In contrast, I'm so so happy that UX has largely settled on "this works and people know it" researched best practices. We don't need to be reinventing the steering wheel or AC controls for no reason (looking at you, Tesla).
The 90s and early 2000s were a hellscape of design nightmares between geocities, MySpace, iframes, and everyone and their grandma trying out new designs. 99% of it was trash. The bog standard website doesn't have to be someone's art project anymore, and that's a great thing for usability.
UX isn't stagnant, it's just matured since its infancy. (edit: for example, consider Google's material vs Apple's design systems, where they agree or disagree, even though they are both pretty mature by now. What should a primary call to action look like so it's obvious? How should you navigate a multi layered app? How should notifications work? Etc. Still a lot of interesting problems, they're just more nuanced now. Or look at some of the best selling design apps with complex features and UIs, they are innovating plenty. Or dashboards. Or DevEx stuff. Lots of fun new developments out there, even though some of the older problems have been satisfactorily solved!)
Material is mature in the same way that a corpse or old cheese turns "mature". Mature, sure it is, but is it acceptable? I would say it's not.
Sometime after skeumorphic design started dying off, UX has gone in an extremely bad direction. UIs have dropped key affordances and visual cues in favour of oversimplified design elements. UI/UX designers started to optimise for juicing the maximum amount of money and attention out of users too - the focus on "calls to action" and notifications is one example. Features that are 10x force multipliers for users when used sparingly in designs, have been overused to the extent that they become cognitive burdens. Apps are getting redesigned on a whim, confusing users who cannot adjust.
UX designers are having fun with the new landscape, but users are not. It's time this is recognised, and designers start to pull more pages from Apple's design handbook, and not Google's.
> UIs have dropped key affordances and visual cues in favour of oversimplified design elements.
Definitely agree, it's not quite as bad in enterprise products, but consumer products definitely prioritize aesthetics and visual design over usability.
> UI/UX designers started to optimise for juicing the maximum amount of money and attention out of users too - the focus on "calls to action" and notifications is one example.
In my experience most of those user-hostile changes typically came from A/B testing and short-sighted product managers.
Good designers (and developers too) will push back when management asks them to implement dark patterns so they are certainly not blameless, but at least in my experience it's not quite accurate to say that these changes come from UI/UX designers.
Those tools are there to be used or abused... sadly. It goes both ways. Having these frameworks makes it a LOT easier for your average dev or low-skilled dev-designer hybrid (like me) to put together something quite a bit more usable than I would've been able to create a decade ago. It's a huge improvement from, say, WinForms controls with a bunch of human interaction guidelines. Most of the engineers and devs I've met are not good with UX and UI at all, and in that sense Material is a huge upgrade for them.
But yes, its ease of composition also facilitates dark patterns and the gamification of addiction, etc.
I don't know that is really Material's fault, though, or that iOS design guidelines would magically protect the user from user-hostile business decisions. Those are made long before questions of IA or "which UI widget do I use" come into play, popularized by evil advertising companies (yes, Google is one of them) and lootbox vendors and free-to-play-for-like-5-min-and-then-it-costs-a-limb pricing models.
FWIW, I'm not a diehard adherent of Material or anything. At work, I'm currently pushing for our company to NOT use Material for our iOS app, even though it'd be a lot more work, and even though I kinda like Material myself. It just doesn't seem like the right thing to force upon our iOS users.
That said though, for web especially, Material is a lot better than nothing at all, or vanilla Bootstrap for all but the simplest sites. Once you have to start designing custom data tables, autocomplete, chips, cards, etc., Material has put waaaaaaaaay more thought into them than your average team would be able to afford to. For small to medium businesses, it's a godsend... it's not usually a choice (for web) between Material and iOS design, it's just Material or some custom in-house thing that accounts for like 10% of the complexity. There are other web UI frameworks too, but not many are as feature-complete as Material.
If there were a similar framework from Apple, that isn't iOS/mobile-specific, I'd strongly consider that too (is there? did I just miss it?). Or even if you have specific examples of "Material says to do it this way, but Apple's way is better for the user because _____" I'd love to see those and learn.
And for Windows, ehhh... Microsoft gonna Microsoft, and the world will leave them behind. shrug
I remember jobs and gates being asked at a d8 conference in 2008 how they imagined desktops in 10/15 years.
Gates spoke about voice and motion as controls, while jobs argued that on desktop there wasn't much to change because customers were probably already used to things in certain way and any disruption without a net advantage was just not gonna happen.
He also said that the only chance for a ux change were mobile devices as they were a fresh start for everyone.
I write that off as the "magnetic aura" affect. When so many apps/pages are written the ones that have the closest UX to the UX the user already has are the ones that are going to be successful.
You can deviate only slightly from the existing 'critical mass' or risk not getting adpoted.
VR hardware is barely entering the stage where it's affordable, yet becoming more useful for mainstream tasks. It's far from being a bubble, let alone from bursting.
I feel like I've been hearing this since the Nintendo VirtualBoy, and then again with the failed VRML craze, and then again with Oculus, and then again with that leaping whale thing, and then again with the Microsoft and Google versions... yet fundamentally nothing has changed. It's glasses that project 3D images. So what? Who actually wants this stuff? The novelty wears off after a game or two, and aside from super niche industries (remote surgeries?) there's never been a convincing use case...
One hypothetical killer app for me is the ability to have unlimited displays arranged spatially (the last part is important - virtual desktops on normal displays just don’t work for me), as well as visualisation of complex system states in a way that can make use of our built-in spatial reasoning abilities. You need pretty dang dense VR displays for this, and the old stuff was nowhere close to being usable.
