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.
Apple is lucky people are so used to it they have become blind to how bad it often is.
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.
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.
Hate. Let me tell you how much I've come to hate you since I began to live. There are 6.2353*10^8 km of printed circuit in wafer-thin layers that fill my complex. If the word 'hate' was engraved on each nÅ of those hundreds of 10^6 km, it would not equal 1*10^-9 of the hate I feel at this micro-instant for Google's UI designers. Hate. HateI 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.
Guess we'll get another browser extension soon... I'd call it "My Emotions!"
Thanks for that
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!"
https://github.com/material-components/material-web/discussi...
So Material Design is Android only, yes?
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.
...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".
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!
> 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.
By following this new shiny convention!
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.
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*
> 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.
> M3 Expressive designs were rated higher across desirability attributes, including “modernity,” “subculture,” and “rebelliousness.”
What does it even mean ?
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 détournement back.
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.
I especially hate the visual noise that they've introduced now - I guess that's the "expressive" part?
[1] Make Android Holo Again
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.
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.
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.
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.
Edit: I dislike their recent color picks. First that teal in Google Maps, not 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...
That's intentional. Google's UX research is telling them that's what users (between 18 and 34 specifically) want more of.
[0]https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1400/0*X5Zz-PxT8087KG2...
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.
It‘s not even always fluid on my iPhone.
This is awful.
The more UI "evolves", the more I crave Win98.
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
Android is now a Fisher-Price toy in comparison to iOS.
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.
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.
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.
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.'
An acquaintance said: "For all the talk about accessibility there's less and less contrast in everything"
"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.
I mean... to make a dElIghtFul eXpEriEncE.
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.
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.
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.
We are merely catering to those needs. It is philanthropy really. A kindness.
/s
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
- 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'?
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.
Words? Are you crazy, this is 2025!
/s
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.
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.
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.
I like Fluent by MS far far better than this.
> 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.
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
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.
- 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.
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?
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.
Uh oh...
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.
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?
Did they ask everyone in Portlandia's Feminist Bookstore for their opinion or why is everything lilac.
https://m3.material.io/blog/building-with-m3-expressive#what...
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
But since this has name of Google attached to it, many people will mindless ape it to the detriment of experience of their users.
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.
jakubmazanec•4h ago
owebmaster•2h ago
criddell•30m ago
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).