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Material 3 Expressive

design.google

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Re: Material 3 Expressive

#321

Post by freedomben »

idkalexj wrote: post #254
freedomben wrote: post #234

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 websit…

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, WO…

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.

Re: Material 3 Expressive

#322

Post by freedomben »

clickety_clack wrote: post #273
freedomben wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

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.

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.

Re: Material 3 Expressive

#323

Post by abraxas »

chanux wrote: post #265

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 lead…

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)

Re: Material 3 Expressive

#324

Post by 0x457 »

dgimla20 wrote: post #37

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…

> 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.

Re: Material 3 Expressive

#325

Post by horsawlarway »

sorenjan wrote: post #276
bflesch wrote: post #120

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 engin…

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.

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.

Re: Material 3 Expressive

#326

Post by Octoth0rpe »

WorldMaker wrote: post #316
Octoth0rpe wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

> 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.

Re: Material 3 Expressive

#327

Post by abraxas »

erkt wrote: post #238

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.

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...

Re: Material 3 Expressive

#329

Post by tavavex »

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."

Re: Material 3 Expressive

#330

Post by TehCorwiz »

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.

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