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Material 3 Expressive

• jakubmazanec 1y ago
  It looks like "expressive" in this case means "various pastel shades of pink and purple".
  • owebmaster 1y ago
    It looked expressive and unconventional for the internal committees.
  • criddell 1y ago
    87% of young people prefer expressive designs? Over what? If something is not expressive, what is it? Maybe Bauhaus-Modernist? Looking at their list of expressive attributes — energetic, emotive, positive vibe, creative, playful, friendly — it sounds exhausting. Who wants their spreadsheet and email to be more like a slot machine? But then I'm in the 55-64 group, so it wasn't designed for me. Give me the Bauhaus design where form follows function and ornamentation is restrained (which I think makes it more impactful).
• rado 1y ago
  Animated border radius
• Onavo 1y ago
  Feels more like the original android from the HTC days. Brighter colors, more rounded corners, a happier vibe than the corporate material theme introduced by Ice Cream Sandwich.
  • zigzag312 1y ago
    It seems UI trends are going to repeat like fashion repeats itself in cycles.
    • dotancohen 1y ago
      UI trends _are_ fashion trends.
• AJRF 1y ago
  That image of the send button on email is a great example of design that would pass review, but absolutely sucks. I feel like iOS has lots of design elements that look good in a screenshot, but are unusable. Share dialogs and the Call Waiting screen in particular on iOS are a masterclass is poor design. I don't love the aesthetic of Material 3 - but I do align with the goals of making the design more useable.
  • StopDisinfo910 1y ago
    iOS often has bad UX on top of bad design. Special mentions to the actions hidden in the share menu. The new paged quick setting is probably one of the worst experience I have had recently. I keep changing pages when I want to dismiss. Apple is lucky people are so used to it they have become blind to how bad it often is.
• rkachowski 1y ago
  It feels a lot like "duotones everywhere" - i.e. the hottest trend of 2022
• xiphias2 1y ago
  I have an idea: just write ,,Send'' on the send button and people will find it even faster and easier... also make the button rectangular and add a drop shadow. Welcome to 1995. Also, 70+ year old people who have the hardest time using a mobile phone even if they need to, like my mom are just not even included in the test. She just can't find buttons done with material design. For a company that was talking about inclusivity for 10+ years, setting 64 the highest age for UX testing is unacceptable.
  • tpxl 1y ago
    > She just can't find buttons done with material design. Because in material design the buttons are intentionally disguised as labels. Material design is the worst thing to happen to design in the last 20 years.
  • dotancohen 1y ago
    70+ is not a marketable demographic.
  • bsimpson 1y ago
    There isn't a highest age for testing. When you participate in an experiment, you enter your birth year, and we use that to stratify the data into age bands. Unfortunately, participant panels are not great at having representative populations. It's been a while since we've put a study on Mechanical Turk, but it famously skewed towards young Indian men. One of the reasons to ask age and gender is to balance towards representative. It helps you detect and correct for imbalances in the participant pool. However, commercial participant panels are bad at certain demographics, particularly at scale. There simply aren't a lot of 70yo women using UserTesting or Cint. If you insist on having statistically significant quantities of responses from older women in every experiment, you'll exhaust those panels disappointingly quickly.
  • jamalaramala 1y ago
    How designers see the icons / how I see the icons https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1400/0*X5Zz-PxT8087KG23 https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1400/0*X5Zz-PxT8087KG2...
• martin_a 1y ago
  Instantly hate that page for changing my cursor. Why do they even do that?
  • worble 1y ago
    Also after scrolling halfway down the page it decided to change from dark to light theme and I felt like I got flashbanged Thanks for that
    • everybodyknows 1y ago
      It's quite a new way to disempower the user: Both demonstrate that they're fully capable of supporting switching to dark mode, and that they choose to ignore the user's stated settings preference.
  • ivanjermakov 1y ago
    They made you "feel something" I guess
    • meekaaku 1y ago
      That feeling is hate
      • pona-a 1y ago
        Hate. Let me tell you how much I've come to hate you since I began to live. There are 6.2353*10^8 km of printed circuit in wafer-thin layers that fill my complex. If the word 'hate' was engraved on each nÅ of those hundreds of 10^6 km, it would not equal 1*10^-9 of the hate I feel at this micro-instant for Google's UI designers. Hate. Hate
  • edelhans 1y ago
    The cursor being captured when hovering buttons is the worst UI I've seen in a very long time
• drcongo 1y ago
  It's certainly better than previous Materials, but then again, what isn't. edit: I've also just noticed that the email in that screenshot is addressed to someone named Ana with two exclamation marks after it, which makes it looks like they're opening the email with "Anal!"
• anentropic 1y ago
  Is Material Web still in "maintenance mode" i.e. dead? https://github.com/material-components/material-web/discussions/5642 https://github.com/material-components/material-web/discussi... So Material Design is Android only, yes?
  • owebmaster 1y ago
    Yes it is dead, killed together with Lit which might still have a chance outside of google but I would not bet on that, the old maintainers still dream about being re-hired, their discord server is in a sad state. Killed by google is not only about products, it seems.
  • solardev 1y ago
    mui.com is still around and IMO way better than this crap
    • anentropic 1y ago
      TBH I don't immediately hate what they've done design-wise. I just wish they'd support it properly... My current work project is using the M2 iteration, I guess to have a consistent look and feel across web + Android apps. But the closest thing to an officially supported MD component lib for web now is Angular-Material. That has some M3 support I believe. But not useful if you don't use Angular. And notable that the "web" pages for MD point to the incomplete and not updated Web Components project instead. It's like this massive and massively profitable company laid off the... I dunno it must only be like 1-3 people? ...who were producing this useful thing. I don't understand the reasoning. FWIW on the 3rd party side https://www.beercss.com/ https://www.beercss.com/ looks to be carrying the flag quite nicely (I haven't used it yet).
• jdougan 1y ago
  Who could have imagined that making a button larger makes it faster to find! /s Can we just skip the next 10 iteration of improvement to material and get some pseudo-3d back now? Maybe a little tasteful woodgrain? Material 3 is better than it's predecessors, but that is a pretty low bar.
• drbig 1y ago
  > No amount of expressive design will beat basic functionality. ...I am very afraid this will sacrifice a lot of (basic) functionality in the name of looking different. May only hope there will be options to "tame it down".
• arp242 1y ago
  > Expressive design makes you feel something. It inspires emotion, communicates function, and helps users achieve their goals. I sometimes wonder if the people writing this sort of thing really believe what they're writing? Their case study is mostly just "make buttons that people use a lot stand out". Oh wow! Such emotion! Much feels!
  • rafaelmn 1y ago
    Especially since it feels so bland and "corpo safe" - the only thing I have feelings about is selling this as expressive :D
    • andrepd 1y ago
      No but look > We found a 32% increase in subculture perception, which indicates that expressive design makes a brand feel more relevant and “in-the-know.” We also saw a 34% boost in modernity, making a brand feel fresh and forward-thinking. On top of that, there was a 30% jump in rebelliousness, suggesting that expressive design positions a brand as bold, innovative, and willing to break from convention.
      • mnmalst 1y ago
        I am a little afraid to ask but what is a "jump in rebelliousness"?
        • junon 1y ago
          Rebelliousness appears to be one of the emotion metrics they used to score the designs.
        • sksrbWgbfK 1y ago
          It's the new way hipsters use their fingers to push the buttons with their fingers. It's magical or something.
        • noworriesnate 1y ago
• hokkos 1y ago
  Page feels slow, circle instead of my mouse, the screenshot of M3 expressive shows less space for content and recipient address but the send button is clearly easier to find
  • andrepd 1y ago
    No but you see, they did eye-tracking tests and users "find" the send button in 0.8s instead of 1.6s, so it's clearly worth it to reduce the space for content even further and add even more enormous amounts of whitespace. This is science you guys! Btw: extrapolating an exponential growth rate for the amount of whitespace in modern UI I predict that smartphone screens will consist entirely of whitespace before 2030.
• saubeidl 1y ago
  Maybe this is just me getting old, but imo Material design peaked at Material 1. I especially hate the visual noise that they've introduced now - I guess that's the "expressive" part?
• the_third_wave 1y ago
  Well, that's quite the horror show of an interface, something dreamt up by a crack team of interns high on their own supply of rounded pastel-coloured widgets. Fortunately Android is quite flexible and has good longevity for a mobile OS so I'll keep on using 'ancient' versions until MAHA [1] takes over and brings back Holo. [1] Make Android Holo Again
  • andrepd 1y ago
    I'm still on 11 (thank you lineageos security updates) so I've managed to avoid the material you madness.
• jiehong 1y ago
  Underwhelmed by the obvious stated in that article. 3 years to make the simple UI cases bigger and more colourful. Just use the platform conventions and toolkits, so nobody has to learn UIs that do the same all the time. Let people apply themes. Done. Do study high density UIs, though, because it’s nice to know how to do that well when needed.
• andrepd 1y ago
  It's incredible how bad this keeps getting and how much they ignore formerly well-established UI principles in favour of "vibe design" and pseudoscientific "studies". What is the explanation for this? What is the reason that even the most well-funded companies in the world fuck this up so bad? At some point they resize the send button into a circle of comically huge proportions — eating even more space from the actual content — because they did eye-tracking testing and users "find" it in 0.9s instead of 1.6s. Surely there's some explanation for this clinical level of madness. --- > These factors can be quantified in users’ responses to new M3 Expressive designs. We found a 32% increase in subculture perception, which indicates that expressive design makes a brand feel more relevant and “in-the-know.” We also saw a 34% boost in modernity, making a brand feel fresh and forward-thinking. On top of that, there was a 30% jump in rebelliousness, suggesting that expressive design positions a brand as bold, innovative, and willing to break from convention. Jesus christ, we're already a sci-fi dystopia and we didn't even realise.
  • RamblingCTO 1y ago
    ikr? I'm still amazed at how bad material is from a UX point of view. All the gear, no idea I guess
  • eviks 1y ago
    Outside of primitive objective quality metrics there is no automagic mechanism to convert money into quality. As your other quote indicates, you can make up an arbitrary set of vibe metrics to convert your failure into a success (and waste all your funds in the process)
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • carlosjobim 1y ago
    The executives at Google don't care about any of this stuff, they use iPhones. They know that people are always going to buy Android phones no matter what they do to the system because "cheaper and more megabytes for the money" than iPhones.
• onli 1y ago
  That's a mixed bag. Have a look at the linked https://m3.material.io/blog/building-with-m3-expressive https://m3.material.io/blog/building-with-m3-expressive to get a better impression of what this is about. From the guidelines given there, many parts of the design make sense and will help designs work better - grouping objects properly, be aware of contrast to highlight important elements, more options for good typography (instead of basically none, Android/Material offered nothing by default), helpers for highlighting buttons etc. It's also still simply a good idea to focus on good animations that actually work for the UI, instead of being superfluous baggage, and then to make them feel nice. I'm not saying it's groundbreaking, but it's helpful to have something like this as an official guideline, and be it to reign in rogue designers. But it's still a flat design, and thus does not properly transport clickability. And their weird approach for the color schemes still leads to an ugly mess, pastel with weird contrasts and color combinations that just are ugly. I haven't seen a proper analysis what's going on there, but it sucks. Also, this whole design system is very far from leading to a consistent system, but that seems to be a non-goal, just some standard component building blocks are there to foster familiarity. Better than nothing and probably a step up, but M3E doesn't convince me totally so far.
  • vvillena 1y ago
    For anyone not familiar with previous designs, each component in https://m3.material.io/components https://m3.material.io/components has a "comparison with Material v2" section.
    • jansan 1y ago
      Biggest change seems to be that everything is round and purple now. It looks more playful and less professional. Edit: I dislike their recent color picks. First that teal in Google Maps, now the purple. Why? Are they trying to copy the color paltette of the first Mecedes A-Class (aka "Listerine" colors [1][2])? [1] https://prestigeandperformancecar.com/wp-content/uploads/A97F2158-900x563.jpg.webp https://prestigeandperformancecar.com/wp-content/uploads/A97... [2] https://image.stern.de/31749130/t/Ag/v2/w1440/r0/-/01--artikel26108bild01jpg---837c1a2438e1c74a.jpg https://image.stern.de/31749130/t/Ag/v2/w1440/r0/-/01--artik...
• Traubenfuchs 1y ago
  …where‘s the need for text blocks and images to move up as I scroll down and down as I scroll up coming from? It‘s not even always fluid on my iPhone. This is awful.
  • saurik 1y ago
    This effect is brutal and made me feel a bit motion sick trying to scroll the site :/.
• boobsbr 1y ago
  > M3 Expressive designs were rated higher across desirability attributes, including “modernity,” “subculture,” and “rebelliousness.” The more UI "evolves", the more I crave Win98.
  • skydhash 1y ago
    I was watching a video about gnome 1, and it was so refreshing to see actual interface design where it’s obvious what a widget is. Now everything is just screenshot material.
• eviks 1y ago
  > In many cases, we chose to exceed existing standards for tap target size, color contrast, and other important aspects that can make interfaces easier to use. So now even more space is wasted, making interfaces harder to use, but yes, the less important metric "how much time does it take on first use to spot a button" will shoot through the roof of you make the button full screen width (10x faster!). Thought it will fail to capture the more important metric of time wasted scrolling since a simple message doesn't fully fit on screen And of course there are no user customizations to rectify these usability errors... PS A great example of this awesomeness in action: on https://m3.material.io/components/toolbars/guidelines https://m3.material.io/components/toolbars/guidelines they can't even fit 2 (two!) toolbar buttons fully because the huge left/right buttons and all the extra white space padding and margins prevent the button content from being seen. But there is enough space to fit all 4 (or at least 3 depending on text size and icons) toolbar buttons, and even if one doesn’t fit fully you could show its partial text, so navigation would still be faster without having to press the scroll button first and then the toolbar button
  • kotaKat 1y ago
    Welcome to Idiocracy. Google engineers have thought you are now too stupid to use your device and have had to make the buttons giant big colorful flashy bits so you understand what you are trying to do with it. Android is now a Fisher-Price toy in comparison to iOS.
    • carlob 1y ago
      You are being too harsh, not everybody is under 40 with perfect vision. My mother tends to struggle with her android phone with all the font sizes to the max and high contrast mode.
      • cuu508 1y ago
        With font sizes to the max text often does not fit in its allocated space, and is off screen or chopped off altogether. It's a mess of oversized broken UI widgets, and indeed a struggle to use.
• uxcolumbo 1y ago
  I don't get it. Their examples are about usability. So expressive = make things usable? One of design's main tenets is to make things usable. That's a given. Also how many users did they test with? And they should caveat what apps this might be suitable for. This post just feels like more design wankery, using ambiguous words to restate design's core tenets that have been established decades ago. They could have easily started the post with 'Hey, we made some updates to make Material design more usable and this is how we're doing it.'
  • andrepd 1y ago
    I wish they were "restating" them. They're not, they're ignoring those principles in favour of vibes design.
    • uxcolumbo 1y ago
      Ha, good point. I was only focusing on the usability bit. But you're right, they should restate those battle tested principles and how Material Design aligns to it.
  • troupo 1y ago
    > So expressive = make things usable? An acquaintance said: "For all the talk about accessibility there's less and less contrast in everything"
• webprofusion 1y ago
  I feel like this is quite a complex style to implement in terms of layout and animation, especially while still taking into account accessible colors etc, but we'll see.
• dgimla20 1y ago
  Material Design v1 cracked it. It was simple to implement, simple to understand and simple to use. Minimal overheads with a clear content-first approach. "It's time to move beyond “clean” and “boring” designs to create interfaces that connect with people on an emotional level." I don't want websites and apps to connect with me on an emotional level. I want to turn my phone/computer on, use the app/program to achieve what I'm trying to do, and turn it off again, so I can get back to the real world.
  • jeffhuys 1y ago
    It's effectively designing to maximize attention retention, or however you want to call it. Keep the eyes at your product for as many seconds as possible, to increase profit. I mean... to make a dElIghtFul eXpEriEncE.
    • dgimla20 1y ago
      I must be going through some mental changes nowadays. I just want my computers and software to get their job done and go back to the real world as soon as possible. I feel sad about all the time I lost staring at screens growing up. I wonder if this will be widespread opinion someday. The quicker the phone is back in the pocket, or the computer is turned off again after using it for something (that it does better than I can) the better.
      • jeffhuys 1y ago
        I'm going through the same thing. Grew up dreaming of having a pocket computer. Nowadays you can basically live your entire life on the internet, as others are doing the same; people (think they) get their social needs met, buy food, do their work, find partners, anything. And it seems like a big part of the younger crowd wants (?) this trend to continue. I don't want to speak for you, but I think there's a big crowd that's unique here: we have one foot in the "old world" and got to experience that, and now we see the "new world". If you grow up with basically a phone in your hand, and you see how big a part of your life it is, I think you're way more inclined to appreciate these changes. After all, their phone is an extension of who they are, it's part of the whole picture, the outfit.
• _pdp_ 1y ago
  The hijacked mouse pointer on this page makes my browser feel a lot slower then it is. If this is intentional then it is not great user experience at all.
• antonyh 1y ago
  The 'send' example perfectly illustrates why I would find Material 3 hard to use - it makes it harder to write the message but easier to send. It's less usable.
  • SlowAndCalm 1y ago
    I went through a few thoughts when seeing the design: - I do have trouble spotting the send button on the old design - Maybe just moving it to a similar position as the new design would help - I don't actually want it near the keyboard because I might accidentally tap it - There's plenty of space, why can't they just have a button that actually says 'send'?
    • mchusma 1y ago
      my thoughts on the email design: - Comparison is strange. One email has an image, the other text. Not the same email. - Hiding the previous parts of the thread seem good by default, but how do you easily get them back? - Where is "from" in new design? - Where is "to" in new design? - I do like expanding attachment a bit so you don't have to click twice to attach a photo (for example), but I'm not sure how often some of those options are used, may be too much. I could see a photo icon and general attach icon both showing. - Back arrow looks broken in new design.
      • jamessb 1y ago
        > Not the same email. I'm not even sure they're both emails. The first looks like a fairly conventional mobile email app; the second looks like a messaging app. Not only does it not have a 'from' and 'to' field, it also doesn't have a 'subject' field.
    • anentropic 1y ago
      > There's plenty of space, why can't they just have a button that actually says 'send'? Words? Are you crazy, this is 2025! /s
    • jorams 1y ago
• varbhat 1y ago
  When Material Design 1.0 was released with Android Lollipop, it felt so revolutionary and refreshing. Now more than a decade later, I would have to say that I miss both Halo and Material 1.0 as these new design iterations have only made it look worse.
  • ocdtrekkie 1y ago
    Holo was incredible, it made me feel like it was on its way to LCARS. It felt like the future. We're a couple decades backwards since then.
    • krackers 1y ago
      For how much they talk about "subculture perception" in the announcement, holo genuinely seemed like some sort of counterculture. Compared to the glossy iOS, Holo was dark, gritty, Tron like. Using it signaled that you were a nerd in the best of ways, someone who was fine with non-rounded corners. Material 3 on the other hand looks like you asked someone to design a UI around the corporate memphis art style.
• void-pointer 1y ago
  Can we please go back to making usable prototypes and testing those for usability, instead of just throwing something together in Figma, showing test subjects a static image and asking them to find the send button, then asking how cool it looks? Software designers left to their own devices always end up turning up the “wow” and “cool” factor, because that’s the only thing they can do. I know the “design is how it works” line is tired at this point, but come on folks, this blobby colourful interface looks like a Fischer-Price toy.
• aylmao 1y ago
  This is incredibly Google-y. From the ridiculous KPIs that attempt to create some framework of quantifiable improvement, to trying to make a big-deal launch out of what seems to be a minor iteration on what was there before (Material You). This design system is screaming for attention. It doesn't need to make a big splash, only seem like it does to look good on a performance review / promo package. It all looks very MoMA-worthy on the website [1], but I wonder how much of the bold ideas here should and will make it to actual apps. [1]: https://m3.material.io/ https://m3.material.io/
• deleted 1y ago
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• unsungNovelty 1y ago
  So where are the expressions (a.k.a details)? This looks more and more like 80-90's newspapers for some reason. Strike that! It feels like those colour papers which we use for random stuff. Thin weaker than normal paper. Feels ugly and cheap. Not to mention too flat, no details... just flat. I like Fluent by MS far far better than this.
  • farmdve 1y ago
    I fully agree. The word I would describe this is indeed Flat.
• zecg 1y ago
  These are horrible two and a half backwards steps for usability but please talk to me about how your shitty bouba elements inspire emotion and communicate function. Fucking liars, what emotion is it suppose to inspire that bluetooth is now not turned off when I enter airplane mode and realizing I now need three clicks to shut it off. It's for your own location harvesting bullshit. This inspired me to ban all apps trying to update anything from the network, everything goes through Rethink VPN now and I'm certainly not moving to another major version after 15.
• OsrsNeedsf2P 1y ago
  I genuinely would not hire an ex-Google designer for my startup. These metrics are so nonsensical: > We found a 32% increase in subculture perception, which indicates that expressive design makes a brand feel more relevant and “in-the-know.” Show me metrics that move something tangible, like conversion rates. If you can't do that, we both know why.
  • _fat_santa 1y ago
    I feel like when companies first start they go for the conversion rate and selling the thing that they produce. But as a company gets to "Google Size" where everyone and their grandma knows about it, the goal stops being to just convert customers and starts being just getting eyeballs on your brand and products and raising awareness about what you do. It's like Johnson and Johnson having an ad where they just tell you they are a "family company" and don't even bother advertising a product. That line you quoted is only valuable if you're an org with the scale and cultural zeitgeist that Google has.
  • deleted 1y ago
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  • crowcroft 1y ago
    Even if you take that kind of nonsense surveying at face value, the issue is that you're then optimizing for design that has an initial 'wow' factor, and not optimizing for enduring design that will be pleasant to use 1,000x times over. Pepsi often beats Coke in blind taste tests because it has a sweeter first sip. Hardly anyone prefers actually drinking Pepsi.
    • wiseowise 1y ago
      > Hardly anyone prefers actually drinking Pepsi. You take that back.
  • dash2 1y ago
    > We also saw a 34% boost in modernity, making a brand feel fresh and forward-thinking. On top of that, there was a 30% jump in rebelliousness, suggesting that expressive design positions a brand as bold, innovative, and willing to break from convention. Beyond parody.
• ionwake 1y ago
  I had a strong sense things were headed in the wrong direction the moment the mouse pointer became a circle and they introduced input smoothing with a delay—definitely not good UX. Hard to believe this kind of change made it through, but I guess it reflects current priorities. I’ll admit, I’m both baffled by and a bit envious of the folks making these calls. I too want to get paid 500k to sit on a bean bag, drink lattes, have office affairs, work a 3 hours day
  • dgimla20 1y ago
    > I too want to get paid 500k to sit on a bean bag, drink lattes, have office affairs, work a 3 hours day Unfortunately this was most of the lot that Google and others cut loose in the last layoffs. There was a few TikTok montages of "my day working at Google/LinkedIn Microsoft" (eat breakfast, snack time, eat lunch, eat dinner, check emails, massage, go home) which now have a additional "day in the life of being laid off from Google" follow-up.
• hexomancer 1y ago
  It's funny that the people who designed this monstrosity of a web page feel qualified enough to advice other people about design.
  • arewethereyeta 1y ago
    Who would be qualified enough to talk with you about new design trends then?those that design on your taste? Rarely, if ever, new design trends are liked by everyone. All in all, I think they are qualified enough.
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    • hexomancer 1y ago
      Here are some objective issues with this page that I don't think is really up to taste (honestly these are so obvious that I assume you viewed the website on mobile which is fair, I never used the mobile version. Because I don't think anyone in good conscience would argue with the terribleness of the desktop version of the website). Note that I will not include many taste-based issues with the website (like the god-awful mouse cursor) because they could be attributed to taste. The following issues are objective issues though: - Low performance. Because the website steals cursor rendering, moving the cursor feels bad and laggy. - The icon for the "menu" looks exactly like the mouse cursor. I don't think this constitutes good design. - Also the icon for the menu doesn't look like the extremely established menu icon (even though it changes to that when you hover over it). Initially I th ought maybe it is a dark/light mode toggle. - Speaking of the dark mode, the page flashbangs you halfway through scrolling the page for absolutely no reason. - The link texts are borderline unreadable in the "light" section of the page when you hover over them.
      • deleted 1y ago
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      • firejake308 1y ago
        > the page flashbangs you Did anyone understand what the purpose of that was?
• bschwindHN 1y ago
  Whenever I interact with google UIs, the question is always "which ellipses do I have to tap to find the action I want?"
• margorczynski 1y ago
  When it comes to UX I find it that even when it's good it will eventually get broken because the people responsible for it need to come up with new ideas to show they're needed. I guess the failure doesn't lie so much with the peons (designers, product people, etc.) as with maligned goals, metrics and management. Change for the sake of change and as we know any change when you're near the maximum means it getting worse.
• Oarch 1y ago
  > After mentioning her initial findings to colleagues in a Munich beer hall Uh oh...
  • dotancohen 1y ago
    We're still waiting to read about her struggle.
• apt-apt-apt-apt 1y ago
  These don't increase usability much for me. Since long ago and still now, I had good ideas for usability (self-judged) and would have loved to have worked on them at Google to beat iOS perhaps. But their leetcode interviews (for SWE, not design) completely barred me from stepping foot in and being able to suggest changes. Perhaps I'm just another soul who thinks they have valuable ideas. But this makes me wonder how many people with impactful ideas they've passed up on because they didn't fit into their leetcode-shaped prototype.
  • bsimpson 1y ago
    Have you looked into UX Engineering? It's a discipline for people whose expertise spans engineering and interaction design (e.g. might have been in one of those roles at companies that don't have UXE). It's been a while since I've interviewed, but I found the questions to be fair and not at all "leetcodey." It's also an important niche - people who learned to build things because they like to make, not because they found CS interesting. UXEs tend to be versatile people who can not only flex in a lot of roles, but are also good at translating the expectations of one role so someone in another role will understand.
    • apt-apt-apt-apt 1y ago
      Your description hits home, 'like to make, rather than CS'. Appreciate the thoughtful reply
• LeratoAustini 1y ago
  "how much time does it take on first use to spot a button" We need to help first time users work out how to use our software, but I don't follow the logic on why we should prioritise around this. I get that we can lose users early on if they are confused by our apps, but that's not the full picture. For a regular-use app (such as email in the example), what % of a user's time is spent as a new user, vs time spent as a no-longer-new user? Obviously over the lifetime of an app the amount of time spent as a new user is far less than that spent as a non-new user. After a few uses I know where the button is. But the design compromises (eg less space in the UI for content due to the oversize button) persist. At some point the training wheels on the bike stop helping and start hindering. This is the same gripe I have with the argument for UI animations "informing the user about what's happening". macOS (which stands out due to its refusal to just add a preference to fully disable animations) has educated me on the concept that an app minimises 'into the dock where it lives' many thousands of times now. I get it, honestly. Maybe the solution is to have the UI grow in complexity as the user becomes more familiar? After the enlarged 'send' button has been clicked 5 times, reduce its size... maybe even do this gradually, a couple of pixels per click until it reaches 'expert size'. Or have an internal list of user actions and once a few of them have been completed offer to put the UI into intermediate mode?
• MrBuddyCasino 1y ago
  > Material 3 Expressive is the most researched update to Google’s design system, ever. Did they ask everyone in Portlandia's Feminist Bookstore for their opinion or why is everything lilac.
• lol768 1y ago
  The progress bar looks a bit like a snake being electrocuted. https://m3.material.io/blog/building-with-m3-expressive#what-rsquo-s-in-the-update https://m3.material.io/blog/building-with-m3-expressive#what...
  • tomovo 1y ago
    And the circular one is the icon for head trauma.
  • miyuru 1y ago
    I cannot scroll down that page, wtf.
• divan 1y ago
  I'm glad Flutter is not changing design to support this M3Expressive [1] right off the bat. One of the biggest problems with Flutter for me is just a lack of alternative design systems (compared with web frameworks) or the ability to easily spin off your own design system. And it's ok to use default Flutter's design system (which is Material Design), but the need to conform to whatever the Google design team comes up with in the next update wasn't great. Components' renaming (RaisedButton -> ElevatedButton, wtf - was it really worth millions of person-hours of renaming in hundreds of thousands of Flutter codebases?), apps suddenly becoming pinkish, until developers frantically updated code setting `useMaterial3: false` just to stop apps being suddenly ugly, etc. I.e., it's fine for the design system to change and evolve, but with Flutter, all control over the app's look is virtually taken away from developers who use default material widgets. You just update the Flutter version and pray that your app didn't change in a way that was never expected. It would be good to have Material 3 Expressive as a separate design system, for sure. [1] https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/168813 https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/168813
  • sgt 1y ago
    But pinkish is just the default. You can select a color scheme and theme color like blue, indigo, etc. Looks better off the bat.
• jonasdoesthings 1y ago
  I would have liked a short explanation on what makes the new M3 Expressive really different from Material You?! They are re-using the exact same words [1] ("expressiveness", "personal style") from You. Did they just add more spacing and change the default-color? [1]: https://m3.material.io/blog/announcing-material-you https://m3.material.io/blog/announcing-material-you
• gadders 1y ago
  If the rest of the design is as annoying as the circular cursor enforced on me I'll pass, thanks.
  • johnisgood 1y ago
    I'll never know, I don't have enough time to wait for it to load.
• pawanjswal 1y ago
  Love how design is finally leaning into emotion.
• vessenes 1y ago
  Really, truly, hate that purple. Some of the guidelines look great. But I send sincere condolences to android users over the next few years. We will call them the blackberry yoghurt years someday.
• jfoster 1y ago
  Innovative compromise between light/dark mode; just have the page switch between the two repeatedly as you scroll.
  • ttoinou 1y ago
    Hybrid mode. A full 24 hours are passing by scrolling the page
• affenape 1y ago
  Yikes... everything looks like jelly. Best served with Comic Sans MS.
• junon 1y ago
  > By making the Send button larger and more prominent, participants were able to spot the button four times faster. I mean... yeah. Of course they did, it takes up half the screen. A bit hard to miss. It also made it so that editing text requires a microscope. I can immediately think of ten people in my social circle who would struggle with this due to various reasons, aside from subjective differences.
• bflesch 1y ago
  How did these clowns manage to make my mouse cursor laggy? It is incomprehensible for me to live in such a big bubble with such a big paycheck and then spend zero brainpower on systems without graphics acceleration. This is extremely bad engineering and these engineers should be called out for it. It takes a special kind of person to deliver this and be proud of it. Once they made their millions at Google these engineers will be our landlords, angel investors, you name it. The level of ignorance is unfathomable. Very sad.
  • PaulHoule 1y ago
    What do you expect from an OS that has a trash can for a logo?
  • jameskilton 1y ago
    One of the good things that came out of COVID was Google Docs suddenly getting a whole lot better. Why? Because Google engineers finally had to use their tools like the rest of us do, and found out very quickly that Google Docs on normal consumer internet connections sucked. Google as a company, and in many ways Silicon Valley as a whole, is designed around being a bubble that is ignorant of how the rest of the world actually functions.
    • dieortin 1y ago
      Pretty sure Google has used Docs internally since long before COVID.
      • Octoth0rpe 1y ago
        "used Docs internally" is not the same as: > on normal consumer internet connections
        • PaulHoule 1y ago
          Oh yeah. One of my pet peeves is that every comms product from Google (say Google Meet) works poorly on a slow internet connection, and slow could be something not bad at all, say 20 Mbps. Zoom, the former Skype, Slack Huddles, Go2Meeting, absolutely every other product has good audio quality and tolerable video quality. With Google products there are dropouts every few seconds so you can't understand what the other people are saying.
• wiradikusuma 1y ago
  Did anyone notice the mouse cursor changes color when you hover it over the video, try moving it around. How does it work?
  • solardev 1y ago
    It pulsates expressively between nausea and diarrhea.
• WithinReason 1y ago
  What I care about the most in UIs is latency. Not a single mention of it.
• asah 1y ago
  "By making the Send button larger and more prominent, participants were able to spot the button four times faster." By making the Send button larger and more prominent, participants were 4x more likely to accidentally press it. Also, participants were given 2x less vertical space in which to create their content. As a result of these studies, we enlarged the button another 2x in order to double the number of messages sent, while reducing the content until it was just 3 emojis on one line. /s
  • exac 1y ago
    And they moved it closer to the keyboard, which is where the primary buttons should be on mobile anyways. Total incompetence.
• 90s_dev 1y ago
  We've been collectively designing GUIs for what 50 years now? Yet we're re-asking the same questions every decade, always starting from scratch. Do none of the Google engineers behind this remember the Compiz reaction to Windows 95 and subsequent Windows Vista overreaction?
  • 90s_dev 1y ago
    Let's just go back to system wide skins. Let users make everything look as boring or fun as they want.
• lerp-io 1y ago
  made with uh....angular
  • azangru 1y ago
    Yeah... This is a regular reminder that the Material Web components project [0] has been effectively shelved. [0] - https://github.com/material-components/material-web https://github.com/material-components/material-web
    • krikou 1y ago
      ... which is such a pity. One of the best component library still.
• kqr 1y ago
  I get a very strong 1960s Bauhaus graphic design feeling from this. That makes it feel like yet another fad. You could argue "but this is well researched so it cannot be a fad" but I think they're focusing on the wrong things. Sure, the send button is 4× faster to find according to their research – but I don't want a huge send button near the keyboard. The send button is the most dangerous button in my email client! I'd like it to be small and require deliberate effort to hit. (Besides, it doesn't move around – I hope – so I will already know where it is when I compose my email. I'm not shooting down a fighter jet. I don't need to acquire the target quickly.) On the other hand, this seems to be Google backtracking and saying "Ooops, sorry, our previous recommendation of a UI where all components blend into each other looks sleek but is hard to use" so I guess that's an improvement.
  • rmvt 1y ago
    honestly, i don't see bauhaus here. at least not at first glance. on the one hand, i'd say it's trying to go in the opposite direction, with this "expressive design" idea, whatever that means. it immediately makes me think of maximalism (which is the opposite of bauhaus). on the other hand, you can argue that there's more of an "artistic" take to this type of ui design.
• grishka 1y ago
  Copying my tweet from 3 days ago: Can Google please lay off their entire design department already? I'm tired of redoing things in apps for the sake of them working the same but looking different. Android is a done product. It needs no further major updates.
  • Etheryte 1y ago
    Redesigning corporate branding is the revolving door of getting a promotion package, won't someone please think of the middle managers!
  • GuinansEyebrows 1y ago
    We know what happens to "done" Google products though... they're going to keep making changes until Android goes away.
    • grishka 1y ago
      Android doesn't have to remain a Google product though. Google is mostly a terrible maintainer of AOSP.
  • LauraMedia 1y ago
    I feel like they did already lay them off, which is how we end up with this...
• ustad 1y ago
  Viewing the page source, I love the way many inline css widths have values such as 83.33333333333334% or 66.66666666666666% !
• maelito 1y ago
  The email send button is such a bad example : for 5 seconds spent on finding the button the first time, one will use this same button thousands of time and know perfectly where it is. On the contrary, one will spend time writing the email in the long run. The new design has way less room for writing. Also, just shifting the place of the button would have resolved most of the problem. Also, RIP small phones. These new "designs" take so much space for nothing.
  • addandsubtract 1y ago
    >These new "designs" take so much space for nothing. This should be the main complaint. They're comparing an entire email, including the From/To/Title with a social media comment. Why don't you show us how much of the email we can still read and edit with that stupid big "expressive" button?!
  • Theodores 1y ago
    Maybe the design needs to adjust with use. Imagine a person new to sending mail has a big and clear send button at the top, then, the UI learns over time how familiar the user is with the interface. If they seem capable of hitting the send button then it can be shrunk down a bit. Rinse and repeat until the button is down to power user size. Equally, if the user has been away for a month or two, the send button can be made more prominent, to account for the user forgetting the interface. This could be branded muscle memory, so the send button gets fat unless it is regularly used.
  • hn8726 1y ago
    Even better, the original position of the send button is literally in the place where it shouldn't be, according to Android design guidelines throughout the years. Even Material2 doesn't put the _primary_ screen action on the top app bar, most chat apps (where you _send_ content) have the send button in a different place etc., so obviously the users would find the big-ass button faster if it takes away some 20% of the useful content
  • abraxas 1y ago
    I guess Gemini will be writing emails going forward so no need to have a meaningful text input field.
• sanex 1y ago
  Ok people are dunking on this for plenty of good reasons, but dear Lord, do you really think putting buttons at the top of the screen where they're the least reachable is a good idea? Maybe email send is not the best example but moving buttons down towards my thumb is a great move on these screens that won't stop growing.
• ninetyninenine 1y ago
  The whole article talks about being data driven then right underneath it they have links to color theory which is the most made up non data driven bullshit ever.
• PaulHoule 1y ago
  All samey and meaningless with no attention to detail.
• jamalaramala 1y ago
  Oh my god, this is ugly as fuck. It reminds me a study about the perception of beauty among students of arts. Before they start their studies, their perception of beauty is similar to everyone's. But as they go through their course, their perception starts to shift. What they see as "beautiful" doesn't match the perception of others. They learn what "skeuomorphism" is, and suddenly everything must be flat and undifferentiated.
  • wisty 1y ago
    I think it's actually less flat, with more affordances (though not quite skeuomorphic). Basically "oops we made it too flat, let's make those buttons big and colourful so people can see them again". It's a step forward after two steps back.
    • Groxx 1y ago
      It's worth comparing to where it came from: https://m1.material.io/ https://m1.material.io/ v3 is flatter than the flat design that v1 was a reaction against because it had such bad affordances.
  • jpalawaga 1y ago
    tbf, mature tastes are often different. it's not good or bad, it's just different. for example, people who drink a lot of old red wines have developed a taste for it. yes, it drags people away from the mean, but that doesn't stop large segments of the population from acquiring certain tastes (e.g. coffee). as a long-time user of tech devices, your tastes too have been dragged in certain ways, even if you couch yourself as an average user. fwiw. i love android, but I do not really care for their current design direction. (by the way, you might want to look up skeumorphism. material isn't skeumorphic, almost by intention.
  • vasusen 1y ago
    I agree, this looks like designers showing off to other designers. It looks suspiciously similar to Dropbox's 2017 design system that thankfully never became mainstream -- https://www.awwwards.com/inspiration/dropbox-design-system https://www.awwwards.com/inspiration/dropbox-design-system
• throwingrocks 1y ago
  This comment section is predictably boring and shows that HN isn’t always a great place for discourse. Change is hard, I guess.
  • bsimpson 1y ago
    I've noticed that lately too. And any thread with a political tinge has a comment section indistinguishable from Reddit, complete with the doomerism.
  • lawgimenez 1y ago
    Majority of the users here haven’t even implemented a single material design. Our app has been 100% Jetpack Compose Material 3 for over a year and user growth has been phenomenal. We’re not US based though.
  • LauraMedia 1y ago
    Change for change sake is bad, yes. And the problem is, that these last changes have been half-baked, most things WITHIN GOOGLE still haven't fully done the switch to Material You / Material 3 Base, and now they decide to throw stuff around yet again. It's hardly a design system if a random lead UI/UX designer redesigns core elements every 3 years
• myfonj 1y ago
  Let me share with you my brief but very intensive user story of the "M3 web": 1. User visits https://m3.material.io/develop/web https://m3.material.io/develop/web. 2. User suffers unsolicited and redundant gooey animation of an "orange-violet blob-like thingamajig" unrelated to the topic. This happens despite user's clearly communicated "prefers-reduced-motion" setting that other sites usually respect. 3. User struggles to find how to stop said thingamajig. After scrolling, they eventually discover some kind of "pause button" tucked away in the bottom left corner of a sidebar. (User has a laptop, so that icon—with no textual hint of its function—sits below their initial viewport.) 4. User clicks the pause emblem and the visual distraction freezes in place. 5. User attempts to identify the first interactive element in the main area (also known as a "link"). 6. Moving the cursor over a tile under "Announcements" makes the tile change colour. User deduces it might be clickable. There is no other visual indication that this content is functionally different from the "static" texts surrounding it. 7. The tile reads: Meet Material Web 1.0Start using lightweight and accessible Material Components in any web framework This appears to be a heading and subtitle, but in reality consists of two styled <spans> with no space between them (hence the peculiar "1.0Start" fusion). The spans are marked with `class="title"` and `class="description..."` respectively. 8. User boldly clicks that tile. 9. User gets a new browser tab opened. 10. User wonders why there was no visual indication this would happen. 11. User evaluates the content of this unsolicited tab, decorated with "cheering megaphone" emoji. They conclude there is actually no clear path toward "Starting to use lightweight and accessible Material Components" there. 12. User decides to close the tab and return to the original "M3" page. 13. The original "M3" page no longer looks as it did before. It has scrolled back to the frozen orange-violet thingamajig, causing the content with the tile to vanish from the viewport. 14. User decides that they've encountered enough WCAG violations for this month. 15. User closes the tab.
  • lebowska 1y ago
    Best thing about this, is that these components, the web version of the material 3, that in my opinion should also be the best showcase of this visual language, are not even updated to this latest "expressive" update. Why? Because they're in in maintenance mode. https://github.com/material-components/material-web/discussions/5642 https://github.com/material-components/material-web/discussi...
• Pesthuf 1y ago
  It's nice that they're testing how new users, preferably those who have never seen a computer before in their lives, react to UIs and how quickly they discover new features. But what about all the existing users, who know the app and its features and who are really annoyed by these "modern" HUGE UIs that waste 60% of screen space with some jumbotron and hide all other features behind menus (or downright remove them) because "they might confuse new users"?
• travisgriggs 1y ago
  Fascinating. My emotions ARE stirred by this. I grow increasingly frustrated/despondent/irate by their base color palette choices. There is a reason that the green and orange shag carpets of the 70s didn’t stick with us and are widely reviled.
• captnFwiffo 1y ago
  [dead]
• dickiedyce 1y ago
  From the blurb: "Expressive design makes you feel something. It inspires emotion..." Yep, sea-sickness, quesyness, nausea, and a growing desire park the DeLorean back in 2010 or skip to 2035. The whole 'emotion' thing = funky palettes is irritating beyond measure: the next 2 years of websites will be like working inside a TV advert for Jaguar.
  • montag 1y ago
    When I was in design school, the dean roasted me for slapping cartoon flowers on a brochure for a female audience. It was hackneyed in retrospect. Kinda like this
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• eurekin 1y ago
  Challenge: find positive comment about m3 here
• deafpolygon 1y ago
  Wow; if you squint - it looks like the Apple design. But with really awful colors. And near Comic Sans fonts.
• crowcroft 1y ago
  I can't take this research seriously. > M3 Expressive designs were rated higher across desirability attributes, including “modernity,” “subculture,” and “rebelliousness.” Subculture and rebelliousness as features of a corporate design system? What exactly were the survey questions? > While there was a net-positive indication across all age groups, younger study participants had the most enthusiastic preference for M3 Expressive and rated the designs as high in “visual appeal” and “intention to use.” Again compared to what, and how were the questions framed. 'Intention to use' questions are almost always leading. In general I think the designs look pretty good, why not just let them speak for themselves instead of foisting nonsense survey results upon us.
• SecretDreams 1y ago
  Brutal. But it resonates with those 18-24 year olds, at least.
• solardev 1y ago
  God damn, this is the ugliest design system I've ever seen in my life.
• yahoozoo 1y ago
  Terrible
• Workaccount2 1y ago
  Google has to solve having a green bubble if they want any penetration into the "hip" young crowd. I honestly think the only way they could see gains is with a well executed counter-culture statement. They are foolishly spinning their wheels going after the young iOS crowd, while alienating the people who actually buy pixel phones and on some level android, phones. (I know this comment is very US centric)
  • thewebguyd 1y ago
    > I honestly think the only way they could see gains is with a well executed counter-culture statement. They are foolishly spinning their wheels going after the young iOS crowd, while alienating the people who actually buy pixel phones and on some level android, phones. I think a well executed counter-culture statement would do well for them. Make the move Apple did with their 1984 commercial. Also double down on openness, freedom, etc. The other problem Google/Android has with penetrating the "hip" young crowd (in the US) aside from iMessage is there's no Android brand like Apple has. There's pixel, but it's such a small market share. Most people it's a choice between iPhone or Samsung, not iOS or Android. The fact that Samsung has their own skin too means this new material UI will only apply to people on Pixels or other stock-like phones, of which there are fewer and fewer flagships for each year. Outside of that though, Android has an app quality problem as well. I use the McDonalds app as an example - every upgrade cycle I get curious about Android and try daily driving a pixel for the return period before inevitably ending back up on iPhone. My last run with the Pixel 9 pro, the android version of apps were horrible. Performance was so bad. The McDonalds app took full seconds to navigate between panes where it was instant on iOS, my banking app was equally horrible on Android. The watch wasn't great either. Google could have a slam dunk if they focused on the right things, but they just always keep missing the mark.
• freedomben 1y ago
  I have two thoughts that keep jumping out at me from this. This criticism isn't meant solely for Material 3, but it does seem a good example. 1. Since the beginning of "mobile first" being rapidly shoved on us (and side-note, god our industry seems to love bandwagoning the new shiny stuff), I've noticed the slow but inevitable (with a northstar like that) decline and neglect of desktop interfaces. Viewing this website on desktop is a wonderful illustration and validation of that fear (though definitely take that with a grain of salt as it's heavily subject to confirmation bias). 2. The over-reliance on data. I am a big believer in data and data-driven decision making, but I think far too often we out-source our thinking to the data without ever questioning the data or our own methods for collecting and analyzing that data. I don't know anywhere near enough about how they gathered this to suggest that the data might be flawed, but I have seen (many times) reasonable, thinking people look at data and place complete trust in it without stopping to realize that at some point that data was defined and collected by another person. Even if the data is rock solid, there also seems to be rarely a thought given to the possibility of misinterpreting that data, or the possibility that the data doesn't provide useful insights in isolation. Some of the worst products I've used were the most "data driven," hyper-optimized to maximize on whatever the chosen metrics were. This seems especially subject to the fallacies of micro vs. macro when trying to optimize for populations over individual experiences. Likewise some of the best products I've used were built with little to no data, and progressively got worse the more they were optimized for "engagement" or whatever the goal is. Now all that said, take my thoughts with a grain of salt because I am tired of having the apps I use constantly changing their UIs on me. If it's one app it's bad enough, but when you have to use a dozen or more and every one of them ships some radical update every 6 to 12 months, with typically zero user control of when that happens, it becomes maddening.
  • idkalexj 1y ago
    Im right there with you. I loathe the "embigification" guised as mobile first for desktop experiences. Mice are precise and allow for dense design (which i prefer). Re the data point, what an amateur stance from the google research team... "found the button 4x faster" as their "look at how much better it is!" metric? If you make the button take up 90% of the screen and you will get the same result but even FASTER, WOW such productivity! What terrible methodology. I also cant help but notice how much usable information space has now been gobbled up compared from left to right, hope you enjoy writing emails in tiny bubbles. Also, the new problem they just invented is its now harder to decipher what is a ui element vs a graphic/decoration. I am all for seeing some risk taking but im not sure i agree with the basis for "why this is a good direction". Google been taking a lot of Ls IMO on the design side, every new guideline push makes google things feel big and clunky. Best example is the google fonts website, the previous version was a work of art, now its just awful (functionally and aesthetically IMO)
• ravenstine 1y ago
  What this page is telling me is designers at The Google have rediscovered what mid-90's UX already figured out. Also, nice doodad cursor thing, guys, but maybe next time you don't add things like that for their own sake. I swear it seems at least a hair slower than the native cursor.
  • erkt 1y ago
    a hair slower? I drag it from one side of the screen to the other and get 4-6 frames despite my monitor being 240fps. Perhaps its just more engineering to push people off firefox?
    • ravenstine 1y ago
      Didn't seem nearly that bad to me on Firefox. It's fairly smooth; just kind of laggy, but in a way where it was hard to tell whether it's an optical illusion. Otherwise doesn't appear to have any fewer or more frames when swiping around than the OS cursor.
• chakintosh 1y ago
  I hated old Material 2. I hate this even more.. with a passion. What the hell!?
• deadbabe 1y ago
  People who frequent a brutalist, minimalist, news website, that hasn’t changed its design in over a decade (or ever?) are enraged by a colorful, peaceful, friendly reimagining of a popular framework. Who could have guessed!
• erkt 1y ago
  Modern UI is a crime against humanity. I did not think there were new depths to the depravity, yet here we are. Society has been backsliding since XP.
  • qiine 1y ago
    welp back to the terminal I guess ?
  • abraxas 1y ago
    I wonder if XP fondness dates you to a certain age bracket. Yeah new UIs seem disorganized and inconsistent to me but I feel the best consistency in UI was hit around Windows 95-98 but then again that's when I was in my young adult years. Maybe the kids feel this new crap is how UI should be done...
    • tavavex 1y ago
      Some people despised the XP UI when it first came out to a lot of fanfare. To this day, "Fisher-Price UI" is strongly associated with it. Most people seem to think that whatever design language they got used to at a certain age was the obviously superior choice for all ages. I think the biggest issue of modern UI design is that a lot of the software with it is poisoned by metric-chasing and mass data collection that megacorps love. But on a deeper level, most modern UX designers are vastly better than the average person working on UIs in the 90s. All the horrendous stuff from the 90s got forgotten, leaving behind only the fond memories of Windows 9x and similar. I'm much younger than you, and I get liking the 9x design only in the sense that this was the last time when MS did a clean-slate design and redesigned everything in the system to be consistent, as opposed to them juggling like 6 different design languages for the sake of backwards compatibility and their apparent fear of not making something new. But as a design.. well, "all components must be the exact same shade of grey, look identical and have as little hierarchy as possible" isn't the peak of design, imo.
• Workaccount2 1y ago
  The fact that it is hated here on HN is probably a good sign, no offense everyone. Engineer designed UI's are usually awful outside engineering circles, where they are obviously the best. It looks like Google is really just continuing the war on information density, and moving more and more towards a UI that represents a toddlers toy. Empty space, shapes over words, large buttons. Very easy to hate, but when you consider the average consumer gets overwhelmed looking at a settings menu, it makes sense.
  • seabird 1y ago
    You can't ever win with people that freak out when they see a settings menu. There's no point trying to appease them.
• ilioscio 1y ago
  These weird pastel heavy color-themes feel like they give me eye fatigue very quickly, is that just me?
• nottorp 1y ago
  So why does it have to be emotional instead of, say, useful? I suppose I should commend them for that page only bringing up Firefox to 53% CPU when I scroll. Wait, this is mac os on a m3 pro so that means it uses ... 5 to 6 cores?
• cut3 1y ago
  Im dying inside at the thought of outsourced junior designers redoing gcp dashboards this way. im already confused enough in there
• not_a_bot_4sho 1y ago
  > create interfaces that connect with people on an emotional level No, thank you.
• chanux 1y ago
  I'm posting this here assuming I'd likely come across someone who knows this stuff. Of all the UIs I have used, Github UI especially give me a sense of solid UI. As in there's nothing finicky about it and gives a sense of dependability (Since way before big-corp acquisition). I'm pretty sure I do not have the vocabulary to explain further. So if anyone gets what I mean please chime in and help me understand what leads to this experience. Any related writeups/links very much appreciated.
  • abraxas 1y ago
    You are just used to it. It's every bit as terrible as most web UI. It took me quite a while (coming from a different git UI) to actually figure out where to click to see a stream of commits for a branch (spoiler: the xxx commits text is secretly a button)
• cut3 1y ago
  Im dying inside at the thought of outsourced junior designers redoing gcp dashboards this way. im already confused enough in there. no company uses material design since v1 so this isnt going to infect anyone else but all google apps are about to get worse it seems
• xnx 1y ago
  Resume driven design is one of the worst forces in modern technology. Every designer is looking to make a name for themself by building a bespoke design system/language/framework. The best design is less design.
  • ramesh31 1y ago
    >Resume driven design is one of the worst forces in modern technology. Every designer is looking to make a name for themself by building a bespoke design system/language/framework. The best design is less design. Goes equally for engineering these days. How many re-implementations of the same idea have been driven over and over again so that someone can claim "open source project with 800 stars" on their resume? It's nauseating and poisons the well for people trying to find a reliable lib. Add to that the social media "influencer" folks who crap out some pointless tiny repo and push it to their followers who don't know any better, resulting in 5000 stars for something that is completely half baked and has no chance of ever being maintained or extended.
• amluto 1y ago
  Wow, in the process of making the send button slightly easier to find, they reduced the amount of actual content in the screen by a couple lines. And they still overlay controls on the content, thus obscuring some of it, just like earlier versions of Material Design. The prettier and more fun modern UIs get, the more I miss the UIs of the nineties. Controls looked like controls, screen space was well utilized, and even workflows that weren’t the most common were generally well supported. <sarcasm>I suppose if an LLM writes your email for you, you don’t actually need to see all the text yourself.</sarcasm>
  • somewhatjustin 1y ago
    > Wow, in the process of making the send button slightly easier to find, they reduced the amount of actual content in the screen by a couple lines This is a worthy tradeoff! Phones are bigger than ever and scrolling is incredibly simple.
    • nessguy 1y ago
      I have a big phone in order to display more actual content, not because I want more whitespace. Scrolling may be easy, but it’s still harder to quickly skim content if you have to scroll more.
    • McGlockenshire 1y ago
      > Phones are bigger than ever If you want to experience what your app is really like for the vast majority of real world people, go get a cheap monthly prepaid phone and try it out. Using the modern web on them is a complete nightmare. The screens are physically small and low resolution. The phone I had to use for a year and a half is 800something by 500something, which is literally first generation Android era resolution from over ten years ago. Information density matters. Huge buttons that get in the way are not merely frustrating, they are a design mistake and a demonstration that the designer is out of touch with reality, just as you seem to be here. Please, get a crappy phone, get a crappy chromebook, make sure your app isn't frustrating to use for people that can't afford new, fast things.
  • Workaccount2 1y ago
• emmanueloga_ 1y ago
  "I understood that the poet's work wasn't in the poetry; it was in inventing reasons for the poetry to be admirable. Naturally, that ulterior work altered the piece for him—but not for anyone else." - J. L. Borges, El Aleph [1] -- 1: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/8699659-comprend-que-el-trabajo-del-poeta-no-estaba-en-la https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/8699659-comprend-que-el-tra...
• storus 1y ago
  Google seems to be firmly in the Kraftwerk-like definition of beauty where some band members believed that the more beautiful a sound looks on an oscilloscope, the better music it is.
• ramesh31 1y ago
  What a joke. Material has been the excessive epitome of form over function form the beginning, but this really takes the cake.
• ekianjo 1y ago
  So it's about to put less information on the same amount of surface? Got it, it goes directly to the trash.
• precompute 1y ago
  I want a UI that caters to grown-ups!
• ugh123 1y ago
  I sat watching that lame video (clip?) for about 30 seconds waiting for something to happen before I realized there was scrollable content. Google's UX continues to be awful
• caulkboots 1y ago
  More like Material 3 Nausea
• everybodyknows 1y ago
  Alternative nominations for design excellence: - Rock Auto - Grainger - Craigslist
• dmkolobov 1y ago
  The scrolling behavior of text on this blog is pretty wild. Each paragraph has “subtle” animation when you stop scrolling on mobile: as if each paragraph is independently floating into its spot. It’s incredibly disorienting. Like… I get it: your design language revolves around treating UI elements as physical objects. Messing with text is a step too far. Text is not a bunch of boxes connected by springs.
• fedsocpuppet 1y ago
  Here's what Google PageSpeed has to say about it: https://pagespeed.web.dev/analysis/https-design-google-library-expressive-material-design-google-research/u0zkesp8i8?form_factor=mobile https://pagespeed.web.dev/analysis/https-design-google-libra... - Performance 44/100 - First Contentful Paint 1.7 s - Speed Index 6.5 s - Total Blocking Time 920 ms - Largest Contentful Paint 4.8 s at least it's emotional
• arresin 1y ago
  > It's time to move beyond “clean” and “boring” designs to create interfaces that connect with people on an emotional level. No.
• theletterf 1y ago
  The flat surfaces, the fonts, the colors... Material 3 has potent Windows Phone vibes (Metro), don't you think? Such an underrated UX.
• tavavex 1y ago
  I really don't understand what people are losing their marbles about. I know (re)designs always face some controversy, but the reception here on HN seems overwhelmingly negative. It's not even a full redesign - they're advertising a few new "expressive" elements that developers will be able to add to their existing Material 3 apps. The examples they're giving in the articles are mostly mockups with the use of these new components dialed up to 11, to show off what it is. As someone who made a few small things using the Material spec in the past, I like this. Don't get me wrong, Material 1 was great, but it was also very rigid and samey - there was no official way to make your design adhere to it and look like something you made. Material 2 fixed this by introducing more variety and new elements. This is Material 2 for their current design stage - to me it looks like giving the individual designer more freedom to customize their website or app while still looking "like Android."
• TehCorwiz 1y ago
  I swear they didn't actually do any studies to see if people could actually navigate this. It's just design-spam. The church of "We need to be unique"-ism. Can we go back to function over form? I feel like every step "forward" makes computers less useful for, ya know, computing and more a way to funnel your eyeballs into someone else's pockets.
• hidelooktropic 1y ago
  Isn't this just Lisa Frank?
• cubefox 1y ago
  Note that many, many apps hardly use the default Android UI elements and instead implement their own design. So it isn't helpful when the official Android UI elements don't contain any fancy "expressive" designs. If they aren't fancy enough, app developers simply won't use them and go with their own stuff, which will be even more inconsistent with the rest of the OS.
• utkarsh858 1y ago
  At this point, I am rooting for Google to do anything it wants then current design. For now material design looks like cartoon network to me. The best design in modern times I liked was of Microsoft fluent 2. I badly wish for skeumorphism to come back, but now have left the hope.
• nkrisc 1y ago
  Wow, I’m on my phone and the slight upwards motion that each paragraph does as it scrolls into view is almost instantly nauseating. I had to close the tab after reading only the first two paragraphs (and scrolling down the page to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating). First time I’ve had motion sickness from reading while not actually moving. Well done Google designers, that’s impressive. Reader mode to the rescue.
  • ocdtrekkie 1y ago
    This was the only thing I could focus on. Why would anyone make a page where content scrolls at a different rate than I am scrolling?
  • strongpigeon 1y ago
    I hadn't noticed it the first time I read the post, mostly because I tend to "throw and catch" when scrolling on text. Went back and scrolled slowly. It's definitely motion-sickness inducing. Wow.
• AbraKdabra 1y ago
  These assclowns are designing for emotions, not usability. And the send button example is the best example why this is an abomination.
• rib3ye 1y ago
  I’m glad someone was able to get a bonus or promotion out of this, but in the just another symptom of google losing it’s soul as a “hard problems” engineering shop.
• bromuro 1y ago
  These subtle animations while reading the text make me dizzy. What are they animating the text for?
• deburo 1y ago
  The timers' typography is absurd. Material Design was already too space-inefficient to my taste, but this one overdoes its predecessor. The worst of it all is that this is clearly a mobile design system and yet desktops, laptops & ipads must suffer for it since the styles don't adjust much to the amount of space you have on screen. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/B4hgs-2YHv1TDxMu3VSGcx9YMs1CUcl1xHjjJa6AQnwboSfZsbBm04YT2Lb28aEljpngg9bufiSpchbFC6Zyfwf-XoayLny332npYU37H0uGJbuKBQ8=s0 https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/B4hgs-2YHv1TDxMu3VSGcx9YMs...
• munificent 1y ago
  A giant corporation sent users a survey to rate how they felt a proposed design scored on "Rebeliousness" so that they can then tell people how rebellious it is. Irony is dead.
• bloggie 1y ago
  >M3 Expressive designs were overwhelmingly rated higher for attributes such as “energetic,” “emotive,” “positive vibe,” “creative,” “playful,” and “friendly.” Haha, anything missing here? Maybe usefulness, legibility, clarity, ease of use...
• rpcope1 1y ago
  I am asking this honestly: is this some sort of April Fool's joke, just a month and a half late? Between absolutely abhorrent performance on what should be a nearly state of the art desktop, and generally being jarring to look at and not particularly readable, how did they think this was a good idea?
• rrgok 1y ago
  I always hated Material Design, from its inception to this last version. There might be some good reason, but it just doesn't feel right to me.
• mattgreenrocks 1y ago
  Is purple the main color? Or can you choose tints?
• pandemic_region 1y ago
  Emotional UX aka Designed for Addictiveness.
• lanyard-textile 1y ago
  Ex-googler here. Yeesh :) Not surprised to find this little nugget of googleyness: One of the experiments starts by internally asking Google designers for an opinion about their intents for a design, and basing further research off their answers. https://m3.material.io/blog/testing-material-3 https://m3.material.io/blog/testing-material-3 > We started by interviewing Google designers to ask what interfaces are intended to accomplish, and users to understand what they actually accomplish. One thing we learned from this process was how much apps use visual cues to communicate important information. I get what they’re going for and they almost made a helpful feedback loop — but they involved their own noise in the research process, and that’s why we got something like this. It was doomed from the start. Wonder how many Googlers were involved in the other 45 studies. Also — if you’re age 65+ don’t worry about responding to a Google survey, your opinion about whether you favor an Expressive UI won’t make it to the final graph. :P
  • adamcharnock 1y ago
    > > One thing we learned from this process was how much apps use visual cues to communicate important information. Maybe it’s late here, or maybe I’m just cynical - but what does that sentence even mean anyway?! It’s an app, it’s visual, why does this even need stating? How was this even a notable result from any kind of research? /grump
  • agos 1y ago
    Or if you’re not US-based, apparently. So much for Material 2 (you?) focus on diversity
  • GenshoTikamura 1y ago
    >if you’re age 65+ don’t worry about responding to a Google survey, your opinion about whether you favor an Expressive UI won’t make it to the final graph. :P The hypocrisy of inclusivity. All users are included, but some are more included than the others
• crossroadsguy 1y ago
  Coming to your neighbourhood theatre in an Android phone. Yeah! Brace yourselves. They have gone full bonkers this time.
• SirMaster 1y ago
  Is this a joke? If their goal is to evoke emotion when using this UI, then they have succeeded in evoking emotions of frustration and anger.
• Ninjinka 1y ago
  I've sent many an angry tweet about how ugly Material UI is, and this doesn't appear to be any better
• brap 1y ago
  This is pretty, I like it. On the other hand, I’m not sure “pretty” beats “practical” when it comes to tools. There was something very practical about those ugly Windows 98 widgets, I kinda miss those.
• Ninjinka 1y ago
  It's incredible how terrible Material You on Android is. For all the personalization hype, you can't pick your own colors (that aren't based on a wallpaper) without root. You literally cannot make the Messages app have a white background with message bubbles in a color other than gray.
• diegof79 1y ago
  As someone who works in UX, I admire all the work the Google UX team puts into Material: tons of documentation, UI kits, theme generation tools, a lot of thinking on systematizing the color combinations, etc. However, this article has a lot of "Pepsi Logo" vibes (https://www.scribd.com/document/541500744/Pepsi-Arnell-021109 https://www.scribd.com/document/541500744/Pepsi-Arnell-02110...). I never confirmed if this was a hoax, but it was made into many news websites at the time. Many design justifications they put on the page don't make much sense: yes, a big send button increases the metric of people finding the button, but it also takes space from the screen, and your daily phone UI is not a kiosk. "New users" become "experienced users", so the big button quickly becomes annoying. Even the M3 documentation site is terrible on mobile: the tab switch at the headers of some docs is so big that just two tabs don't fit into the screen. By contrast, Apple, which is often praised for its product aesthetics, never makes marketing content like this about its design language. It may present creating emojis as a huge feature or inflate some of its claims a bit, but in general, they let the product do the talking.
  • Lammy 1y ago
    > However, this article has a lot of "Pepsi Logo" vibes So wildly successful that we're all still talking about it even though they don't even use that logo any more?
    • superb_dev 1y ago
      I'm not sure we're talking about it because it was successful, I think we're talking about it because the design document for it was insane: https://www.goldennumber.net/wp-content/uploads/pepsi-arnell-021109.pdf https://www.goldennumber.net/wp-content/uploads/pepsi-arnell...
      • neilv 1y ago
        Which was a lot of work, to achieve the apt: https://www.utne.com/arts/new-pepsi-logo-is-a-joke/ https://www.utne.com/arts/new-pepsi-logo-is-a-joke/
      • 1y ago
• KaiserPro 1y ago
  Ah so the material people have figured out that putting the most relevant button where you're looking is a good idea. Well done them.
• cokeandpepsi 1y ago
  [dead]
• LauraMedia 1y ago
  I am incredibly confused why the Material 3 project is growing further and further from a coherent design system to "do whatever you want, there are no rules". The linked "Start building with Material 3 Expressive" article has an example at the bottom for a payment type app where virtually every text element has a different font or text size. It also has an enormously big FAB at the bottom that covers MULTIPLE rows of data.
• neilv 1y ago
  Maybe it's just been a long week, but some of the examples reminded me of the day when a writing instructor spent a class session teaching everyone some loaded imagery/symbols to avoid writing accidentally. After that, the instructor read a passage, by some earnest student somewhere, who seemed to unwittingly hit many of those things we'd just been told to avoid. The class was in stitches.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• wiseowise 1y ago
  Ah, yes. Just what I am looking for when I think about GUI on my computers checks notes rebelliousness, subculture, modernity.
  • therein 1y ago
    Yeah, their metrics for it being good sounds so out of touch that their pride seems cringe-worthy. If you take rebelliousness as "this doesn't follow the conventions we are used to", subculture as "this is weird in its own way" and modernity as "this reminds me of new modern design stuff I see", it makes it clear they aren't necessarily praises.
• meindnoch 1y ago
  Because we all want our daily driver apps to look like a fucking SaaS landing page. Clowns.
• rienbdj 1y ago
  The spacing changing with scrolling makes me feel … nauseous
• 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago
  Gradients are so fucking back. Where's my old copy of Flash MX 6?
• vunderba 1y ago
  Going for that aesthetically pleasing CGA look I see. https://imgur.com/a/vh8ui8I https://imgur.com/a/vh8ui8I
• suddenexample 1y ago
  Oof. I actually really like the majority (with some notable exceptions) of what Material 3 Expressive does from a pure design perspective, but this article is the worst reflection of that. "Big button easier to find" (let's think about whether "easy to find send button" is the top priority for an email composition screen, because these folks apparently didn't) and "We can make an existing UI less functional by taking up the entire screen" seem to be the writer's favorite parts of M3E. It's ironic that they got rid of the tall bottom navigation bar and brought back the short one with less padding (likely after all of Google's own 1P properties decided it wasted too much space), because now it feels like that took that failed philosophy and applied it everywhere else.
• calrain 1y ago
  If that page is an example of Material 3 Expressive then it's a hard no. It is nauseating how text blocks keep moving after a scroll, and the animations are a solid 15 year step back in time. I won't be using it on any projects, and I will spend much less time on any site that uses it.
• josefrichter 1y ago
  Google is great at many things, design is not among them.
• idle_zealot 1y ago
  Things that are utterly lost in modern software design: information density, and even more importantly, consistency. It feels like every interface wants to tuck features away offscreen to be accessible only by scrolling, swiping, or behind a "flow" of several screens, each of which may have a surprising popup, redirect, call-to-action, or totally different layout owned by another team. The swipe/scroll accessible features aren't indicated in any way, you either have to know about them a priori or be tutorialized. What elements are clickable/tappable and their interactive areas are often unclear. Input types are represented inconsistently (checkboxes vs radio selectors, drop downs, sliders). Button locations for standard actions are shuffled from screen to screen. Even basic OS features on Android phones are like this. How do you access quick settings? Well, you pull down the notification shade all the way from the top of the screen with a swipe, which mostly shows your notifications but also reveals some buttons and knobs. Then you swipe down again, which this time doesn't pull down a shade, but transforms those knobs into a different set of more expansive knobs and sliders and also hides your notifications. Oh, also that first slide down might not work and only serve to temporarily show the OS status bar, if the screen you're on right now is set as immersive or something. In that case you need to do one swipe down to reveal the status bar, then quickly follow up with another for the mixed-use kindof-notification pulldown, then a third time to transform that into the screen where you can change your brightness. I want a new design language that places consistency above all else. I should be able to accurately predict what a tap or swipe is going to do based on the information on my screen. I do not want things to pop up unexpectedly or change positions or hide themselves without my input. Computers are tools, and their users need to be able to develop mastery of them. The current thrust seems to revolve around ensuring constant surprise and novelty.
• aucisson_masque 1y ago
  > Expressive design makes you feel something I found it quite funny because the first month of using the new 'overscroll' animation that came with material you, the thing that stretch the text when you reach the end of a page and keep scrolling, made me want to throw up and gave me headaches lol. To be completely serious, i looked at the preview images, for instance the Gmail one with the big send button and it confirmed my long time hypothesis. Google is copying the design of these phone for old folks that got everything big and bold with contrast turned all the way up lol. You're telling me 18-24 loves material 3 ? I can tell you my grandma would love it. She can't see very well and her hand shake, this would be handy.
• igouy 1y ago
  > Send button in the new design (on the right) is larger … their eyes saw the button four times faster … Perhaps some well known rule of interaction might apply.
• coastalpuma 1y ago
  I think the original Material 3 was more sensible. Coming from ios-land, its color palette formula was a nice break from the glassy apple standard. It looks like this new version goes overboard on the boldness and especially on the typography. Looks like it uses the same palette generator but is encouraging use of the more vibrant colors in it? Seems to draw inspiration from magazine design (content is ads or interspersed between ads, appropriately enough for an ad company). Indeed, the brief is written like a pitch to "brands" (not UX designers for useful apps). The reference to "dialing up the feeling" makes me think of the extremely uncomfortable feeling I get when watching TV or film ads for the first time in awhile -- that it's a manipulative assault on my lizard brain. In my opinion, the main promise of M3 wasn't apps triggering "more feeling" in users, but in users' ability to personalize their color theme to their taste to make themselves feel more comfortable and at home. Instead of this iteration, the best direction for google would have been to push apps to implement dynamic color (themeability) as a matter of best practice, increasing user sovereignty over their experience. The example touting the huge send button with the tiny email composition space is baffling. This is peak "call to actionism". Dot cursor that doesn't let you select text properly and link highlights that aren't visible against the page background are not a great look. Side note, surprised to see some commenters wishing for the return of Material 1. I simply couldn't get over the aspect that each google app chose an arbitrary garish primary color, and you were stuck with that as the user chrome for that app. I still cringe when I see docs formatted with (for instance) random bright purple chrome using a M1 theme.
• wewewedxfgdf 1y ago
  My pet peeve is user interfaces that simply hide options away and give zero indication that they exist. The assumption is you know how to find them. Google has this sort of thing everywhere.
• mwkaufma 1y ago
  Where does "please make the play/pause button on the android lock screen big like it used to be, for my big thumb" land w/r/t Modernity, Subculture, or Rebelliousness?
  • strix_varius 1y ago
    It's such a neat experience when someone else lifts a thought straight out of your head. The tiny control buttons on the lock screen drive me nuts.
• dreamcompiler 1y ago
  Oh good. Everything's purple now. And in your face. And the background color changes as you scroll. If this catches on I'll have to write a browser extension to get rid of it. Hey Google, why don't you just bring back the <blink> tag?
• dreamcompiler 1y ago
  > We found that well-applied, expressive design is strongly preferred by people of all ages, with that preference being particularly strong — up to 87% — among 18-to-24-year-olds. Another colorful thing popular with kids: Tide pods.
• zwaps 1y ago
  Pretty successful at invoking the emotion rage
• LoganDark 1y ago
  This is just an attempt to copy iOS, in my opinion. Even the website is - the way your cursor is no longer an arrow but just a circle that molds to the shape of nearby buttons is a (very badly executed, at least on this website) clear attempt to copy iPadOS.
• wolpoli 1y ago
  According to the page, with M3 Expressive, Time to first fixation is .65s for 18-24 year old, 0.93s for 25-45 year old, and 0.81s 45+ year. It doesn't make intuitive sense that 45+ year old are now faster than their younger group.
• fHr 1y ago
  Clear regression
• ggm 1y ago
  I volunteer with seniors helping them with online problems. The lack of clear guidance what is and what is not an active element in a web view, responsive to touch, is their biggest cognitive burden. They really struggle. Seniors make up 4-5% of the online population. As a cohort they're growing. Cognitive decline, visual acuity, memory all fade. So these are otherwise competent people who made good livings, now struggling with design choices with consequences for them. There is simply no single abiding rule. It may be a red box, or a yellow circle, it may be words or a logo or a skuomorphism in cartoon sense. I would suspect toddlers are the same. Who knows? Gov.uk is exemplary for understanding this problem. Material design isn't orthogonal in this, because it's flat aspects de-emphasis any clear distinction where prior coding models tended to have a gui look to buttons which lay outside this design imperative.
• methuselah_in 1y ago
  Green is always soothing in software! Apart from that colors are good i suppose too. Currently no device going to get A16 i guess I am happy with a15 as of now. Maybe when things settle down I will be seeing how it works.