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I like their Material Expressive design a lot more now after Apple's big reveal. While it's still a bit too colorful and whimsical for my liking, it does stay m

by paxys 1y ago

I like their Material Expressive design a lot more now after Apple's big reveal. While it's still a bit too colorful and whimsical for my liking, it does stay much closer to what I think should be the top UX design ideal - be clear, legible, and get out of the way. On the new iOS every screen feels like some UX designer is shouting "look how amazing I am at this!!" at me.

LorenDB 1y ago
My main complaint with Material Expressive is that every other button seems to be 85% padding and 15% actual content. What happened to reasonable information density?
- legitster 1y ago
  For control surfaces, padding prevents misclicks. It's actually very important part of perceived interface quality when dealing with a handheld touchscreen device.
  - robocat 1y ago
    Different topic: CSS doesn't have a good way to manage nearby clicks? A tap just a few px outside a button should click the button? <Input>s can steal focus from nearby taps on Mobile Safari (which can also be a fuckup). I hate iPhone taps that slip a little and scrollable areas having queer interactions (causing usability/accessibility issues).
    - crazygringo 1y ago
      You could, but you don't want it to. Buttons are e.g. often floating above content, or adjacent to other buttons. It's just as bad to click a button you don't want to, when you're merely trying to scroll, or highlight text, or click another button. Making a button's clickable area larger than the button itself can be desirable in limited circumstances, but it's not a general-purpose solution.
      - robocat 1y ago
        > You could, but you don't want it to. Argue with Apple because Mobile Safari makes a tap close to a button click the button (and it causes exactly the problems you've predicted, and workarounds are difficult). Do you do a lot of close testing?? Because the feature is quite noticeable. Try it yourself on an iPhone (ideally use something that can do smaller taps than a finger, with zoom and without zoom): https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/Elements/button https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/... I recall that similar features are more obvious on Android because you can make taps visible. Virtual keyboards also have interesting responses to close taps on key buttons.
      - gf000 1y ago
        As a proof.. well just use HN on your phone. It absolutely sucks, so those UI puritanists - please learn a lesson and at least make touch targets reasonably sized!
        robocat 1y ago
        Exactly: we need an easy way to increase the tappable area of the vote buttons. You can't just add a invisible tappable wide border because the tap zones must not overlap. It is hard to design to be contained within a component. I had to use customised elements/CSS because the tappable area depends upon where a control/component is placed next to another control/component. I also recall an obscure fix necessary for Mobile Safari. If you wanted something clickable near an <input> you needed to take care how you designed it because otherwise the <input> would steal the click. You could add an onclick handler (Mobile Safari has a bunch of heuristic hacks where onclick= will cause differences to touch behaviours when a touch is on an element that has a click handler. You could also use a button which might or might not be more accessible depending on needs and design. I recall I needed a lot of fiddling depending on each control.
    - gherkinnn 1y ago
      What's wrong with increasing the size of the button? You can set a (pseudo) element as an invisible enlargement of that button but then you will get accidental taps.
    - downsplat 1y ago
      Some positive padding, offset by the same negative margin, will do just that, i.e capture clicks near the link or button. It has some problems, but I've seen it used to make footnote links easier to click on mobile. Ex: a.fn-link { padding:10px 18px; margin:-10px -18px; }
  - jay_kyburz 1y ago
    Yeah, but the icons and labels could use more of that padding and be larger so old folks like me can see them.
    - tkzed49 1y ago
      There's literally a setting for this. There are separate sliders for "display size" and "font size", the latter of which just makes the font larger
      - jay_kyburz 1y ago
        haha yes, I tried to use my kids phone the other day and I had forgotten how much larger I had set the fonts on my own phone. It was impossible to read anything. It's actually a credit to google that you can scale the fonts up so much and then forget you had done it. In the old days, the UI would be broken in various places.
        andrewshadura 1y ago
        It is still often broken, especially when a non-English locale is set. A family member uses larger fonts in Android, and most labels are barely readable (barel… readab…), UI widgets often don't fit on the screen etc.
    - xinayder 1y ago
      The trend nowadays is to remove icons, because UX designers think it makes the control too bloated and users don't perceive icons anyways (joke).
- xboxnolifes 1y ago
  Buttons are whatever for me, but the padding on things like notifications and other information text is getting ridiculous. The notifications are taking up 1/4 of the screen and managing to only show 3 words of an email or text on my phone.
pier25 1y ago
Couldn't agree more. Quite a fall from grace by Apple.
- rudedogg 1y ago
  I thought it looks nice, and gives more focus to the content like they intended :/. The space around a block style tab-bar/navbar is wasted anyway, might as well show some of the content. Most apps were doing it anyway. Seeing a system tabbar/navbar was getting rare in “good” apps.
- nextos 1y ago
  Apple did skeuomorphism really well, which is hard and requires a lot of design work. I cannot understand why they gradually abandoned that, as it was clearly a competitive moat in terms of usability. I've seen how computer illiterate or elderly people were able to navigate skeuomorphic designs with relative ease. Right now, they can't tell what is a button or a field and what isn't.
  - kstrauser 1y ago
    It was primarily because skeuomorphic UIs don't scale well with user experience levels. They're easier for novices but don't lend themselves well to expert use, unless you add a bunch of extra affordances that would seem really out of place in a UI meant to look like a real thing. And what does a skeuomorphic web browser or email app look ike? We don't have those in meatspace.
    - jazzyjackson 1y ago
      inbox/outbox is a holdover from bins setting on your desk. but yeah there's not much more to the interface of a blank sheet of paper. I disagree that skeuomorphic can't be used by power users. Just throw a bunch of keyboard shortcuts in there.
  - pazimzadeh 1y ago
    It was less of flat vs. skeuomorphic than dead vs. alive elements (https://vimeo.com/64895205 https://vimeo.com/64895205). While the technology to create 'alive' skeuomorphic elements now exists, that wasn't the case a few years ago. Older skeuomorphic designs were static/rasters which were clunky to either mix these static elements with animated elements (for example the iOS 7 menu title transitions) or to have transparency (how can you have transparent leather/velvet?). Liquid Glass is actually an extension of the foundation laid by iOS 7. Many parts of the iOS 7 transition guide might as well have been written for Liquid Glass: - "Make sure that app content is discernible through translucent UI elements—such as bars and keyboards—and the transparent status bar" - "Examine your app for hard-coded UI values—such as sizes and positions—and replace them with those you derive dynamically from system-provided values." https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/TransitionGuide/Scoping.html https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Us...
aaomidi 1y ago
I decided to install the beta to get a more informed opinion. I think the UI looks better when you’re holding it vs seeing it in the pictures. Control center, however, sucks.
- microtonal 1y ago
  I installed the iOS beta and thought it was as bad, if not worse than the WWDC demos. In a lot of cases, text becomes outright unreadable. Control Center looks like a mess with all the transparency. Like the grandparent I'm much more excited by Material Design 3 Expressive.
  - argsnd 1y ago
    There's some instances of text illegibility that seems to be caused by buggy contrast detection and I think they'll probably fix that pretty easily since this is only the first beta. I think the readability concerns are really overblown.
  - int_19h 1y ago
    In Vista/Win7, they mostly used glass background for parts of the window that didn't have any text on them. And for the few exceptions where that wasn't the case (like e.g. window titles) they added a kind of halo so that black text would always contrast with that regardless of what was below the window, or else just significantly darken the glass and use white text. All for obvious reasons. Looking at the new iOS screenshots, I'm surprised that those reasons apparently aren't obvious to Apple designers.
  - aaomidi 1y ago
    Maybe I've dodged this by having a fully black background! Hope they improve on some of these issues.
- MisterBiggs 1y ago
  Same experience. I hopped on the beta because I thought the current version was going to be really bad and I wanted to watch them move towards something more functional. Its definitely not perfect but the way that the UI reacts in real time to holding the phone and elements moving makes it work really well and isn't something you can capture in a screenshot or video.
jauntywundrkind 1y ago
The layer separation on Material has been really not good for me. The floating action button is so hard to notice sometimes; I've reached out for IT help or support sometimes because I just didn't notice it. I haven't used it yet but the refraction effect on Liquid Glass feels like it could be amazingly good at creating a sense of layer separation. Static content it's maybe not going to be awesome at, but as soon as the there's motion, the non-linear motion around the bend of the glass, for me, seems to create a very easy perturbance of regular motion that it feels like eyes, in their radar like way, instantly know of, without having to look closely and interpret.
- cosmic_cheese 1y ago
  In my view the dramatic reduction of depth in Material 2 and beyond was a real mistake. That was the one redeeming thing it had over other flat UI design systems.
saubeidl 1y ago
I agree, but that being said, I still think it peaked at the OG Material. I miss elevation shadows.
andrepd 1y ago
Superfluous animations, cryptic icons and UI elements with no indication of function and capabilities, and ungodly amounts of whitespace that make my 5.8" screen have less information density than my 2009 Nokia. That's not what "legible and gets out my my way" means to me.
SebastianKra 1y ago
I'm also disappointed in Apple right now, but the screenshots of the Calendar and Gmail Apps in this post are even worse. Content in Gmail is separated by kilometers of whitespace with not a divider in sight. The calendar reserves 10% of horizontal whitespace for this crucial 2014 low-poly wallpaper…
bitwize 1y ago
Indeed, but Apple still wins when it comes to "wow factor". In a year's time Android will look old and busted, and Google will have to respond with a similar UI refresh. Of course it won't be as pretty, responsive, or slick but it will keep Android in the running. Turns out "pretty" matters -- a lot -- in UI. Sucks for those of us who found Windows 9x, NEXTSTEP, or AmigaOS as the pinnacle of usability, but users find themselves more comfortable with a UI that looks modern even if said UI has other detriments like lack of affordance.
- paulryanrogers 1y ago
  "Pretty" is subjective and changes every 6 months or so. I prefer no animations, no translucency, info density, and an accurate calculator no matter how fast I type. But for fashion reasons we cannot have nice things.
  - jajuuka 1y ago
    Hey, I got that reference! Completely agree though.
- Larrikin 1y ago
  Material Design does not get updated very often. The only reason M3 is a big deal, is because it's the first major change in years.
- rickdeckard 1y ago
  The great thing about Material Design is that it lays a solid foundation to put such gaudy elements on top, because if the design-language is properly followed it can also be globally adjusted. So expect Android Device Vendors to expand their theme engines to support more excessive GUI eyecandy than even before, "liquid glass" will be the minimum The odd thing about this journey is, that once you're used to the simplicity of Material Design, adding such liquid/glass/leather/concrete/... elements to the rendering just degrades readability. My guess is that Apple now cranked up the eyecandy again for everyone to follow, to then tone it down in the coming years, again appearing more "mature" than others. And in the end we will settle on something close to Material Design again, with more z-axis separation (more shadows, floating,...) and liquid state-transitions (changing elements affecting other nearby elements) But hey, it's everyone's individual journey.
scottoreily 1y ago
[dead]
dmix 1y ago
Have you tried the beta on iPhone? 75% of the time it seems much nicer with 25% degraded. It's a weird mix but I see why they went in that direction. The only real problem is the religious adherence to the glass design language that is hurting it... because there are very good UX/design improvements via the glass, just not everywhere. I wouldn't judge the new Android until I tried it on a phone either.
- rickdeckard 1y ago
  > The only real problem is the religious adherence to the glass design language that is hurting it That's also my impression, iOS 26 looks like some UI's were peer-reviewed and thrown back with the note "Not gaudy enough, it's not enough glass! Remember, the theme is 'Liquid Glass', Management wants to see traces of this on every screen!"
  - dmix 1y ago
    100%, I do love Safari though. I'd almost say it's a good release if the icons weren't so funky
mrcwinn 1y ago
Whatever the hot takes... nothing is more "dangerous" than a sound design philosophy. Sure, there are tweaks to make and I don't love everything about Apple's new design, but what I see is a team with an opinion on how to unify design across a full suite of products. That sounds quite durable to me.
SchemaLoad 1y ago
Material is fine, but it feels pretty uninspired to me. Like the corporate art version of UI. Big flat inoffensive blobs, washed out pastel colours, etc. The new iOS demo kinda makes me feel excited to try the new update, once they iron out a few of the poor contrast spots.
- IgorPartola 1y ago
  I agree. It is clear, functional, and reminds me of staged doctor’s offices in commercials for prescription drugs. Apple now is entering their Windows XP design era. Once things get too gaudy they will introduce Flat Glass or pretend like they invented straight lines and sharp corners. But at least that seems to have a personality.
  - JadeNB 1y ago
    > Apple now is entering their Windows XP design era. Is Windows XP universally understood to be bad design? I remember it as somewhere between blandly unremarkable and slightly pleasant.
    - coredog64 1y ago
      The "Fisher-Price" design language was unpopular, but ISTR you could turn off most of the eye candy and get a the Windows 2000 design language. Pretty sure that was like the first or second thing I did with both XP and Vista.
      - derefr 1y ago
        And even then, people were never against most of it. Scrollbar thumbs with grip stipple? Checkboxes that fill in with a roundrect rather than a checkmark? Buttons and tabs that have an inline ring-highlight "intent" color to them, akin to the fill color on modern Bootstrap theme buttons? These were all parts of the Luna theme as well — and people liked them. (And, IIRC, they were often sad that these parts got deactivated when reverting to the Windows Classic theme, and often asked if there was some hybrid theme that kept these.) With Luna, I think people were mainly just reacting negatively to two things: 1. the start button being big and green and a weird blob shape; the start menu it opens having a huge, very rounded forehead and chin — and both of these having a certain "pre-baked custom PNG image 8-way sliced in Photoshop and drawn by parts" look that you'd see used on web pages in this era. This made the whole UI feel very "non-brutalist" — form not following function, the way it did in Windows Classic (where the theme was in part designed to optimize for as few line-draw GDI calls as possible.) 2. both the taskbar and window title bars being vertically thicker, and having a vaguely-plastic-looking sheen to them to "add dimensionality." And my hypothesis is that, of these, it was mainly the "vertically thicker" taskbar+window decorations that upset so many people. This was an era where many screens were still largely 1024x768, even as monitor sizes were growing; so "small was cool" [and legible!] Websites baked their text into images using 8x5 pixel fonts; Linux users used tiny fonts and narrow themes in fvwm/blackbox/fluxbox, etc. In that era, a title bar stealing thirty whole pixels was almost blasphemy. (Same problem with the Office XP ribbon. Microsoft's visual designers must have been too far ahead-of-the-curve in what kind of resolutions their graphics cards supported, I think.) I think, if there was an alternate version of Luna that also shipped with XP, that just narrowed the taskbar and window caption bar to the Windows Classic dimensions... then Luna would have been universally acclaimed.
tail_exchange 1y ago
The opposite for me. I'm so tired of the boring and uninspiring flat design, that Apple may have convinced me to get an iPhone next time I upgrade. I don't even notice Android updates anymore, the past 3 or 4 just look and feel the same.
bandoti 1y ago
I find as time goes on I am less-and-less excited about mobile releases. I’ve had a smartphone since the Google Nexus 1. The desktop experience is always better, and a good book is even more inviting. Curious what other folks are feeling. A lot of these tools seem like useless frivolity. Meanwhile, I have family who constantly get confused whether the iOS phone icon is FaceTime or the “real” phone; and I have to do multiple taps instead of one to make a FaceTime call—and Apple is busy making Liquid Glass, for what?
- dr-detroit 1y ago
  [dead]
- SchemaLoad 1y ago
  The old mobile OSs used to be hilariously lacking so every update was genuinely game changing. I remember getting really excited when Android Ice Cream Sandwich was adding screenshot functionality to tablets. And hearing people talk about folders getting added to iOS. Now all the low hanging fruit is gone they are less exciting. The photogrammetry api stuff added to iOS probably took 100x the dev effort of adding folders and copy/paste, but gets far less excitement.
  - nashashmi 1y ago
    The remaining low hanging fruits seem to be in porting to desktop docks.
    - xattt 1y ago
      It feels like Apple’s announcements for iPad OS are telegraphing that docking might be supported in yet-to-be-released iPhones.
      - nashashmi 1y ago
        There is only one purpose for the iPhone to have a usb c connection. Just one. The dock. Like all things apple, watch them muzzle it to keep sales of the IPAD high.
kevin_thibedeau 1y ago
More like shouting "Watch me drain your battery all day long".
- autoexec 1y ago
  you sell more phones that way.
hulitu 1y ago
> be clear, legible, and get out of the way. Which none of the current OSs do (except Linux without SystemD or BSDs, with a custom WM)
- hackyhacky 1y ago
  Huh? What does systemd have to do with UX? If you want a bare bones Linux GUI, there are plenty of options, e.g. i3, which are completely independent of your preferred process 1.
  - benchly 1y ago
    Not the user you asked, but systemd has been controversial for a long time, long enough that I see the topic come up about once a month on various forums. There's a few folks who even consider it a bit fascist, I guess. I don't particularly mind it myself, but I get where some power users would get irked by it. This article does a decent job of explaining why; https://www.infoworld.com/article/2251761/linux-why-do-people-hate-systemd.html https://www.infoworld.com/article/2251761/linux-why-do-peopl...
    - hackyhacky 1y ago
      I fully understand the controversy about systemd, but the comment I replied to seemed to imply that systems was related to the Linux GUI, which it is not.

by paxys 1y ago

LorenDB 1y ago

My main complaint with Material Expressive is that every other button seems to be 85% padding and 15% actual content. What happened to reasonable information density?

legitster 1y ago
For control surfaces, padding prevents misclicks. It's actually very important part of perceived interface quality when dealing with a handheld touchscreen device.
- robocat 1y ago
  Different topic: CSS doesn't have a good way to manage nearby clicks? A tap just a few px outside a button should click the button? <Input>s can steal focus from nearby taps on Mobile Safari (which can also be a fuckup). I hate iPhone taps that slip a little and scrollable areas having queer interactions (causing usability/accessibility issues).
  - crazygringo 1y ago
    You could, but you don't want it to. Buttons are e.g. often floating above content, or adjacent to other buttons. It's just as bad to click a button you don't want to, when you're merely trying to scroll, or highlight text, or click another button. Making a button's clickable area larger than the button itself can be desirable in limited circumstances, but it's not a general-purpose solution.
    - robocat 1y ago
      > You could, but you don't want it to. Argue with Apple because Mobile Safari makes a tap close to a button click the button (and it causes exactly the problems you've predicted, and workarounds are difficult). Do you do a lot of close testing?? Because the feature is quite noticeable. Try it yourself on an iPhone (ideally use something that can do smaller taps than a finger, with zoom and without zoom): https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/Elements/button https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/... I recall that similar features are more obvious on Android because you can make taps visible. Virtual keyboards also have interesting responses to close taps on key buttons.
    - gf000 1y ago
      As a proof.. well just use HN on your phone. It absolutely sucks, so those UI puritanists - please learn a lesson and at least make touch targets reasonably sized!
      - robocat 1y ago
        Exactly: we need an easy way to increase the tappable area of the vote buttons. You can't just add a invisible tappable wide border because the tap zones must not overlap. It is hard to design to be contained within a component. I had to use customised elements/CSS because the tappable area depends upon where a control/component is placed next to another control/component. I also recall an obscure fix necessary for Mobile Safari. If you wanted something clickable near an <input> you needed to take care how you designed it because otherwise the <input> would steal the click. You could add an onclick handler (Mobile Safari has a bunch of heuristic hacks where onclick= will cause differences to touch behaviours when a touch is on an element that has a click handler. You could also use a button which might or might not be more accessible depending on needs and design. I recall I needed a lot of fiddling depending on each control.
  - gherkinnn 1y ago
    What's wrong with increasing the size of the button? You can set a (pseudo) element as an invisible enlargement of that button but then you will get accidental taps.
  - downsplat 1y ago
    Some positive padding, offset by the same negative margin, will do just that, i.e capture clicks near the link or button. It has some problems, but I've seen it used to make footnote links easier to click on mobile. Ex: a.fn-link { padding:10px 18px; margin:-10px -18px; }
- jay_kyburz 1y ago
  Yeah, but the icons and labels could use more of that padding and be larger so old folks like me can see them.
  - tkzed49 1y ago
    There's literally a setting for this. There are separate sliders for "display size" and "font size", the latter of which just makes the font larger
    - jay_kyburz 1y ago
      haha yes, I tried to use my kids phone the other day and I had forgotten how much larger I had set the fonts on my own phone. It was impossible to read anything. It's actually a credit to google that you can scale the fonts up so much and then forget you had done it. In the old days, the UI would be broken in various places.
      - andrewshadura 1y ago
        It is still often broken, especially when a non-English locale is set. A family member uses larger fonts in Android, and most labels are barely readable (barel… readab…), UI widgets often don't fit on the screen etc.
  - xinayder 1y ago
    The trend nowadays is to remove icons, because UX designers think it makes the control too bloated and users don't perceive icons anyways (joke).
xboxnolifes 1y ago
Buttons are whatever for me, but the padding on things like notifications and other information text is getting ridiculous. The notifications are taking up 1/4 of the screen and managing to only show 3 words of an email or text on my phone.

pier25 1y ago

Couldn't agree more. Quite a fall from grace by Apple.

rudedogg 1y ago
I thought it looks nice, and gives more focus to the content like they intended :/. The space around a block style tab-bar/navbar is wasted anyway, might as well show some of the content. Most apps were doing it anyway. Seeing a system tabbar/navbar was getting rare in “good” apps.
nextos 1y ago
Apple did skeuomorphism really well, which is hard and requires a lot of design work. I cannot understand why they gradually abandoned that, as it was clearly a competitive moat in terms of usability. I've seen how computer illiterate or elderly people were able to navigate skeuomorphic designs with relative ease. Right now, they can't tell what is a button or a field and what isn't.
- kstrauser 1y ago
  It was primarily because skeuomorphic UIs don't scale well with user experience levels. They're easier for novices but don't lend themselves well to expert use, unless you add a bunch of extra affordances that would seem really out of place in a UI meant to look like a real thing. And what does a skeuomorphic web browser or email app look ike? We don't have those in meatspace.
  - jazzyjackson 1y ago
    inbox/outbox is a holdover from bins setting on your desk. but yeah there's not much more to the interface of a blank sheet of paper. I disagree that skeuomorphic can't be used by power users. Just throw a bunch of keyboard shortcuts in there.
- pazimzadeh 1y ago
  It was less of flat vs. skeuomorphic than dead vs. alive elements (https://vimeo.com/64895205 https://vimeo.com/64895205). While the technology to create 'alive' skeuomorphic elements now exists, that wasn't the case a few years ago. Older skeuomorphic designs were static/rasters which were clunky to either mix these static elements with animated elements (for example the iOS 7 menu title transitions) or to have transparency (how can you have transparent leather/velvet?). Liquid Glass is actually an extension of the foundation laid by iOS 7. Many parts of the iOS 7 transition guide might as well have been written for Liquid Glass: - "Make sure that app content is discernible through translucent UI elements—such as bars and keyboards—and the transparent status bar" - "Examine your app for hard-coded UI values—such as sizes and positions—and replace them with those you derive dynamically from system-provided values." https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/TransitionGuide/Scoping.html https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Us...

aaomidi 1y ago

I decided to install the beta to get a more informed opinion. I think the UI looks better when you’re holding it vs seeing it in the pictures. Control center, however, sucks.

microtonal 1y ago
I installed the iOS beta and thought it was as bad, if not worse than the WWDC demos. In a lot of cases, text becomes outright unreadable. Control Center looks like a mess with all the transparency. Like the grandparent I'm much more excited by Material Design 3 Expressive.
- argsnd 1y ago
  There's some instances of text illegibility that seems to be caused by buggy contrast detection and I think they'll probably fix that pretty easily since this is only the first beta. I think the readability concerns are really overblown.
- int_19h 1y ago
  In Vista/Win7, they mostly used glass background for parts of the window that didn't have any text on them. And for the few exceptions where that wasn't the case (like e.g. window titles) they added a kind of halo so that black text would always contrast with that regardless of what was below the window, or else just significantly darken the glass and use white text. All for obvious reasons. Looking at the new iOS screenshots, I'm surprised that those reasons apparently aren't obvious to Apple designers.
- aaomidi 1y ago
  Maybe I've dodged this by having a fully black background! Hope they improve on some of these issues.
MisterBiggs 1y ago
Same experience. I hopped on the beta because I thought the current version was going to be really bad and I wanted to watch them move towards something more functional. Its definitely not perfect but the way that the UI reacts in real time to holding the phone and elements moving makes it work really well and isn't something you can capture in a screenshot or video.

jauntywundrkind 1y ago

The layer separation on Material has been really not good for me. The floating action button is so hard to notice sometimes; I've reached out for IT help or support sometimes because I just didn't notice it. I haven't used it yet but the refraction effect on Liquid Glass feels like it could be amazingly good at creating a sense of layer separation. Static content it's maybe not going to be awesome at, but as soon as the there's motion, the non-linear motion around the bend of the glass, for me, seems to create a very easy perturbance of regular motion that it feels like eyes, in their radar like way, instantly know of, without having to look closely and interpret.

cosmic_cheese 1y ago
In my view the dramatic reduction of depth in Material 2 and beyond was a real mistake. That was the one redeeming thing it had over other flat UI design systems.

saubeidl 1y ago

I agree, but that being said, I still think it peaked at the OG Material. I miss elevation shadows.

andrepd 1y ago

Superfluous animations, cryptic icons and UI elements with no indication of function and capabilities, and ungodly amounts of whitespace that make my 5.8" screen have less information density than my 2009 Nokia. That's not what "legible and gets out my my way" means to me.

SebastianKra 1y ago

I'm also disappointed in Apple right now, but the screenshots of the Calendar and Gmail Apps in this post are even worse. Content in Gmail is separated by kilometers of whitespace with not a divider in sight. The calendar reserves 10% of horizontal whitespace for this crucial 2014 low-poly wallpaper…

bitwize 1y ago

Indeed, but Apple still wins when it comes to "wow factor". In a year's time Android will look old and busted, and Google will have to respond with a similar UI refresh. Of course it won't be as pretty, responsive, or slick but it will keep Android in the running. Turns out "pretty" matters -- a lot -- in UI. Sucks for those of us who found Windows 9x, NEXTSTEP, or AmigaOS as the pinnacle of usability, but users find themselves more comfortable with a UI that looks modern even if said UI has other detriments like lack of affordance.

paulryanrogers 1y ago
"Pretty" is subjective and changes every 6 months or so. I prefer no animations, no translucency, info density, and an accurate calculator no matter how fast I type. But for fashion reasons we cannot have nice things.
- jajuuka 1y ago
  Hey, I got that reference! Completely agree though.
Larrikin 1y ago
Material Design does not get updated very often. The only reason M3 is a big deal, is because it's the first major change in years.
rickdeckard 1y ago
The great thing about Material Design is that it lays a solid foundation to put such gaudy elements on top, because if the design-language is properly followed it can also be globally adjusted. So expect Android Device Vendors to expand their theme engines to support more excessive GUI eyecandy than even before, "liquid glass" will be the minimum The odd thing about this journey is, that once you're used to the simplicity of Material Design, adding such liquid/glass/leather/concrete/... elements to the rendering just degrades readability. My guess is that Apple now cranked up the eyecandy again for everyone to follow, to then tone it down in the coming years, again appearing more "mature" than others. And in the end we will settle on something close to Material Design again, with more z-axis separation (more shadows, floating,...) and liquid state-transitions (changing elements affecting other nearby elements) But hey, it's everyone's individual journey.

scottoreily 1y ago

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dmix 1y ago

Have you tried the beta on iPhone? 75% of the time it seems much nicer with 25% degraded. It's a weird mix but I see why they went in that direction. The only real problem is the religious adherence to the glass design language that is hurting it... because there are very good UX/design improvements via the glass, just not everywhere. I wouldn't judge the new Android until I tried it on a phone either.

rickdeckard 1y ago
> The only real problem is the religious adherence to the glass design language that is hurting it That's also my impression, iOS 26 looks like some UI's were peer-reviewed and thrown back with the note "Not gaudy enough, it's not enough glass! Remember, the theme is 'Liquid Glass', Management wants to see traces of this on every screen!"
- dmix 1y ago
  100%, I do love Safari though. I'd almost say it's a good release if the icons weren't so funky

mrcwinn 1y ago

Whatever the hot takes... nothing is more "dangerous" than a sound design philosophy. Sure, there are tweaks to make and I don't love everything about Apple's new design, but what I see is a team with an opinion on how to unify design across a full suite of products. That sounds quite durable to me.

SchemaLoad 1y ago

Material is fine, but it feels pretty uninspired to me. Like the corporate art version of UI. Big flat inoffensive blobs, washed out pastel colours, etc. The new iOS demo kinda makes me feel excited to try the new update, once they iron out a few of the poor contrast spots.

IgorPartola 1y ago
I agree. It is clear, functional, and reminds me of staged doctor’s offices in commercials for prescription drugs. Apple now is entering their Windows XP design era. Once things get too gaudy they will introduce Flat Glass or pretend like they invented straight lines and sharp corners. But at least that seems to have a personality.
- JadeNB 1y ago
  > Apple now is entering their Windows XP design era. Is Windows XP universally understood to be bad design? I remember it as somewhere between blandly unremarkable and slightly pleasant.
  - coredog64 1y ago
    The "Fisher-Price" design language was unpopular, but ISTR you could turn off most of the eye candy and get a the Windows 2000 design language. Pretty sure that was like the first or second thing I did with both XP and Vista.
    - derefr 1y ago
      And even then, people were never against most of it. Scrollbar thumbs with grip stipple? Checkboxes that fill in with a roundrect rather than a checkmark? Buttons and tabs that have an inline ring-highlight "intent" color to them, akin to the fill color on modern Bootstrap theme buttons? These were all parts of the Luna theme as well — and people liked them. (And, IIRC, they were often sad that these parts got deactivated when reverting to the Windows Classic theme, and often asked if there was some hybrid theme that kept these.) With Luna, I think people were mainly just reacting negatively to two things: 1. the start button being big and green and a weird blob shape; the start menu it opens having a huge, very rounded forehead and chin — and both of these having a certain "pre-baked custom PNG image 8-way sliced in Photoshop and drawn by parts" look that you'd see used on web pages in this era. This made the whole UI feel very "non-brutalist" — form not following function, the way it did in Windows Classic (where the theme was in part designed to optimize for as few line-draw GDI calls as possible.) 2. both the taskbar and window title bars being vertically thicker, and having a vaguely-plastic-looking sheen to them to "add dimensionality." And my hypothesis is that, of these, it was mainly the "vertically thicker" taskbar+window decorations that upset so many people. This was an era where many screens were still largely 1024x768, even as monitor sizes were growing; so "small was cool" [and legible!] Websites baked their text into images using 8x5 pixel fonts; Linux users used tiny fonts and narrow themes in fvwm/blackbox/fluxbox, etc. In that era, a title bar stealing thirty whole pixels was almost blasphemy. (Same problem with the Office XP ribbon. Microsoft's visual designers must have been too far ahead-of-the-curve in what kind of resolutions their graphics cards supported, I think.) I think, if there was an alternate version of Luna that also shipped with XP, that just narrowed the taskbar and window caption bar to the Windows Classic dimensions... then Luna would have been universally acclaimed.

tail_exchange 1y ago

The opposite for me. I'm so tired of the boring and uninspiring flat design, that Apple may have convinced me to get an iPhone next time I upgrade. I don't even notice Android updates anymore, the past 3 or 4 just look and feel the same.

bandoti 1y ago

I find as time goes on I am less-and-less excited about mobile releases. I’ve had a smartphone since the Google Nexus 1. The desktop experience is always better, and a good book is even more inviting. Curious what other folks are feeling. A lot of these tools seem like useless frivolity. Meanwhile, I have family who constantly get confused whether the iOS phone icon is FaceTime or the “real” phone; and I have to do multiple taps instead of one to make a FaceTime call—and Apple is busy making Liquid Glass, for what?

dr-detroit 1y ago
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SchemaLoad 1y ago
The old mobile OSs used to be hilariously lacking so every update was genuinely game changing. I remember getting really excited when Android Ice Cream Sandwich was adding screenshot functionality to tablets. And hearing people talk about folders getting added to iOS. Now all the low hanging fruit is gone they are less exciting. The photogrammetry api stuff added to iOS probably took 100x the dev effort of adding folders and copy/paste, but gets far less excitement.
- nashashmi 1y ago
  The remaining low hanging fruits seem to be in porting to desktop docks.
  - xattt 1y ago
    It feels like Apple’s announcements for iPad OS are telegraphing that docking might be supported in yet-to-be-released iPhones.
    - nashashmi 1y ago
      There is only one purpose for the iPhone to have a usb c connection. Just one. The dock. Like all things apple, watch them muzzle it to keep sales of the IPAD high.

kevin_thibedeau 1y ago

More like shouting "Watch me drain your battery all day long".

autoexec 1y ago
you sell more phones that way.

hulitu 1y ago

> be clear, legible, and get out of the way. Which none of the current OSs do (except Linux without SystemD or BSDs, with a custom WM)

hackyhacky 1y ago
Huh? What does systemd have to do with UX? If you want a bare bones Linux GUI, there are plenty of options, e.g. i3, which are completely independent of your preferred process 1.
- benchly 1y ago
  Not the user you asked, but systemd has been controversial for a long time, long enough that I see the topic come up about once a month on various forums. There's a few folks who even consider it a bit fascist, I guess. I don't particularly mind it myself, but I get where some power users would get irked by it. This article does a decent job of explaining why; https://www.infoworld.com/article/2251761/linux-why-do-people-hate-systemd.html https://www.infoworld.com/article/2251761/linux-why-do-peopl...
  - hackyhacky 1y ago
    I fully understand the controversy about systemd, but the comment I replied to seemed to imply that systems was related to the Linux GUI, which it is not.