[HN Gopher] Material 3 Expressive
___________________________________________________________________
Material 3 Expressive
Author : meetpateltech
Score : 293 points
Date : 2025-05-13 17:20 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (design.google)
(TXT) w3m dump (design.google)
| jakubmazanec wrote:
| It looks like "expressive" in this case means "various pastel
| shades of pink and purple".
| owebmaster wrote:
| It looked expressive and unconventional for the internal
| committees.
| criddell wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Animated border radius
| Onavo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It seems UI trends are going to repeat like fashion repeats
| itself in cycles.
| dotancohen wrote:
| UI trends _are_ fashion trends.
| AJRF wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It feels a lot like "duotones everywhere" - i.e. the hottest
| trend of 2022
| xiphias2 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 70+ is not a marketable demographic.
| bsimpson wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| How designers see the icons / how I see the icons
|
| https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1400/0*X5Zz-PxT8087KG2...
| martin_a wrote:
| Instantly hate that page for changing my cursor. Why do they even
| do that?
| ivanjermakov wrote:
| They made you "feel something" I guess
| meekaaku wrote:
| That feeling is hate
| pona-a wrote:
| 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 nA 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 wrote:
| The cursor being captured when hovering buttons is the worst UI
| I've seen in a very long time
| SietrixDev wrote:
| It's what iPad does when you use a mouse. https://web.archive
| .org/web/20200602200001/https://www.apple...
| jfoster wrote:
| Is that meant to be an argument in favor of it? That it's
| what the iPad does for the extremely rare case of a user
| using a mouse with it?
| SietrixDev wrote:
| Just information. I don't know rare this case is, I use
| my iPad mostly with magic keyboard which has a touchpad.
|
| Honestly it doesn't bother me at all because it only
| applies to UI elements and not the websites link or
| buttons.
| wpm wrote:
| It sucks on there too. Thankfully it can be toned
| down/disabled there.
| MildlySerious wrote:
| This is, for all I care, on par with sites that mess with
| scrolling.
|
| I sort of understand this being used on artistic or playful
| sites, or ones to show off tech, sure. On a document that
| talks about usability? Feels like satire.
| jeffhuys wrote:
| I have my cursor set to "pretty damn big" because my resolution
| is also big. Makes it more visible. Sure, now the contrast is
| really nice, but it's still a tiny circle I have to find
| instead of a humongus arrow I'm used to.
|
| Guess we'll get another browser extension soon... I'd call it
| "My Emotions!"
| worble wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| antisthenes wrote:
| First, they came for my scroll bars...
| drcongo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Is Material Web still in "maintenance mode" i.e. dead?
|
| https://github.com/material-components/material-web/discussi...
|
| So Material Design is Android only, yes?
| owebmaster wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| mui.com is still around and IMO way better than this crap
| anentropic wrote:
| 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/ looks to
| be carrying the flag quite nicely (I haven't used it yet).
| jdougan wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Especially since it feels so bland and "corpo safe" - the only
| thing I have feelings about is selling this as expressive :D
| andrepd wrote:
| 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.
| vermilingua wrote:
| I was positive that this was satire, but no that's
| genuinely right there in the post.
| owebmaster wrote:
| Google became a trillion dollars satire
| jeffhuys wrote:
| > willing to break from convention
|
| By following this new shiny convention!
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| That's disruption, baby!
| mnmalst wrote:
| I am a little afraid to ask but what is a "jump in
| rebelliousness"?
| junon wrote:
| Rebelliousness appears to be one of the emotion metrics
| they used to score the designs.
| sksrbWgbfK wrote:
| It's the new way hipsters use their fingers to push the
| buttons with their fingers. It's magical or something.
| noworriesnate wrote:
| It means a trillion dollar company is affirming people's
| dissatisfaction with the status quo for even more $$$.
| krunck wrote:
| While destroying the meaning of rebellion - which we
| could use a bit of right now.
| mouse_ wrote:
| This reeks of "Defiant Jazz"
| everybodyknows wrote:
| And they quantified each of those gains down to two full
| decimal places of precision!
| figassis wrote:
| So google has been tracking rebelliousness since when that
| today they have a 30% historical comparison?
| fngjdflmdflg wrote:
| It doesn't look bland to me at all. Most of the examples look
| like a failed Linux rice.
| rafaelmn wrote:
| The colors scheme are like the definition of bland, theres
| zero punchy contrast, there's nothing popping. They show
| super smooth squiggly line as a "contrast" to a straight
| line in the play progress. Wow so brave, much courage
|
| Feels tame and bland - and I have no problem with, in fact
| I don't really want my phone OS GUI to be radical. But just
| don't sell me BS about how this is bold and how it induces
| emotional response :D
| nicce wrote:
| Also known as marketing. I don't know why they need it here so
| much.
| xrhobo wrote:
| I assume not only do they believe what they are writing but
| would believe you and I just don't "get it".
|
| To be fair, there are things I am really into that seem just as
| ridiculous to an outsider/non-connoisseur. Microtonal music for
| example. I have seen youtube comments before on pieces I really
| do love saying that people must be pretending to like this
| music because it sounds so awful to them.
|
| Or wine tasting comes to mind. I love wine but the wine tasting
| connoisseur seems ridiculous to me. We really are having two
| different experiences though.
|
| The writers probably are perceiving these things and not just
| making them up.
| arp242 wrote:
| The thing is I can understand wine tasting, or microtonal
| music, or poetry, or lots of other things. I don't really
| "get" those things either, but I can see how it's something
| that other people do "get". I do understand it on some level.
|
| But this kind of stuff ... I don't really understand how
| anyone can say something like that with a straight face. But
| maybe that's just a failure of empathy on my part *shrug*
| tomovo wrote:
| You assume it's people writing it. It was probably written by
| AI. Nobody cares.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Depends on how deep you want the belief to be, but a lot of
| people will hold weird beliefs. I've seen colleagues express so
| much pride, joy and pleasure for things that I consider bogus
| at best (and totally detrimental if I'm being harsh), so I
| wouldn't be surprised people who live in UX land to be in that
| kind of bubble. The worst part to me .. is the blend of cutesy-
| butterfly projects with "scientific study" practices. So now
| they have stats on how their emotion framework is the best for
| the future.
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| I heard recently from a professional Marketer/Behavioral
| Psychologist is one of the things he learned that was a gut
| punch was the things one holds most dear are generally
| commodities to almost everyone else.
| nkrisc wrote:
| As a UX designer, I assure you there are still some of us
| that are cynical about all this BS.
|
| In my experience, the one thing that people care about
| feeling when using some GUI is that they are on the right
| track and are closer to accomplishing whatever task they are
| performing.
|
| I'll say this though, the UX designers who speak in flowery
| bullshit like that tend to get noticed more and climb the
| career ladder, because it's what everyone wants to hear. It's
| this kind of stuff that made disillusioned me and made me
| hate the work.
|
| I think some really do believe it, and I think others will
| just say whatever they think someone wants to hear.
| moffkalast wrote:
| I doubt it's actual people writing it anymore, probably
| something from Gemini. All the emotions, none of the feels.
| dgllghr wrote:
| I unfortunately think this is a case of manufactured consent:
|
| > You don't say something because it's true; you say it because
| you believe it--and you believe it because it's what gets
| rewarded.
| quitit wrote:
| I notice that Google's design never speaks for itself. It's
| always married with overbearing verbiage that sounds like it
| was penned for a Will Ferrell film.
| lm28469 wrote:
| Since a few years I can't tell if these things are satirical or
| serious, a lot of people working for FAANG are completely
| delirious and barely connected to the reality of 99.999% of the
| population.
|
| > M3 Expressive designs were rated higher across desirability
| attributes, including "modernity," "subculture," and
| "rebelliousness."
|
| What does it even mean ?
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Truly is amazing how capitalism just consumes and repurposes
| everything.
|
| Ah yes, our subculture is so rebellious as we use a product
| created by the fifth largest company in the world by market
| cap that makes $100,000,000,000 in profit annually.
|
| We need detournement back.
| hokkos wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I'm still on 11 (thank you lineageos security updates) so I've
| managed to avoid the material you madness.
| jiehong wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| ikr? I'm still amazed at how bad material is from a UX point of
| view. All the gear, no idea I guess
| eviks wrote:
| 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)
| carlosjobim wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| That's a mixed bag.
|
| Have a look at the linked 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 wrote:
| For anyone not familiar with previous designs, each component
| in https://m3.material.io/components has a "comparison with
| Material v2" section.
| jansan wrote:
| 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/A97...
|
| [2] https://image.stern.de/31749130/t/Ag/v2/w1440/r0/-/01--
| artik...
| onion2k wrote:
| _It looks more playful and less professional._
|
| That's intentional. Google's UX research is telling them
| that's what users (between 18 and 34 specifically) want
| more of.
| dcrazy wrote:
| Those cars look like driveable iMacs.
| moffkalast wrote:
| It's been a meme [0] for a while that Google is eventually
| designing all icons to look the exact same. I think the UX
| engineers have been kicked out.
|
| [0]https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1400/0*X5Zz-
| PxT8087KG2...
| klabb3 wrote:
| > But it's still a flat design, and thus does not properly
| transport clickability.
|
| And toggled / disabled states. With mobile's lack of hover,
| it's often a game of trial and error to figure out what's even
| interactable.
|
| > 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.
|
| It looks like a poster for a party. To extrapolate, it feels
| like the lineage is digital marketing, especially video centric
| content on mobile-exclusive byte sized attention-scape. This
| style draws less attention to your options (what you can do),
| and more towards content (what's provided for you). It's
| reduced decision making, highlighting the happy/desired path
| even more. No wonder it scores higher in user testing - it
| requires less thinking IF you take the happy path.
|
| I'd imagine it works great for simple commercial products with
| single call to actions. But for apps (not posters) it leaves a
| lot on the table.
| Spivak wrote:
| > This style draws less attention to your options (what you
| can do), and more towards content (what's provided for you)
|
| I see this is as a good thing, apps are finally being
| designed with the assumption that people will use them more
| than once. Previous design systems prioritize "first
| discovery" so much it gets in the way once you're a regular
| user. Once you know your way around the actual content of the
| app should be most of the screen.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| > And toggled / disabled states. With mobile's lack of hover,
| it's often a game of trial and error to figure out what's
| even interactable.
|
| The toggle switch is one of the worst UI conventions to come
| out of mobile IMO and I get irrationally irate when I see it
| in desktop UIs with a mouse and keyboard.
|
| A simple checkbox would have done just fine, we've those
| since forever, and they clearly convey either an on or off
| state.
|
| Nope, not good enough, we need a toggle switch. Which color
| or direction is on or off? Who knows, because everyone
| implements it differently.
| safety1st wrote:
| Why's it all pink? Are they really making the default theme of
| the future pink?
|
| If an update makes my phone pink, I'm throwing it away.
| onli wrote:
| The big thing of this design system is that you can change
| the colors ;)
| p_l wrote:
| I have simple question:
|
| WHY that page results, in recent chrome with all sorts of hw
| acceleration, on powerful laptop, to suck over 6 cores of cpu.
| As in, Chrome's internal task manager shows over 600% cpu use.
|
| I have less cpu use playing recent-ish AAA game with maxed out
| details in 4k resolution
| onli wrote:
| The one I linked to? No idea. Works fine in Firefox with
| Ublock Origin from that perspective, but also there the side
| menu does not render properly and the JS console does not
| look happy.
| p_l wrote:
| > The one I linked to?
|
| Yep. I have to say that it differs - it happened over half
| of the times I opened it, but never when I tried to figure
| things out with DevTools. Originally I noticed when I had
| it open in background and entire system started lagging
| from load.
| robertoandred wrote:
| Good lord, that page you linked is 60MB.
| 16bytes wrote:
| Can you recommend another comprehensive design system? As an
| engineer, that's the most valuable thing about MD3: the figma
| design kit and per component design guidelines. It lets me
| offload a ton of workload I'd otherwise have to do myself
| (poorly) or outsource to a designer.
|
| I haven't seen another design system that is as comprehensive
| to material. Express seems like an evolutionary refresh with
| some things I could use right away, but otherwise most of the
| content is MD3. It's valuable to me as part of the larger
| ecosystem.
| onli wrote:
| I am not aware of a better alternative. It is a good
| question, that would be quite helpful!
|
| What I did in the past (with M3) is to add some additional
| design tweaks (in flutter), like giving buttons an elevation.
| That worked when I had the designer on my side and since the
| app came from flutters M2 style, which had similar aspects.
| But it is cumbersome to argue against a google guideline with
| only usability knowledge and test results, and it also
| frankly depends on each component what can be done, which
| means the adapted design can easily become inconsistent if
| one is not careful.
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| ...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 wrote:
| This effect is brutal and made me feel a bit motion sick trying
| to scroll the site :/.
| boobsbr wrote:
| > M3 Expressive designs were rated higher across desirability
| attributes, including "modernity," "subculture," and
| "rebelliousness."
|
| The more UI "evolves", the more I crave Win98.
| skydhash wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| rom1v wrote:
| > By making the Send button larger and more prominent,
| participants were able to spot the button four times faster.
|
| By making the Back button larger and more prominent instead,
| participants would be able to spot the button four times
| faster. I suggest to reduce the size of the Send button.
| xattt wrote:
| The running joke was that the back button in Longhorn was
| bigger than the others to make it an easier target to get out
| of Goatse.
| IshKebab wrote:
| After saying they weren't letting data make the decisions
| too...
| laserbeam wrote:
| In my view, peak design is the "density" setting in Gmail where
| you could select between 3 degrees of density and wasted space
| in the UI.
|
| Even though I like somewhat denser interfaces, I know that lots
| of whitespace is GREAT for new users. Just like I know
| everything needs to be in the UI (~80-90% of users click the
| undo button instead of typing Ctrl+Z in many apps). There has
| to be space for a learning curve for any interface.
|
| The ability to make things denser is important, but high
| density is usually only relevant for power users. It should not
| be the benchmark by which a UI is judged.
|
| EDIT: Actual ctrl+z statistic is inaccurate. Details included
| in a further comment.
| smeej wrote:
| Wow, I understand using the button on a phone app, because
| where would you even find the "Ctrl" button, but if it's true
| that even digital natives are still using the button instead
| of a keyboard shortcuts when sitting at a keyboard, that
| boggles my mind.
| laserbeam wrote:
| The statistic is actually wrong, I misremembered. It is
| from Tantacrul, a designer overseeing the current design of
| MuseScore and the redesign of Audacity. It's a finding he
| had while working at microsoft on a revamped version of MS
| Paint (the man has since moved to greener pastures).
|
| The actual moment is a few minutes into the section about
| shortcuts (of a long video trashing a piece of discontinued
| music software). The actual bit was that undo/redo was the
| most clicked button in the MS Paint interface, and that
| people overwhelmingly prefer the button over the shortcut.
| No actual number is specified.
|
| https://youtu.be/Yqaon6YHzaU?si=uDFFQgrbZuYFifhS&t=1580
|
| The correct statistic (which I associated with the other
| example in my mind) was that only 17% of users use more
| than 20 shortcuts.
| eviks wrote:
| > Button instead of Ctrl+Z
|
| This is rather different, this is ignorance, so button
| alternatives _are_ helpful for ignorant users (although one
| of the reasons for such widespread ignorance is precisely
| because there isn 't really much of a learning curve since
| interfaces don't actually teach you much if at all)
|
| But for a lot of whitespace instead of content, what exactly
| does it teach new users? Consider the toolbar example, how
| would showing a new user 3 buttons (left, right, section
| name) help instead of showing 3 buttons with section name and
| a 4th partial text button with section name?
|
| Also, gmail density mostly affects vertical density, the
| number of horizontal tabs doesn't change, so the control
| density doesn't change as much except for the left list of
| categories (but only if it's a big list otherwise it would
| still fit in sparse UI ), making this mostly an aesthetic
| choice (unless you often need to see a lot of emails in a
| list)
| admissionsguy wrote:
| Most users cannot handle more than two buttons anyway, at least
| outside of professional tools for power users.
| eviks wrote:
| Of course they can, do "most users" fail when their browsers
| have more than 2 tabs?
|
| Besides, in this toolbar example, thare are *more than 2
| buttons", so even by your metric it's a fail. It's just that
| instead of actual content section buttons you get left/right
| ones
| theon144 wrote:
| I actually have no idea what you mean with the example, all the
| toolbars on the page fit 4 or more buttons, I tried viewing it
| in various window widths, can you be a bit more specific?
| eviks wrote:
| Try with a smartphone, the very first toolbar
| "Overview/specs/guideline/accessibility", tap the specs to
| see both left/right buttons
| uxcolumbo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I wish they were "restating" them. They're not, they're
| ignoring those principles in favour of vibes design.
| uxcolumbo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > So expressive = make things usable?
|
| An acquaintance said: "For all the talk about accessibility
| there's less and less contrast in everything"
| webprofusion wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| dgimla20 wrote:
| Thanks for writing this. It's refreshing to see there's a
| bunch of us in the same boat.
|
| I think you've hit the nail on the head about the two
| worlds. My phone sits in my pocket most of the day and
| just comes out when I need it. Every day I see people
| looking at their phone as they walk through busy streets,
| walk their dog, pushing prams, at the gym on the
| treadmills, bikes and on the machines. Especially jarring
| to see when it's a rarish sunny day and all that changes
| is the brightness setting on their phone.
| johnisgood wrote:
| Yeah, my phone is just an accessory I keep in my pocket,
| but only when I know I may need it for something, e.g.
| time or calls. Sometimes I do not even take it with
| myself. No reason for me to do that. I just hit 30.
| wltr wrote:
| I feel you guys, but do you read and write here from your
| laptops? I never come here from a desktop browser, only a
| smartphone.
| johnisgood wrote:
| I do not own a laptop, I get on HN from my desktop, never
| from my phone, although I do have "Hacki" installed, I
| just never use it.
|
| > I feel you guys
|
| _contemplates life_... I 'm getting old. :D
| thewebguyd wrote:
| > I feel you guys, but do you read and write here from
| your laptops? I never come here from a desktop browser,
| only a smartphone.
|
| I do. I hate virtual keyboards and the typing experience
| on a phone frustrates me to no end, and the copy & paste
| experience is just as poor. During the workday I don't
| even look at or use my phone, I reply to messages from my
| Mac when needed.
|
| Anything that needs more than a couple lines back and
| forth I do from my laptop. Having a full discussion or
| conversation using a phone virtual keyboard is such a
| user hostile experience to me.
| duderific wrote:
| > Having a full discussion or conversation using a phone
| virtual keyboard is such a user hostile experience to me.
|
| Same - when I'm scrolling Reddit I often feel like I want
| to add a comment, but then think about having to "type" a
| few paragraphs on my phone, and just pass on it. However,
| I'm definitely on the older side, and I do understand
| that the younger generations have no such qualms.
| johnisgood wrote:
| Yup, pretty much my experience. There is no way I am
| going to write paragraphs on a phone. I do not know, I
| just hit 30, so I guess I am considered old? I definitely
| am old school, though! You know, nothing fancy, just Void
| Linux with i3, XTerm, etc.
|
| You know what I wish I could get? A Blackberry phone with
| that keyboard (maybe KeyOne?). I wonder if there is
| anything like that still in production.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| > You know what I wish I could get? A Blackberry phone
| with that keyboard (maybe KeyOne?). I wonder if there is
| anything like that still in production.
|
| Yes! Before the iPhone came out my daily driver was a
| BlackBerry Bold. The keyboard was perfect, and it had the
| trackball (and later, trackpad) for text selection. Still
| not full size keyboard typing speed but pretty close.
| Then I switched to the first gen Moto Droid when it came
| out and it had the slide open landscape keyboard. Not as
| ergonomic as the black berry but it worked. Then after
| the first iPhone, everyone dumped physical keyboards and
| I'm still salty about it.
|
| I wish there was room in the mobile space to break apart
| the Samsung/Apple duopoly. Would have loved to see both
| Windows phone and webOS succeed, and the variety of
| devices that could have brought.
| andrepd wrote:
| It's good for you. It's not good for them ("them" being the
| people that make Scrooge McDuck amounts of money for
| keeping you staring at ads).
| worldsavior wrote:
| You're talking like Google isn't a ad company trying to keep
| you staring on your screen.
| 28304283409234 wrote:
| No see "today, people increasingly see their devices not as
| tools, but as extensions of themselves."
|
| We are merely catering to those needs. It is philanthropy
| really. A kindness.
|
| /s
| sandeep1998 wrote:
| XD
| troupo wrote:
| > Material Design v1 cracked it.
|
| And yet they had to have a study with 600 people to tell them
| that ... text fields have to look like txt fields. And they
| still failed to make textfields look like textfields
| sksrbWgbfK wrote:
| I had the same reaction when they said that "younger study
| participants had the most enthusiastic preference for M3
| Expressive." Could it be that young people are most likely to
| be impressed by pretty bullshit, and the whole point of this
| redesign is futile?
| iamdelirium wrote:
| Insert Principle Skinner: "Am I out of touch? No, its the
| young people that are wrong".
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| They have to pretend you want emotional designs. Because how
| would they keep their jobs? Every iteration of material design
| needs some bullshit improvement.
| xinayder wrote:
| They managed to connect me to an emotional level that I just
| want to throw my phone away and get a phone that supports
| postmarketOS. I despise the new designs so much, they are so
| useless and try to take away important information on the
| screen for absolutely no reason. While making everything round
| and trying so hard to copy iOS, but making a shitty job at it.
| wltr wrote:
| But ... that way phones would get obsolete much faster, and
| so you'd be able to buy an obsolete sluggish Pixel of two
| years old, and install something different on it! Like
| Lineage, Graphene, Postmarket.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| > 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
|
| Building a B2B SaaS app one of the most refreshing thoughts
| I've had about it was: "people don't like using my app". The
| software I'm building nobody wants to use, but they have to use
| it for their work.
|
| Given that I try my hardest to make the app as efficient and as
| fast as possible so that people can go in, do their thing, and
| get out. With things like design's I'm very careful to preserve
| the button layouts of all the UI's because I know my customers
| have largely memorized where they are.
|
| I could see adding some "flare" like this in lower touch points
| in my app but I would not do this for high touch points. Those
| places need to be fast and predictable, a customer won't look
| too kindly on any redesign if they now have to spend an extra
| second or two looking for an action or waiting on an animation.
|
| In terms of MaterialUI though, my app actually uses M2 (via the
| React MUI lib) and I'm pretty happy with it. I wish like hell
| Google would finish their M3 web implementation so I could hop
| on that instead of using a 3rd party lib but it seems Google
| has gotten M3 to where they personally want it and just kinda
| abandoned development.
| skydhash wrote:
| My best experience with job-related software was a data entry
| program (I forgot the name). It had a windows classic UI (on
| windows 8) and fully keyboard driven. After a few days, I
| could just look at the paper form and enter the data without
| looking at the screen. Very usable on a 11inch screen.
|
| These days, I mostly reverted to a Emacs/TUI workflow.
| Padding and animations makes everything less usable.
| 0x457 wrote:
| > Material Design v1
|
| I think it was the worst one. At least from an interoperability
| perspective: sure, a giant floating "+" in a circle in notes
| app on a mobile device is alright CTA to add a new note, but on
| anything bigger than that (even an iPad screen) it's bad.
|
| Apps and websites using it felt like "Work in Progress, we will
| style it later" except there was no later it was already styled
| and was just ugly.
| amluto wrote:
| > sure, a giant floating "+" in a circle in notes app on a
| mobile device is alright CTA to add a new note
|
| No, it's not, because it floats over the actual content,
| which means that the user can neither see nor interact with
| the content under it. Of course, no one carefully designs the
| rest of the UI to make sure that content doesn't get stuck
| under the floating button.
| overfeed wrote:
| > No, it's not, because it floats over the actual content,
| which means that the user can neither see nor interact with
| the content under it.
|
| 1. How narrow is your screen? The FAB is typically used
| over _scrollable_ full-width list items.
|
| 2. Using a design system does not release the app author
| from their UX duties, like making sure the UI works as best
| as possible.
| amluto wrote:
| It's remarkably common for some floating UI element to
| obscure the bottom portion of something scrollable. You
| can't work around this by scrolling because, if the
| region in question is on the screen at all, it's at the
| bottom.
|
| Even Mobile Safari messes this up on occasion --
| sometimes the URL bar at the bottom obscures the bottom
| of a page, and, while one can temporarily reveal it by
| dragging up, the content rubber-bands right back down
| when the user lets go.
| taylorallred wrote:
| I don't entirely agree. This mentality is what leads to
| brutalist architecture offices that suck out the soul of all
| who work in them. People "live" and "work" in their apps and
| should feel alive while they do that. (That said, I don't think
| this new material style is necessarily the way to achieve
| that...)
| tacker2000 wrote:
| Material design v1 is the reason we have extremely low
| information density and extreme whitespace everywhere.
|
| Just compare the original Gmail UI to the one Google has now.
| Or original Adwords admin page to the one they launched 2-3
| years ago. Its a regression in every possible way.
|
| And apple is also not far behind in enshittyfying their UIs in
| order to merge the Desktop and the Smartphone paradigms into
| one.
|
| This is the worst phase in UX/UI history we have ever
| witnessed.
| _pdp_ wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| The reason the send button on the old design is hard to see
| seems to me to be that it doesn't stand out in any way. The
| only difference to everything else on the screen is that it's
| blue instead of black, but the contrast isn't big and it's
| between two less important icons.
|
| Here's a 30-second edit of the first picture that undoubtedly
| breaks material design guidelines, but also solves the
| problem without introducing any new problems:
| https://kappa.lol/7Zuuc8.png
|
| The problem with a text button in a case like this is that
| the translation of "Send" is longer in most languages and
| even much longer some languages.
| erkt wrote:
| Maybe just use the word "send" in a blue bubble? Forcing us
| to discover and translate hieroglyphics is just lazy UI
| design because you do not want to worry about localization.
| romanows wrote:
| On my Android gmail app, when I reply to an email, there's
| very little on the screen at the start of the process. The
| pink-ish send button really stands out since everything else
| is grey text (I'm using dark mode). They show an image after
| the user has composed their message and also expanded the
| quoted previous email text, which is not really what the
| user's experience is like, so it's misleading IMO.
| gempir wrote:
| I looked at the 2 screenshots and it took me like a minute to
| see the send button on the new screen.
|
| I am probably very used to the "old" design. If a user will use
| this product once or twice, yes then the big button at the
| bottom will be advantaged. But you are biasing the design for
| new users.
|
| Existing users know exactly where the button is and will now
| have wasted space because of a gigantic send button.
| yiyus wrote:
| That's also my impression. They even brag about it. They have
| optimized the time that it takes to find the send button
| (something that I will only have to do once or maybe a few
| times until I get used to it) at the expense of a good portion
| of screen space that would be very useful when actually writing
| emails.
| SecretDreams wrote:
| Ya, but it lands so well with those 18-24 year olds that make
| all the clicks!
| wapeoifjaweofji wrote:
| If there's one thing I know about 18-24 year olds, it's that
| they love sending emails!
| arccy wrote:
| it increases the efficiency of sending short messages...
| varbhat wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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/
| unsungNovelty wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I fully agree. The word I would describe this is indeed Flat.
| zecg wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| crowcroft wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > Hardly anyone prefers actually drinking Pepsi.
|
| You take that back.
| dash2 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| It's funny that the people who designed this monstrosity of a web
| page feel qualified enough to advice other people about design.
| arewethereyeta wrote:
| 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.
| hexomancer wrote:
| 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.
| firejake308 wrote:
| > the page flashbangs you
|
| Did anyone understand what the purpose of that was?
| recursive wrote:
| Emotional connection.
|
| Those who experience trauma together often form a strong
| emotional bond.
| slater wrote:
| emotional connection!
|
| efb
| albedoa wrote:
| > Who would be qualified enough to talk with you about new
| design trends then?
|
| The person you are asking did not say anything about new
| design trends.
|
| But anyway, if one is calling this page a monstrosity, then
| it seems in bad faith for you to ask that question on the
| same line where you call its designers "qualified enough".
|
| Would you consider an answer that excludes anyone who thinks
| that these designers are qualified? Would you consider any
| answer that disagrees with your assessment, or have you
| already made up your mind?
| arewethereyeta wrote:
| not really, I still consider them qualified enough to push
| new stuff. Wether it's a good or bad movement I see them as
| qualified yes. I was not refering to the page but the
| people behind the design proposal. I, for one, was never a
| big fan of material design even though I implemented it in
| some projects. I am still open to new stuff. I've seen
| people here calling shadcn a monstruosity for example.
| lucianbr wrote:
| Read the rest of the comment thread. It is obviously not a
| singular opinion, as you seem to think.
| bschwindHN wrote:
| Whenever I interact with google UIs, the question is always
| "which ellipses do I have to tap to find the action I want?"
| margorczynski wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > After mentioning her initial findings to colleagues in a Munich
| beer hall
|
| Uh oh...
| dotancohen wrote:
| We're still waiting to read about her struggle.
| apt-apt-apt-apt wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| LeratoAustini wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| > _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 wrote:
| The progress bar looks a bit like a snake being electrocuted.
|
| https://m3.material.io/blog/building-with-m3-expressive#what...
| tomovo wrote:
| And the circular one is the icon for head trauma.
| miyuru wrote:
| I cannot scroll down that page, wtf.
| divan wrote:
| 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
| sgt wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| gadders wrote:
| If the rest of the design is as annoying as the circular cursor
| enforced on me I'll pass, thanks.
| johnisgood wrote:
| I'll never know, I don't have enough time to wait for it to
| load.
| pawanjswal wrote:
| Love how design is finally leaning into emotion.
| vessenes wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Innovative compromise between light/dark mode; just have the page
| switch between the two repeatedly as you scroll.
| ttoinou wrote:
| Hybrid mode. A full 24 hours are passing by scrolling the page
| affenape wrote:
| Yikes... everything looks like jelly. Best served with Comic Sans
| MS.
| junon wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| jameskilton wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Pretty sure Google has used Docs internally since long before
| COVID.
| Octoth0rpe wrote:
| "used Docs internally" is not the same as:
|
| > on normal consumer internet connections
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 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.
| sojsurf wrote:
| I have used Google meet exclusively for a number of
| years, multiple times a day on the cheapest Internet
| connection I can buy in my area. It is consistently a
| better experience then Zoom or Teams.
|
| The only caveat is that the experience is not good on
| Firefox. Google meet is the only thing I use Chrome/Brave
| for.
| fkyoureadthedoc wrote:
| Probably because they seem to be recreating the cursor on the
| webpage for that cool effect. Even on a good computer I have
| some input lag, and going from very low input lag and 120fps
| cursor to that it feels slightly off. Although I might be
| imagining it just because it looks different than the normal
| one...
| ImHereToVote wrote:
| Browser don't support replacing cursor images natively for
| obvious reasons. You have to use JavaScript for that.
| jampekka wrote:
| CSS supports replacing cursor images natively.
|
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/cursor
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| In this case it looks like they didn't just want an image
| though, they wanted the cursor to invert the color of
| whatever part of the web page it's over, and to
| seamlessly morph into a selection highlight whenever you
| mouse over certain controls. Seems like that's a _lot_
| harder to make performant.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| You can do that by changing the cursor icon for the
| elements in question. The CSS rule does support per-
| element swapping (because of course it does, that's how a
| text input has a bar but a button has a pointer).
| jampekka wrote:
| The cursor color inversion can't be done with CSS though.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| Use a different colored image.
|
| The background colour of the hovered element is known.
| When you specify the bgcolor, also override the cursor
| image.
| johnisgood wrote:
| I am pretty sure it is doable in CSS.
| magios wrote:
| another thing to block in firefox userContent.css as
| there doesn't appear to be an option for it in
| about:config
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| The only obvious reason I can think of is security concerns
| (some sort of user confusion), but JS wouldn't help with
| that. What other reasons are there?
| johnisgood wrote:
| This website is awful. It is extremely sluggish, laggy, and
| annoying. On top of that, I had to wait a significant amount of
| time for it to load. No thanks. I thought the tab is going to
| be killed...
| Flex247A wrote:
| Leetcode monkeys with little dev experience will do that.
| Octoth0rpe wrote:
| > How did these clowns manage to make my mouse cursor laggy?
|
| FWIW, the link is to basically a glorified demo page _of the
| design_ of material 3, not a real world implementation of that
| design. So, that page's performance is not at all reflective of
| what you'd see when using a relatively recent android app that
| uses flutter's material components
| (https://docs.flutter.dev/ui/widgets/material) or one of the
| many web component libraries that implement MD.
|
| The lag you're noticing is also likely entirely due to their
| weird cursor behavior. If they simply removed that, I suspect
| the page's performance wouldn't be at all noticeable.
| DarkCrusader2 wrote:
| If the people who came up with this design can not make the
| demo site performant, site which will be the first impression
| of your new design language for most, I don't think there is
| much hope for the rest of us.
|
| But since this has name of Google attached to it, many people
| will mindless ape it to the detriment of experience of their
| users.
| Octoth0rpe wrote:
| I think the people who implement google's html/js/css for
| random articles aren't particularly connected to engineers
| working on android/flutter widget performance, and the MUI
| developers aren't even google employees (mui/flutter being
| the main implementations of MD AIUI). I'm not at all
| concerned.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Before I got an iOS phone I thought "why do people care
| about apps?" I mean, there is an app to get me into my
| gym but with my Android device it would take about 45
| seconds to open so I might as well just give them my
| phone number. It was always faster to go to a web site or
| go to the public library or do anything other than wait
| for an app to open.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| _Every_ Material UI library I 've seen in existence is a
| bloated wreck full of bugs. The Angular MUI "flagship"
| has the worst performance I've ever seen of basic things
| browsers have supported for decades and CSS does very
| well for like _buttons_. Some MUI teams find ways to
| bring all of Angular 's bloat to everywhere else, the
| React library is awful. I've had to use MudBlazor, the
| attempt to do MUI things in Blazor, and it is truly
| awful. _Maybe_ Flutter is an exception, congratulations
| to Flutter I guess.
|
| This wouldn't be so much of a problem if so many
| corporations also hadn't somehow decided that MUI was the
| next Bootstrap and have been treating it as an underlayer
| in their Design Systems, most of which aren't actually
| supposed to look like Material and don't really benefit
| from being huge additional libraries of CSS and
| components on top of MUI. I blame Figma for this. I don't
| know that it is any one specific thing Figma is
| intentionally doing, but the more design teams use Figma
| the more they seem to think they "need" a safety blanket
| of Material UI somewhere in the design stack that they
| won't actually use correctly or well.
|
| As an engineer often tasked with performance work, I hate
| how much of Material UI's braindead approach to
| performance reflects on me in ways I can't do anything
| about "because that is the design system you wanted" (not
| the design system you needed). I wish Material UI would
| either get _significantly better_ or just die already.
| Octoth0rpe wrote:
| I tend to agree with your criticisms. FWIW, I do think
| mui has peaked, at least for greenfield projects. A new
| wave of tailwind-based libraries are rising fast, the
| most prominent of which are Mantine and Shadcn. IME, both
| perform MUCH MUCH better than mui.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| You like the Tailwind-based approaches? That's not the
| direction _I_ would go either. I 've never seen anything
| Tailwind-based not feel bloated. It's such interesting
| malicious compliance with "no inline-styles" lint rules
| by just moving the inline styles into the class field. I
| see the same problems, including variations on the same
| performance problems, I remember from the bad old jQuery
| days of everyone just smashing inline styles everywhere
| all the time that lead to the "no inline-styles" lint
| rules in the first place.
|
| But I'm a fan of the cascade done right and with CSS Grid
| and CSS Variables and @layer vanilla CSS cascade is at an
| all time _jam_ right now. I 'd be surprised we aren't
| seeing more "Design Systems" in that space, but I've got
| a feeling given how much you can cut from a Bootstrap or
| Bulma today for CSS Grid/CSS Variables that maybe we
| aren't seeing a lot happening there simply because not a
| lot _needs_ to happen there. People happy with the
| cascade are getting closer and closer to also being
| happier with "no frameworks" again. Vanilla CSS feels
| good to work in again.
| Octoth0rpe wrote:
| > You like the Tailwind-based approaches?
|
| There's two ways of answering this, but both amount to a
| yes
|
| 1) I certainly think much more highly of the recent
| plethora of tailwind based component libraries than the
| previous generation, which mostly don't require me to
| actually use tailwind directly (mantine, daisy).
| Component library developers seem to like it _a lot_, and
| the outcome is great. If they're happy to use tailwind
| and I'm happy with the library that is built on top of
| tailwind, then I'm happy with tailwind.
|
| 2) The other way of answering this is if I'm using
| tailwind directly. To this point, yes, I'm still happy.
| The metaphor I've used is that tailwind is to css is as
| ASM is to machine code. It's still low level, but far,
| far more ergonomic. And in the end, you often end up
| using a higher level of abstraction anyway (again, see
| Daisy, mantine).
|
| >Vanilla CSS feels good to work in again.
|
| FWIW, I really do agree with this. But I think tailwind +
| postcss is even better still.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Checking out the recommendations, out of curiosity, my
| first things that I notice:
|
| - Mantine doesn't use Tailwind. It's overly React
| specific for many of its components that don't really
| need to be React components but could be Vanilla or Web
| Components, but it doesn't seem to be anything like the
| Tailwind approach.
|
| - Daisy seems really funny _to me_ because it seems the
| long way around to be a Vanilla CSS framework while still
| being too much Tailwind.
|
| - (ShadCN is definitely the worst of both above things,
| utterly React-specific and taking the long way around
| from Tailwind back to things that resemble Vanilla CSS,
| only with extra React for React's sake)
| esrauch wrote:
| This page is a promo page of the ux design language people
| as created by UXD/UXE role people.
|
| It's basically like looking at a Figma export and
| complaining about the performance of it; any actual
| implementation would be done for any user-facing products
| realistically will be entirely unrelated both
| technologically and organizationally.
| sgt wrote:
| It's because the developers have extremely fast and graphics
| accelerated hardware. I can't notice any lag whatsoever on the
| mouse cursor on my M2 Pro but.. But a lot of folks won't have
| top end HW.
| belter wrote:
| I am on a four core also with a (non-recent) NVIDIA graphics
| card and its laggy...
| sgt wrote:
| That's crazy. In many ways we are moving backwards.
| robertoandred wrote:
| I have no cursor lag and I'm on a 2019 Intel MBP.
| wltr wrote:
| I'm on an iPhone, and I see no cursor lag!
| DrammBA wrote:
| m1 pro using firefox, I can notice the cursor not being
| smooth, and if I move the mouse while scrolling then it lags
| hard
| lucianbr wrote:
| Couldn't agree more. It's basically a page with some pictures
| in it, and _everything_ in it loaded so late for me that
| initially I wondered why they left so many large empty spaces
| in the page.
|
| This could work and be fast with tech from at least 20 years
| ago, probably even more. It's really incredible this is output
| from a company valued in trillions.
| freedomben wrote:
| Indeed. Google is the worst at designing around lazy loading.
| Their UIs in Drive, Youtube Music, and others essentially
| become unusable once the list gets long. God forbid you don't
| have a super low latency connection straight to the data
| center. Even holding open a web socket to fetch "next pages"
| doesn't cut it in most of the real world. If you're gonna
| lazy load (which I admit sometimes does make sense) you need
| to aggressively fetch the next page. If I have 200 files in
| my Google Drive and they're sorted alphabetically, and I want
| one that starts with "y", the UX is so unbelievable bad that
| I sometimes wonder if I'm being pranked. I'll have to wait
| through a dozen "next page" loads that only load a screen
| worth of files at a time, and each pause makes me wait a
| second or two. That really adds up when I just want to scroll
| to the file. Scrolling through large playlists in Youtube
| Music is utterly painful nowadays too.
|
| Please people, test your UI on low bandwidth connections,
| high latency connections, _and_ both conditions together. It
| doesn 't need to be perfect, but it doesn't have to be
| anywhere near _this_ bad. HN performs way, way better than
| these modern javascript heavy lazy loading apps, and I think
| there 's some important insights in that sitting right there
| for the taking.
| clickety_clack wrote:
| Scrolling back in google chat is another horrendous
| experience. Trying to see a message you sent last week?
| Scrolling up is like "here's 5 messages"... "here's 4
| messages"... "here's another 5". It's like a college
| student wrote it.
| freedomben wrote:
| Oh yes! Totally forgot about that one because I rarely
| use google chat, but that is insane. It really feels like
| somebody built an example app as a joke of how not to do
| it, and somebody else accidentally shipped it.
| roncesvalles wrote:
| Especially when metadata is so cheap to send over. Even if
| you have literally thousands of files, there's no reason
| why they couldn't send it all in a single JSON at first
| page load. Gzipped it would be nothing.
| johnisgood wrote:
| And to imagine that Googlers do not know better...
| _sighs_.
| spencerflem wrote:
| The crazy thing is, theyve written one of the best guides
| on the internet on how to do an infinite scrolling list:
| https://developer.chrome.com/blog/infinite-scroller
| conception wrote:
| If you hate how Google Drive works get excited about
| searching in the new Outlook. Nothing like being able to
| not sort your search results and only getting 200 at a time
| and having to page through them when the search returns
| anything useful at all.
| homebrewer wrote:
| By calling them engineers you're only feeding the ego.
| 05 wrote:
| Any idiot can build a page that loads, but it takes an
| engineer to build a page that barely loads.
| mablopoule wrote:
| Next time I'll be ranting against overengineering, I'll be
| stealing that :D
| GoToRO wrote:
| You are just part of the problem. In which companies do
| engineers still have the final say? Almost none.
| agos wrote:
| At almost all the companies I've worked with engineers might
| not have the final say but they're still on the hook for
| blatant performance issues
| kiliancs wrote:
| They also seemingly went out of their way to prevent
| ctrl/cmd+click on several anchor elements in pages like
| https://m3.material.io/components.
| edoceo wrote:
| Arrreg!! So many of these React (et al) sites, with poorly
| re-built elements and break the built-in functionality! The A
| tag works perfect! But no, we need three or four nested divs,
| components, and many lines of JS to end up with something
| worse.
|
| Is React the driver? Do devs just not know? Is management
| pushing garbage?
| dcre wrote:
| If you render an <a> in React (or Angular, which I think
| they're using here), it's just an <a>! You have to do extra
| work to fuck it up!
| agos wrote:
| Indeed. And all the routing libraries also render <a>s by
| default
| wapeoifjaweofji wrote:
| I'll generally excuse things like laziness and
| incompetence, because I understand that not everyone is
| good at their jobs.
|
| But this:
|
| > You have to do extra work to fuck it up!
|
| resonates so hard. I get so angry at people who take
| extra time out of their day to put so much effort into
| making things worse. So many things on the internet are
| fine, but people spend so much on making them worse. Who
| is this good for? Not me, and likely not the person who
| wasted their time ruining functional things.
| eastbound wrote:
| It doesn't do the internal navigation.
|
| And since React doesn't have built-in support for
| pushState (Yes I know React Router, but it really wants a
| hash router), you really need extra work for an internal
| router. And therefore, every beginner dev does it
| manually and slightly inconsistently.
|
| So yes, React is absolutely the driver, same as Java is
| guilty for Guava existing, because it should have been
| built-in and perfect.
| dcre wrote:
| In this case we are not talking about beginner devs (to
| their credit, the React docs are pushing people toward
| frameworks now) -- these are literally the developers of
| a framework, fucking it up in their own docs!
| tshaddox wrote:
| > Yes I know React Router, but it really wants a hash
| router
|
| This doesn't sound right. The history API has been widely
| supported by all major browsers (including mobile) since
| 2013. React was also first released in 2013. Did React
| Router _ever_ ship a version without a HistoryRouter.
| cmgriffing wrote:
| I was digging into the cursor effect just to see why it's
| so laggy for some people and noticed that this is
| actually a Next.js site.
|
| That is news to me that Google is using Nextjs for
| anything.
| diggan wrote:
| > Is React the driver? Do devs just not know? Is management
| pushing garbage?
|
| I'd say developers who aren't web developers trying to do
| web dev seems to be the cause of this. Understanding the
| platform you're developing for is pretty much table stakes
| for any developer, and not understanding when to use <a> is
| pretty much the most basic mistake you can make. Literally
| the first things you learn in web development is about
| linking to other pages, yet somehow still people fuck up
| putting a <a> into a webpage properly. Boggles my mind.
|
| React makes it as easy as any other library/framework, but
| if you don't think about what ends up in the DOM, and why
| certain things have to be a specific way (often for
| accessibility and user experience), then you'll screw up
| even big and expensive projects like this apparently. 2x
| boggling since this project is literally all about user
| experience yet they get the most fundamental part of the
| web wrong.
| riffraff wrote:
| > I'd say developers who aren't web developers trying to
| do web dev seems to be the cause of this.
|
| Hard disagree. I've seen a ton of decent web developers
| (i.e. people who can use modern CSS, layouts, and modern
| web stacks) reinventing buttons and links and forgetting
| about accessibility.
|
| It's a completely orthogonal thing to the dev background.
| johnfn wrote:
| That sounds like people who don't know web dev trying to
| do web dev.
| tshaddox wrote:
| With every client-side routing framework or library I know
| of, the trivial happy path will involve using their
| provided link component which performs client-side
| navigations on click but also renders an underlying anchor
| tag with href (and works with cmd-click, middle-click
| etc.).
|
| You really have to go out of your way to break this, and I
| don't think client-side routers deserve any blame for this.
| Anyone who is ignorant or careless enough to ship broken
| links using a client-side router would be just as likely to
| break anchor tags with their own hand-rolled JavaScript.
| johnfn wrote:
| One of my pet peeves is people blaming things on React that
| have nothing to do with React. I see this quite frequently
| on Hacker News. Using an a tag or not has nothing to do
| with React.
| jampekka wrote:
| The expressed goal is emotionally impacting UX. They clearly
| got strong emotions out of you. Mission accomplished!
| echelon wrote:
| It's not just a laggy mouse. I scrolled through half a page
| of a completely black screen. On a high powered machine with
| lots of bandwidth and low latency.
|
| The designers here have lost the plot.
| Ghoelian wrote:
| Can't even move the mouse while scrolling lmao
| riffraff wrote:
| I'm on mobile and scrolled through most of this waiting for
| images to load, and wondering why I didn't see any.
| jchw wrote:
| Very unusually, everything is working and smooth on Fennec
| F-Droid for me. Usually it's the opposite but it happens
| more often these days.
| jchw wrote:
| I know you aren't supposed to comment on it, but man, you
| just never know what will set people off on this site,
| and god knows they won't tell you. Are people bothered
| that I chimed in to say "works for me" or that I
| insinuated Fennec F-Droid is usually less smooth than the
| Webkit-based mobile browsers? I'll never know for sure.
| Sometimes with Hacker News, whether a comment is actually
| well-received feels like a dice roll.
| nomel wrote:
| My naive guess is that it's a null hypothesis situation.
| You not seeing a problem isn't a useful indicator for if
| there _is_ a problem. More than that, it probably hits
| too close to home for mostly software devs, with the
| dreaded "Well it works on my machine."
| jchw wrote:
| Must be something like that. More than anything, I'd love
| to know _why_ Firefox seems to be winning on this page;
| practically the opposite of what you 'd expect out of
| Google pages (because, even without a tinfoil hat on,
| it's clear they don't test on Firefox often). Maybe
| uBlock Origin is just cutting out some poorly-written
| script, who knows.
| johnmaguire wrote:
| Working perfectly fine in LibreWolf on macOS. Huh.
| therein wrote:
| The cursor was laggy for about 10-15 seconds on my M4 Max
| after the page loaded, my only sin is probably not using
| Chrome.
|
| 34% modernity, 32% subculture, 30% rebelliousness made me
| cringe.
| billfor wrote:
| And they are very well paid for all that work!
| johnisgood wrote:
| I could do way better and I am not even a web developer.
| Their talent is social networking and/or securing the job
| somehow. :P
| Perepiska wrote:
| Macbook air M1 scrolls text in Firefox fast and smoothly...
| ryanwhitney wrote:
| "then spend zero brainpower on systems without graphics
| acceleration"
| ahmedfromtunis wrote:
| I don't know what graphics acceleration mean in this
| context, but my 5-year old computer, with 4 Gb of RAM and
| no discreet graphics card didn't witness any lag.
| BHSPitMonkey wrote:
| I don't think it's performance bottlenecking so much as
| that the site is capturing the cursor and taking over its
| physics/acceleration, I think? Which probably isn't
| noticeable as long as the acceleration is similar to how
| your OS shell is configured, but was definitely noticeable
| for me on GNOME.
| Raed667 wrote:
| [Ticket Closed] resolution: user should buy a macbook pro with
| at least the M3 processor
|
| /s
| cube00 wrote:
| SecOps put CrowdStrike's Falcon and Windows Defender on our
| Macs so we'd have about 20% CPU left for our actual dev work.
| That's not an exaggeration, staring at the System Monitor is
| all you can do when everything is locked up.
|
| The Android emulator sucks the remainder with ease. The app
| performs better on a low end Android burner phone then our
| dev machines so at least we know our users are having a
| reasonable experience.
| Raed667 wrote:
| You just triggered some PTSD... years ago I had to send my
| CTO a recording of my screen with keyboard input lag on
| VSCode because CrowdStrike was eating up all my CPU.
|
| I asked him if it was a good use of my (expensive) time to
| wait 30 seconds for characters to appear on my code editor.
|
| Luckily he gave me a "special exemption" that allowed me to
| shut that monstrosity down !
| marcusb wrote:
| I had a couple of customers that deployed 7 endpoint
| security tools of the "hook into processes and inspect
| everything" variety. The exact mix was customer-specific,
| but if you're wondering what that looks like:
|
| * Stand-alone "best of breed" endpoint DLP
|
| * Stand-alone "best of breed" EDR
|
| * Process whitelisting tool
|
| * NAC posture assessment agent
|
| * Three different AV agents
|
| This is not even counting their VPN client(s) or the third
| party disk encryption agent they used.
|
| I marveled at how they even got all of the agents to
| coexist, let alone have enough CPU left for people to do
| their jobs.
| pico303 wrote:
| And after all that, your company gets hacked through a
| misconfigured router.
| marcusb wrote:
| Or one of the seven endpoint agents, each of which has a
| kernel module and at least half of which are doing dodgy
| process injection and read process memory shenanigans.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| > And after all that, your company gets hacked through a
| misconfigured router.
|
| Or a more likely scenario - some dev with admin on their
| machine grabs a malicious NPM package, EDR doesn't grab
| it because they successfully lobbied to have certain
| directories exempt for performance reasons (like DevDrive
| on Windows, or WSL). SSH keys get stolen, and despite all
| the fancy security products, the environment is still a
| mess (which is why there's so many products to cover up
| that fact) so the dev actually has keys to prod, then
| you're hosed.
|
| I've seen my fair share of orgs with a plethora of
| security "solutions" and yet fail to understand some
| basic principles like least privilege or separation of
| concerns and think all their security software is going
| to save them.
| pico303 wrote:
| It's so bad with my work laptop that I find myself doing
| work on my personal laptop and git patching it on my work
| laptop.
|
| Also doesn't help that because I don't feel comfortable
| with all the monitoring software on my work laptop, I won't
| use the services I personally pay for with my work browser
| because I don't want the IT department scraping my personal
| passwords.
| ilaksh wrote:
| The web pages are working properly on my 5-6 year old laptop
| running Ubuntu and Chrome. Maybe it doesn't work in Safari or
| on Macs?
| Raed667 wrote:
| It's working perfectly fine on my m1 Mac + firefox.
|
| My comment was a joke
| Piribedil wrote:
| Images loading is lagging on my M3 pro with 48gb ram on fiber
| xinayder wrote:
| The update to Android 15 was TERRIBLE. I updated it the past
| days, it's literally a bootleg copy of iOS interface. I despise
| it so much, much more than the move from Material Design to
| Material You. Everything occupies so much space, there is less
| information available for you, and important things like
| changing the music in your lock screen is confined to a tiny
| space.
|
| At least they got the Expressive right in the name now,
| Material Expressive (HATE).
| sanitycheck wrote:
| Every update is worse than the last. I did the same, and I'm
| particularly loving turning bluetooth on or off requiring a
| swipe and three button presses instead of one. And I thought
| the quick settings regressed in 14 when they went from icons
| to huge buttons, but now they've gone for less-huge buttons
| with always-truncated text in.
|
| At least with Windows it alternately gets much worse then a
| bit better again with each version.
|
| Regarding the monstrosity in the link, yes it does make me
| 'feel things' - things I will refrain from typing out lest
| they be construed as threatening behaviour.
| danieldk wrote:
| You can say a lot about Android 15, but I have a Pixel and an
| iPhone 16 Pro and they do not look alike... at all? Pull down
| the notifications and quick settings, it does not look
| remotely like iOS. The same for all the native apps.
|
| I wonder if you have Samsung One UI 7 or some other skin. One
| UI 7 looks a lot more like iOS, but there is little Google
| can do about that?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| What do you expect from an OS that has a trash can for a logo?
| rossant wrote:
| I only came here to rant about how no one should mess with my
| mouse cursor.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| I'm with you there.
|
| People complain about how crap UX is now, and how computer
| illiterate the general populace has become but I firmly place
| the blame on forcing the web into an application delivery
| platform, abandoning all operating system HIG and conventions
| so that every app is now it's own unique snowflake that
| breaks conventions.
|
| IMO people would struggle less if it was all native apps that
| followed the OS. You learn your operating system's
| conventions and shortcuts, and those translate into every app
| you run - but then marketing people got their hands in
| things, and suddenly everything had to be branded and unique,
| and we are worse off for it.
| donperignon wrote:
| I wish I could upvote you ten times.
| Nickersf wrote:
| Not just the technical aspect here. I read through the page and
| nothing of any measurable importance was stated. What problems
| did this solve? What benefits does this bring to users? I guess
| I was expecting more from Google. The initial Material design
| system made some good points and addressed some issues for UI
| design. This just seems unfocused.
| johnisgood wrote:
| It comes across as AI-generated diarrhea, without any point.
| Maybe I am just too dumb to recognize talent?
| astrolx wrote:
| OMG I thought it was something wrong on my end, privacy add-on
| or whatnot. Glad to see they just lost it.
| xnx wrote:
| > How did these clowns manage to make my mouse cursor laggy?
|
| The lag and that cursor makes it feel like trying to type with
| mittens on.
| ArinaS wrote:
| The "beauty" of websites built solely with javascript.
|
| As if they couldn't build an absolutely identical page with
| just HTML and CSS. But no, javascript is the way for them
| because it has way more tracking and fingerprinting abilities
| than plain HTML and CSS.
| sorenjan wrote:
| I have an 8 core CPU and a 10 TFLOP GPU and the cursor on this
| site lags in Firefox but is noticeable smoother in Edge.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| It's usable (as in smooth-ish) but still visibly laggy
| compared to the normal mouse, in Chrome, on my hefty M1 Pro
| macbook for work.
|
| Also... I fucking hate it. I don't want my mouse to stick to
| buttons, or to change colors constantly.
|
| The "emotion" the this site generated for me was "anger". If
| this is the pitch for the new design system, my journey of
| not using Material is coming to a middle.
| andrepd wrote:
| Why does everything reek of late capitalism? Even design
| doesn't fail to emanate a distinct "dystopian megacorp" stench.
| dmos62 wrote:
| These are UX researchers. This is not an engineering project.
| henning wrote:
| Confirmed. It felt OK on my M1 Max laptop but on my 2019 Intel
| laptop it feels like laggy shit. This is the stuff that makes
| you want to quit programming and go pick berries in the woods.
| AbraKdabra wrote:
| If you try to move the mouse while scrolling the cursor
| freezes... jfc bring back 2010's Google.
| roskelld wrote:
| Wow, yeah just tested that and it's really bad. I guess it's
| a strange thing to do, but a good way to test how the cursor
| hijacking code gets stalled when scroll is active, and I'm
| guessing they're doing UI updates on scroll so the thread is
| getting thrashed there.
|
| Even just making a circle motion with a mouse produces a lot
| of stuttering. I just did the same action on HN and it's as
| smooth as you'd expect on a CPU from 1995 and beyond.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| The mouse cursor / general performance complaint is valid but:
|
| > spend zero brainpower on systems without graphics
| acceleration.
|
| These systems don't exist unless you go out of your way to turn
| off graphics acceleration. In which case that's kinda on you.
| It's like ranting about sites requiring javascript. It's just
| not a realistic expectation to have of anything anymore.
| recursive wrote:
| > In which case that's kinda on you.
|
| What if I turned it off because it makes my machine more
| stable? Why do I have to choose between crashing and jank?
| kllrnohj wrote:
| What on earth are you running that has such a bad GPU
| driver that it can't handle chrome/firefox, yet also is so
| niche that they don't have driver workarounds for it?
| recursive wrote:
| I don't know. It says ThinkPad on top. It was provided by
| my employer.
|
| Edit: Not directly related, but I turned off DRM support
| for similar reasons. Web sites keep turning one of my
| monitors off when that's enabled. Even though I'm not
| intentionally or perceptibly playing any media. The
| (well, another) weird thing is the other monitor stays
| on. They're the same brand and model, using the same
| cable.
|
| Fancy hardware stuff seems to make browsers unstable, and
| in my experience this has been true for over a decade. I
| don't care enough about to try to find a root cause. I
| don't need DRM support or hardware acceleration for
| anything I _intended_ to do, so I just turn off anything
| like that.
| KronisLV wrote:
| > What on earth are you running that has such a bad GPU
| driver that it can't handle chrome/firefox, yet also is
| so niche that they don't have driver workarounds for it?
|
| Fun fact, for the longest time ever on Windows 10 the
| Intel Arc drivers for A580 and B580 would crash in Edge
| if you played some videos on YouTube, it did seem that
| switching the ANGLE backend or whatever it was called
| would help, though I got similar issues with VLC when it
| was using the DirectX based renderer whereas OpenGL
| renderer didn't have that issue but would make the mouse
| disappear when in the video window.
|
| A lot of it feels like it was solved after moving to
| Windows 11, though it's still possible to make the PC
| freeze by either doing encodes in AV1 in DaVinci Resolve
| (QuickTime H264 or maybe H265 doesn't seem to have the
| issue) or through Handbrake, if the GPU is at 100% for
| prolonged periods of time, whereas recording with OBS or
| playing pretty much any game doesn't have that sort of an
| issue.
|
| Might be a bad media chip or something else, go figure -
| definitely there's at least two people in the world who
| might benefit from disabling hardware acceleration in
| some cases, though. My RX 580 doesn't seem to have the
| issue, so that's the joys of being an early adopter.
| bmicraft wrote:
| Firefox on a mid-range Android phone here and this page didn't
| even feel particularly heavy to me. Everything loaded before
| scrolling into view and no stuttering while scrolling
| whatsoever.
| itorcs wrote:
| This comment speaks to me on an almost spiritual level. It
| highlights the fact that it isn't engineering prowess for
| people to get these jobs.
| pfannkuchen wrote:
| Yeah it's kind of weird that "UX" morphed into a non-
| engineering role. Like, the interface to the user is still
| part of the software product. It seems like that sort of role
| would be best executed by the subset of engineers who lean
| towards visual design, as opposed to the subset of visual
| designers who lean towards computing.
| drob518 wrote:
| Ignorance is a key trait for angel investors.
| hnuser123456 wrote:
| They had to add that 500ms of input latency to feel like you're
| really using Android.
| sneilan1 wrote:
| I am on Debian linux with 128 GB of ram running the latest
| brave browser and the cursor lags for me also.
| jonahx wrote:
| I am so happy this is the top comment.
|
| My experience was...
|
| Skim through sentence after sentence of award-winning inanity
| like "Expressive design makes you feel something" as my
| powerful Macbook stumbles and wheezes...
|
| Then think: "I like how default scrolling makes me feel!"
| KronisLV wrote:
| > 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.
|
| I have a dual GPU setup with one GPU dedicated to browsers, the
| cursor still freezes while scrolling and jitters after that and
| has noticeable lag even when not scrolling across both Chromium
| based browsers and Firefox on Windows. I'd compare it to a
| video game with really bad aim acceleration where the mouse
| just feels sluggish and uncooperative.
|
| I like that people are studying what works and what doesn't in
| UI/UX, but I'm not sure why they have to break the basics in
| the process of doing that - that is quite distracting from the
| overall experience and makes it kind of miserable, just as
| opening a very JS heavy SPA or what have you would.
| p4coder wrote:
| Hmm, works just fine on my pixel 6a in chrome.
| pen2l wrote:
| I've opined about the atrocious announcement pages from Google
| before (across the _board_ they are offensively sucky), but to
| give that a rest and speak on-topic about the announcement in
| question -- good lord what a step back it is, how ugly,
| insipid, spiritless, and unimpressive it is. Expressive? It 's
| exactly the opposite. Material team, what have you got against
| shadows, soft bevels, borders, those 2px worth of adornments
| which carry the weight of gold in terms of communicating
| clickability, state, different types of buttons, providing
| instrumental cues and abstraction about everything, why have
| you failed to learn from UI/UX of the decades behind you?
|
| It's even infecting Flutter, because it wants to push Material.
| This is genuinely depressing. And makes me appreciate the
| command of Steve Jobs, the guy leading Stripe, etc. because
| when you see abysmal offerings like these, you just can't help
| to.
|
| And it's phenomenally hard to not be judgmental about this,
| because after release after release it shows they are not
| learning.
| agos wrote:
| My hot take is that material started with only one goal in
| mind: we need a visual design vocabulary for mobile but it
| must absolutely look different from iOS. And by going with
| this in mind they threw the bath water, the baby, and half of
| the bathroom
| varispeed wrote:
| This is classic enshittification. Make poor software to nudge
| people into buy new hardware supposedly handling it better.
| Rinse and repeat.
|
| Also shittier software means you can hire cheaper workers to
| plough on.
| taylorallred wrote:
| To be fair, if you try to paint something on a webpage that
| follows the mouse cursor it's gonna be laggy af even in really
| simple toy examples. The blame may fall more on browsers.
| 51Cards wrote:
| I'm not understanding this comment. I'm running this site on my
| Pixel 5 and on Firefox on a Thinkpad W530 (12+ years old) and
| it's flying on both. What part is laggy?
| simojo wrote:
| As someone who had a landlord that was a google software
| engineer, I concur.
| wiradikusuma wrote:
| Did anyone notice the mouse cursor changes color when you hover
| it over the video, try moving it around. How does it work?
| solardev wrote:
| It pulsates expressively between nausea and diarrhea.
| WithinReason wrote:
| What I care about the most in UIs is latency. Not a single
| mention of it.
| asah wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| And they moved it closer to the keyboard, which is where the
| primary buttons should be on mobile anyways. Total
| incompetence.
| 90s_dev wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Let's just go back to system wide skins. Let users make
| everything look as boring or fun as they want.
| lerp-io wrote:
| made with uh....angular
| azangru wrote:
| 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
| krikou wrote:
| ... which is such a pity. One of the best component library
| still.
| kqr wrote:
| 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 4x 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Redesigning corporate branding is the revolving door of getting
| a promotion package, won't someone please think of the middle
| managers!
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| We know what happens to "done" Google products though...
| they're going to keep making changes until Android goes away.
| grishka wrote:
| Android doesn't have to remain a Google product though.
| Google is mostly a terrible maintainer of AOSP.
| LauraMedia wrote:
| I feel like they did already lay them off, which is how we end
| up with this...
| ustad wrote:
| Viewing the page source, I love the way many inline css widths
| have values such as 83.33333333333334% or 66.66666666666666% !
| maelito wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I guess Gemini will be writing emails going forward so no need
| to have a meaningful text input field.
| wapeoifjaweofji wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Quite a lot of UX design these days is only made for initial
| interactivity smoothness without the realization that it really
| does matter how something feels the 1000th time you do it
| (especially with how often we use our phones now).
| sanex wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| All samey and meaningless with no attention to detail.
| jamalaramala wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It's worth comparing to where it came from:
| https://m1.material.io/
|
| v3 is flatter than the flat design that v1 was a reaction
| against because it had such bad affordances.
| jpalawaga wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| sorcerer-mar wrote:
| Christopher Alexander's "Notes on the Synthesis of Form" blames
| this phenomenon for the crimes of architecture schools of late.
|
| He calls it a craft becoming "self-conscious," i.e. the
| architect's role is not to create a place to live, but to _be
| an architect,_ which necessarily entails "competing" against
| other architects. Nobody wins design competitions by creating
| the 1000th example of a tried and true form, they do it by
| pushing the boundaries _of other architects' sensibilities_ ,
| which are already far afield of a normal person's. Most results
| are therefore complete garbage.
| throwingrocks wrote:
| This comment section is predictably boring and shows that HN
| isn't always a great place for discourse. Change is hard, I
| guess.
| bsimpson wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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. 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 wrote:
| 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/discussi...
| krikou wrote:
| The value proposition of material-web was really convincing
| (accessible, high quality web-based component built on top of
| lit) and the dev team did an incredible job. It was killed
| even before they got a chance to release a full component
| set.
|
| Google, fool me once ...
| kps wrote:
| > This happens despite user's clearly communicated "prefers-
| reduced-motion" setting
|
| Let's not forget the user's clearly communicated "prefers-
| color-scheme" setting.
| myfonj wrote:
| Good point! Yet interestingly, that page seem to adopt to
| colour scheme preference just fine at this point. (Even
| dynamically.) It is fact that the gooey thingamajig keeps
| same weird colours in both schemes, but besides that, at
| least the main background and text try to reflect User's
| preference with regard to luminosity.
| LauraMedia wrote:
| I just low how this big card gives you the impression that
| Material Web is still a thing. Then you click on it and the
| first thing you'll see is "MWC is in maintenance mode"
| "Material Design is no longer actively staffing its
| development." and "New features and components are no longer
| planned."
| Pesthuf wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| dickiedyce wrote:
| 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.
| eurekin wrote:
| Challenge: find positive comment about m3 here
| deafpolygon wrote:
| Wow; if you squint - it looks like the Apple design. But with
| really awful colors. And near Comic Sans fonts.
| crowcroft wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Brutal. But it resonates with those 18-24 year olds, at least.
| solardev wrote:
| God damn, this is the ugliest design system I've ever seen in my
| life.
| yahoozoo wrote:
| Terrible
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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)
| freedomben wrote:
| Could not agree more, especially "I loathe the
| "embigification" guised as mobile first for desktop
| experiences. Mice are precise and allow for dense design
| (which i prefer)."
|
| It really is utterly ridiculous how much scrolling we have to
| do on desktop with these modern apps. Scrolling is a paper
| cut IMHO. There are obviously good cases for having to
| scroll, but we should rarely if ever have to scroll just to
| see menu options! I've built a lot of "modern" websites and
| built desktop UI apps back in the day too, so I understand
| the challenges of trying to build responsive UIs that work on
| different screen sizes, but optimizing for the tiny screen
| and almost completely ignoring massive screens isn't the
| answer.
| bsimpson wrote:
| This post explains the methodology:
|
| https://m3.material.io/blog/testing-material-3
| freedomben wrote:
| Thank you, that's a helpful post.
|
| Don't feel obligated, but if you're willing I'd be interested
| to hear more about the demographics of the sample. For
| example, how did you find the participants? How varied were
| their backgrounds? Was there an even distribution of tech and
| non-tech people? A mix of blue collar and white collar?
|
| Lastly I do want to say that although some of the feedback
| has been harsh, I do think what you guys accomplished was
| impressive!
| bsimpson wrote:
| Thanks :)
|
| I create the tools that our researchers use to run the
| experiments. I typically don't run the experiments
| themselves. I wouldn't want to mis-speak or say something
| non-public and have it be picked up in the press, so I'll
| only respond at a very high level.
|
| In quantitative research (which is to say, showing a survey
| to hundreds of participants), there are what are called
| participant panels. Companies go recruit people to take
| surveys. The companies get paid for this - some of the
| money goes to incentivize participants, and some the
| companies keep as profit. Amazon's Mechanical Turk,
| UserTesting, Cint, and Prolific are examples of participant
| panels and/or the companies that run them.
|
| We package the experiment as a web app and give it to the
| provider. They go show it to the requested number of
| participants, whose responses we log and analyze.
|
| In quantitative research, there's a thing called "power
| analysis," which tells you how many participants you need
| to have statistically significant answers to your
| questions. The more ways you want to be able to slice the
| data, the more participants you need.
|
| Participant panels vary in quality. Ideally, a panel is
| comprised of honest people who want to be helpful, and who
| represent the population you're trying to model.
|
| You can imagine that a stay-at-home mom who's killing time
| while the kids are at school might be a very good
| participant. She's someone who might use your product in
| real life, and her primary motivation is to give you her
| honest response so you make the thing she might use better
| for her. The financial incentive is a thank you for her
| time, but she's not chasing it.
|
| You can also imagine someone who's trying to chain together
| these incentives to form an income stream - the online
| equivalent of a food delivery person. That person's primary
| motivation is to get through the task as quickly as
| possible to maximize the number of incentives he receives.
| He might always choose "A" when asked for his preference
| between two alternatives, not because he likes A, but
| because it's faster to not move the mouse. (This is called
| "straight-lining.") That person would be a bad participant.
| We try to detect this and screen that person out.
|
| Panels compete on quality. For a long time, Mechanical Turk
| had a reputation for having a preponderance of young Indian
| men who were trying to game the system. You'd have to
| design your experiment so the fastest way to complete it
| was to be honest, to try to dissuade cheating. (There are
| whole forums of Mechanical Turk workers trading scripts
| etc. to try to complete as many experiments as possible.)
| Even if you get honest responses, there's still a problem
| of representation. Unless the population you're modeling is
| mostly young Indian men, that panel's opinions might not
| match your users.
|
| Age, gender, and location are basic demographics that are
| frequently used to stratify data, so I'm using them as
| examples here, but to your point - there are a lot of
| different factors that might impact how representative
| someone is of a population.
|
| There's a challenge to all of this (which again, I'm
| writing in one draft, off the top of my head - there are
| surely others) - panels are made of a finite number of
| people, and the more specifically you want to analyze
| someone's demographics, the more participants you need
| (power analysis).
|
| Using the demographics you listed as example filters, let's
| go from a generic to a specific population:
|
| - People
|
| - Young people
|
| - Young women
|
| - Young Japanese women
|
| - Young tech-savvy Japanese women
|
| - Young affluent tech-savvy Japanese women
|
| - Young rural affluent tech-savvy Japanese women
|
| (Assume that we assigned a quantifiable threshold to each
| adjective, so e.g. "young" means "under 35.")
|
| A participant panel is going to have many thousands of
| people, but how many young, rural, affluent, tech-savvy,
| Japanese women does it have? How many people does your
| power analysis say you need to speak confidently about the
| opinions of the people in the group? How many experiments
| do you want to run that need the opinions of that group?
|
| The more you filter a panel, the longer it takes to
| complete an experiment. If you just need 300 people, you
| can get your data back in a few hours. If you need 300
| people who meet a specific demographic profile, it's going
| to take substantially longer.
|
| Over time, that problem turns into panel exhaustion. You
| want the panel to be representative of your users, and
| people who have been in a lot of similar experiments might
| be less representative of your users. There was another
| comment that was concerned about the representation of
| women over 70. Say there are 50 active participants in a
| panel who are women over 70 and your power analysis says
| you need 10 before you can estimate their preferences
| (again, hypothetical numbers I am making up). As soon as
| you give another experiment to that panel, the likelihood
| that you're going to have repeat responses from women over
| 70 goes up. Pretty soon, all your experiments are asking
| the opinions of the same small group of people.
|
| To caveat one last time: I'm just a guy who works with the
| researchers cited in these articles. I'm not the one
| running the experiments or deciding how the data gets
| sliced. I've intentionally used hypotheticals and obscure
| demographic intersections because I don't want to imply
| anything about how the actual experiments are run; but
| instead to give a broad overview of the kinds of problems
| you encounter when you work in this space.
|
| Research is the art+science of studying a subset of people
| to estimate the behavior of people at large, because it's
| not practical to ask everyone everything, all the time.
| Part of the art is figuring out which demographics are the
| most impactful to the things you want to measure, because
| as you add intersections, the quantities of data you need
| to speak credibly about those intersections explode.
| ravenstine wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| deadbabe wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| welp back to the terminal I guess ?
| abraxas wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| These weird pastel heavy color-themes feel like they give me eye
| fatigue very quickly, is that just me?
| chakintosh wrote:
| I hated old Material 2. I hate this even more.. with a passion.
| What the hell!?
| cut3 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > create interfaces that connect with people on an emotional
| level
|
| No, thank you.
| nottorp wrote:
| 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?
| chanux wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Engineers generally hate UIs that consumer loves.
| Spivak wrote:
| I want to tattoo this on the eyeballs of every software dev.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44005192
|
| This post is so god damn funny due to the lack of self
| awareness that this happened to them by virtue of being an
| engineer.
| rootlocus wrote:
| I thought so too, but if you consider they removed the "from",
| "to", "subject" and top actions panels, the original had less
| content space. On the screenshot, the original had 152px of
| content height and the new one has 232px, ~ 150% of the old
| one. The one on the right shows a picture that's also content.
| I assume they redesigned the email thread so the box above the
| current email is the mail the person is responding to, with the
| pictures attached.
| amluto wrote:
| I think you're measuring the wrong thing. Most email apps
| (and I sure hope the app in question is in this category)
| make the from, to, and subject lines part of the scrollable
| content region. In the example in question, I doubt they
| removed it -- they scrolled it off the screen.
|
| Amusingly, whoever made the blog post or perhaps the slide
| with the "4x faster" star seems to have doubled down on not
| caring about space allocated to content - the "4x faster"
| star also obscures the content!
| jjice wrote:
| I feel like the discoverability for less screen real estate
| tradeoff is a bad one for a product that you're going to use
| regularly. Something like Gmail is not a one-off used by an
| individual, so if it takes 4 times longer to find something
| that'll take 5 seconds the first time, I really don't think
| that's a good trade off.
|
| I think it's completely okay to expect someone to have to learn
| a UI/UX if it is better in the long run (assuming it's not a
| product that gets used twice a year).
| emmanueloga_ wrote:
| "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-
| tra...
| storus wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| What a joke. Material has been the excessive epitome of form over
| function form the beginning, but this really takes the cake.
| ekianjo wrote:
| So it's about to put less information on the same amount of
| surface? Got it, it goes directly to the trash.
| precompute wrote:
| I want a UI that caters to grown-ups!
| ugh123 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| More like Material 3 Nausea
| everybodyknows wrote:
| Alternative nominations for design excellence:
|
| - Rock Auto
|
| - Grainger
|
| - Craigslist
| dmkolobov wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Here's what Google PageSpeed has to say about it:
| 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
| bn-l wrote:
| > It's time to move beyond "clean" and "boring" designs to create
| interfaces that connect with people on an emotional level.
|
| No.
| theletterf wrote:
| The flat surfaces, the fonts, the colors... Material 3 has potent
| Windows Phone vibes (Metro), don't you think? Such an underrated
| UX.
| tavavex wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Isn't this just Lisa Frank?
| cubefox wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| These assclowns are designing for emotions, not usability. And
| the send button example is the best example why this is an
| abomination.
| nipponese wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| These subtle animations while reading the text make me dizzy.
| What are they animating the text for?
| deburo wrote:
| 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-2YHv1TDxMu3VSGcx9YMs...
| munificent wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Is purple the main color? Or can you choose tints?
| pandemic_region wrote:
| Emotional UX aka Designed for Addictiveness.
| lanyard-textile wrote:
| 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
|
| > 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 wrote:
| > > 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
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| Coming to your neighbourhood theatre in an Android phone. Yeah!
| Brace yourselves. They have gone full bonkers this time.
| SirMaster wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I've sent many an angry tweet about how ugly Material UI is, and
| this doesn't appear to be any better
| brap wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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-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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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...
| neilv wrote:
| Which was a lot of work, to achieve the apt:
| https://www.utne.com/arts/new-pepsi-logo-is-a-joke/
| Lammy wrote:
| What is the point of branding but to be remembered? It
| worked!
| CharlesW wrote:
| lol no it did not https://www.voronoiapp.com/markets/Dr-
| Pepper-Ties-Pepsi-as-A...
| Lammy wrote:
| I'm not talking about the company's effectiveness in
| selling sugar-water with the branding attached; I'm
| talking about the branding's effectiveness at being
| remembered. A person wants to criticize some unrelated UI
| design and the very first thing that comes to their mind
| is "lol this reminds me of The Gravitational Pull of
| Pepsi!!". It will live forever.
| accrual wrote:
| So much wrought for what is essentially a sugar-water
| company.
| wpm wrote:
| Being infamous is not the same thing as being successful.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| But it has a 30% increase in the key attribute of
| "rebelliousness"!
| kevincox wrote:
| Reeks of "we asked about 1000 attributes and took our
| favourite ones that happened to go up" despite those
| increases not being statistically significant.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| > 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.
|
| On top of that, when Apple makes a change or does a redesign,
| it's usually not overly disruptive (new macOS settings aside).
| The core functionality and layouts remain more or less the
| same, but it's just a new coat of paint. I still use my Mac the
| same way today, with the same keyboard shortcuts and workflow I
| did in 2006. Meanwhile, Windows has gone through no less than 5
| total UI disruptions since then.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| > it's usually not overly disruptive (new macOS settings
| aside). The core functionality and layouts remain more or
| less the same
|
| ios 18 photos app?
| thewebguyd wrote:
| True, even Apple has been slipping lately too, particularly
| with apps.
|
| At least the core OS hasn't gone through a reinvention yet.
| overfeed wrote:
| > By contrast, Apple, which is often praised for its product
| aesthetics, never makes marketing content like this about its
| design language
|
| I clearly remember the Jony-Ive-hagiography era, which I assume
| was organized by Apple PR/marketing. Perhaps it's more accurate
| to say Apple doesn't do this anymore.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| 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.
| LauraMedia wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| wiseowise wrote:
| Ah, yes.
|
| Just what I am looking for when I think about GUI on my computers
| _checks notes_ rebelliousness, subculture, modernity.
| therein wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Because we all want our daily driver apps to look like a fucking
| SaaS landing page.
|
| Clowns.
| rienbdj wrote:
| The spacing changing with scrolling makes me feel ... nauseous
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| Gradients are so fucking back. Where's my old copy of Flash MX 6?
| vunderba wrote:
| Going for that aesthetically pleasing CGA look I see.
|
| https://imgur.com/a/vh8ui8I
| suddenexample wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Google is great at many things, design is not among them.
| idle_zealot wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
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