and thinks "Woah, what just happened there, did something go wrong? What was that".
And so after having done a simple action I spend a second or two with my mind replaying what just happened to try and figure out if something's wrong or not. And it still happens today, even though I know about it and I use several interfaces with Material design extensively. Because it's not consistent.
It's literally the opposite of what an animation should be. It's incredibly intrusive and unsettling instead of being subtle but reassuring you that your desired action happened.
I have to agree-MD isn't "off" by a whole lot but just enough to hinder the user experience. In particular, headers and topbars are oversized beyond what's reasonable, margins are excessive in content elements, and ironically this combination makes interfaces feel very boxed-in AND with poor data density on top of that...
On desktop there is tons of wasted space, key actions are generally hidden behind pointless hidden menus or silly + buttons that do multiple things even though there's loads of space to fit multiple buttons. Google Drive, Sheets, etc. are total jokes now. And I personally find Google play music is an incredibly bad user experience now for my habits. I like listening to my thumbs up playlist (unnecessarily hidden behind a slide out menu) and I like seeing my shuffle playlist (hidden behind a button that opens an idiotic floating modal).
On mobile, everything is too spaced out so you can only see 5 out of the 50 things you might need to actually see. A perfect example is the calendar which is an unusable joke compared to the old one. Another good example is the new clock app where the alarms only show 3, and the timers are bizarrely stacked with only a tiny indicator showing there are multiple timers running.
Material is a tablet design paradigm masquerading as a total solution.