Material Innovation

I'm calling Google's Material Design the most important development in the IT industry this year. It wasn't noticed when announced a few months ago and only now, when the first Android 5 devices start appearing, as well as the first wave of upgrades of the most popular Android applications is rolling out, the world starts realizing how big this change has been.

Forbes has a very good article by Gordon Kelly, comparing iOS8 vs Android 5. He writes:

Comparing the iOS 8 and Android 5.0 Lollipop is a shock, because for the first time in Android history it has become more design focused than iOS. The ugly duckling is finally a swan. Its design is both visual, instructional and altogether more ambitious.

Beating iOS was the bar set extremely high. But Google, with its perseverance, jumped it. With a style. Leaving the leader behind.

But the two are still charging ahead with unparalleled investments in user experience. Desktops have started becoming less and less useful, both MacOS and Windows. I have this fantastic Lenovo Yoga laptop, probably the finest hardware computer ever built. But the Windows experience is far, far from what my phone delivers today. I'm finding myself turning to my phone to do things faster, even at my desk in the office. Tasks like browsing through the news stream (thank you Feedly!) or through  the large number of unread group emails (thank you Gmail!) are extremely efficient on the phone.

The problem with MacOS and Windows lies not in the operating systems themselves. After all they have become just environments hosting our Web browsers. The problem is in the way so called "responsive" web pages are handled. Today a "responsive" site detects the browser and the environment and adapts the content: to a phone, to a tablet, to a laptop or to a desktop. But it becomes complete unresponsive to the fact I am folding my Yoga out from a keyboard / laptop configuration to a tablet configuration. During this operation, the web site should morph from a desktop - oriented to a tablet - oriented appearance. But it does not. Also it would not hurt if the touch - enabled Windows 8.1 detected a finger and offered a magnified link preview. Today operating a 12" Full-HD touch display with a blunt finger is simply not possible. The stylus helps but the software could certainly do better.

The gap between Android and iOS widens and even more frighteningly it does so between the two and the rest. Material Design is the coronation of the mobile-first strategy and the lesson of innovation applied to the most critical connection: the human - machine connection.