The Great Modern UI Debate Thread

[Ian S.]

The same is true of Metro. This is a really long video but the first 3 minutes give you some idea how much effort went into it. They had 60 designers working on it.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8xrWMRLecU

 

I don't really like material design, although many of it's principles are surprisingly close to, and almost certainly inspired by, Metro. The main thing that binds them is authenticity, which each strives for in slightly different ways. Material design uses subtle shadows to give the illusion of depth, where Metro achieves something similar through the panoramic design of the interface and the movement that goes with it.

 

I'm not a fan of gazillions of colours so I prefer Metro's consistency - a background, light or dark, and an accent colour. It's simple, it forces you to concentrate on presentation and it puts content first. I hate apps that don't conform to it, e.g. by using their own colours or with chrome, and I usually uninstall them pretty quickly. I also think that if you need to cut shapes out of paper and build a little wooden rig in a studio to look at the interaction of elements with light, you're not much of a digital designer and probably shouldn't be working on digital interfaces. Even something as basic as After Effects would allow you to do all that research digitally.

 

What concerns me is that with every new iteration, Microsoft move further and further from what makes Metro great. Look at Windows 10 Mobile, for example. The landing page exhibits absolutely nothing that could be described as "Metro". It leads with icons, typography isn't any kind of consideration and the panoramic interaction is thrown out in favour of forcing users to jump in and out of pages one at a time. It's awful and I don't like it at all. Imagine, instead, a Settings app that uses Metro principles to the max. Instead of a landing page with a list of icons and text, you'd straight away see all the settings for System, with headings for Devices and Network & Wireless trailing off the right edge of the screen, intuitively showing you how to proceed. It's one less screen to design and navigation is beautifully fluid, not the in and out rigmarole we have to put up with in W10 Mobile.

 

In abandoning the design language they spent so much time and effort creating, they are basically destroying the amazingly fluid touch experience of Windows Phone and Windows 8. They have all but completely screwed the pooch now. I'm sure they think that by aping Android they can win converts but what they fail to understand is that it works both ways - there is far more to entice WinPhone users across to Android than there is to encourage any happy Android user to switch to W10 Mobile. So by making Windows Mobile more like Android, they are far more likely to make it easier for unhappy WinPhone users (like me) to consider Android. In fact, even though I'm not necessarily a big fan of Material Design, it is streets ahead of anything Microsoft are doing with Windows 10 and, for the first time ever, the switch is actually very tempting for me.

 

 

However, the animations that come with Material design and iOS are much better than the ones that are included with Windows 10

[bluesman86]

Amazing video on Material Design:

 

Notice how they use bold beautiful colors and very fluid animations and care about details like button presses. Windows 10 does not and will be plain and bland with the white/black only style and a ton of random bars.

 

 

It is a great design language I think. I really like what Microsoft is doing with Windows 10, too. I don't think they're fully done evolving it yet, but they're getting there. 

 

Android 5.1 doesn't feel "done" yet, either. I have it running on my phone and I love it, but 4.4 had a much more solid and consistent feeling to it. Like all software, it's a work in progress.