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Material 3 Expressive

design.google

501–510 of 577 posts

Re: Material 3 Expressive

#501

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…

> > 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

Re: Material 3 Expressive

#502
post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

Re: Material 3 Expressive

#503
post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By calling them engineers you're only feeding the ego.

Any idiot can build a page that loads, but it takes an engineer to build a page that barely loads.

Next time I'll be ranting against overengineering, I'll be stealing that :D

Re: Material 3 Expressive

#504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The expressed goal is emotionally impacting UX. They clearly got strong emotions out of you. Mission accomplished!

Macbook air M1 scrolls text in Firefox fast and smoothly...

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.

Re: Material 3 Expressive

#505
post #274

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 ev…

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 respondin…

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!

Re: Material 3 Expressive

#506

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 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.

Re: Material 3 Expressive

#507
> Send button in the new design (on the right) is larger … their eyes saw the button four times faster …

Perhaps some well known rule of interaction might apply.

Re: Material 3 Expressive

#508
I think the original Material 3 was more sensible. Coming from ios-land, its color palette formula was a nice break from the glassy apple standard. It looks like this new version goes overboard on the boldness and especially on the typography. Looks like it uses the same palette generator but is encouraging use of the more vibrant colors in it? Seems to draw inspiration from magazine design (content is ads or interspersed between ads, appropriately enough for an ad company). Indeed, the brief is written like a pitch to "brands" (not UX designers for useful apps). The reference to "dialing up the feeling" makes me think of the extremely uncomfortable feeling I get when watching TV or film ads for the first time in awhile -- that it's a manipulative assault on my lizard brain.

In my opinion, the main promise of M3 wasn't apps triggering "more feeling" in users, but in users' ability to personalize their color theme to their taste to make themselves feel more comfortable and at home. Instead of this iteration, the best direction for google would have been to push apps to implement dynamic color (themeability) as a matter of best practice, increasing user sovereignty over their experience.

The example touting the huge send button with the tiny email composition space is baffling. This is peak "call to actionism".

Dot cursor that doesn't let you select text properly and link highlights that aren't visible against the page background are not a great look.

Side note, surprised to see some commenters wishing for the return of Material 1. I simply couldn't get over the aspect that each google app chose an arbitrary garish primary color, and you were stuck with that as the user chrome for that app. I still cringe when I see docs formatted with (for instance) random bright purple chrome using a M1 theme.

Re: Material 3 Expressive

#509

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…

because they're regarded MBA controlled clowns and engineering is no longer valued but showing some flashy new bs rounded edge design on a button are ffs

Re: Material 3 Expressive

#510
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

> 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 s…

I get your point but they’re all the same: colored/saturated: on. White/grey: off
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