Material-UI

Raised as a usability problem by 26 people on Hacker News over 13 years (2014–2026), in 15 threads.

People raised many different problems with Material-UI, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 25 complaints

Material design makes navigating Google Cloud and related tools unreasonably effortful2026-04-12
Toolkit design choices driven by analytics produce a poor interface overall2026-01-04
Calling it the worst UI, with no specific problem described2026-01-04
Carousel back button goes to next section; section clicks jank and headings clip text2024-12-18
Flat design is confusing for most people to use2023-07-12
Text fields don't look like text fields, so people can't tell they are inputs; low contrast throughout2020-12-09
Default Material styling is hard to customize because too much must be changed2020-06-14
Takes a lot of time to figure out how to customize2020-05-31
Dashboard performs slowly on mobile devices2018-06-23
Icon next to each category doesn't move with the category name when scrolling in Firefox2018-06-22
Flat, dull design makes it hard to find what's needed next2018-06-22
White text on bright yellow-orange and thin gray fonts are hard to read2018-06-22
Oversized elements on mobile let lists show only about two items per screen2018-06-22
Hard to find functions; hover-only actions are hard to discover, especially by keyboard2018-05-18
Scrolling feels slow and janky on mobile because it is hijacked2018-02-12
Styles passed as objects and theme must be fetched from context, which is painful2016-12-16
Components render an unusable mix of HTML and styling when JavaScript is off2016-09-20
Toggle responses lag when pressing ON and OFF on Android2015-07-21
Radio buttons and checkboxes are painful to use2014-11-10
Clicking demo links in the side menu does nothing in Firefox2014-11-10
Clicking menu items in the demo sidebar does nothing, other than the first demo2014-11-10
First three buttons are hidden until hovered, so users can't see them on mobile2014-11-10
Page renders incorrectly with unreadable white-on-white text and overlapping sections2014-11-10
Completely unusable on iPhone2014-11-10
The UI does not feel intuitive to the commenter2014-11-09