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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.

> 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.

> 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?

True, even Apple has been slipping lately too, particularly with apps.

At least the core OS hasn't gone through a reinvention yet.

Similar to Settings app I think the Photos app was because they rewrote it in Swift.

> 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.

But it has a 30% increase in the key attribute of “rebelliousness”!

Reeks of "we asked about 1000 attributes and took our favourite ones that happened to go up" despite those increases not being statistically significant.

> 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?

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...

Which was a lot of work, to achieve the apt: https://www.utne.com/arts/new-pepsi-logo-is-a-joke/

What is the point of branding but to be remembered? It worked!

lol no it did not https://www.voronoiapp.com/markets/Dr-Pepper-Ties-Pepsi-as-A...

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.

You're assuming the goal of the marketing is merely "to be remembered". But it's not. It's to be remembered in some positive way, or at least some way that still increases sales. This campaign will live forever as a laughing stock. That wasn't its intention.

Understood. But also “there’s no such thing as bad publicity.”

Scare quotes because obviously there is, but I don’t think this example crosses the line.

Even if one takes it as being on that side of the fence, which I'm not sure I actually buy myself, I'm also still not convinced getting some a niche of folks aware of marketing and brand design documents to have such an association form would deserved to be called wildly successful. Usually you want a significant portion of the population to have a common association with a brand as large as Pepsi, not a small portion to have a rare association.

Being infamous is not the same thing as being successful.

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.

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.

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

The only thing I see on the Awwwards page is the GIF of Sharp Grotesk font family, which is used on Dropbox homepage. dropbox.design doesn’t open for me, so I’m not sure about other elements of their redesign.

> It reminds me a study about the perception of beauty among students of arts.

Do you know which particular study this was? I would like to read it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

As much as I generally like MDv1: I hate those floating buttons with a passion.

They can occasionally work. But the vast majority of the time they simply get in the way and can't be hidden, because you're in a content-edge-case that doesn't scroll far enough, or you simply reached the end and they didn't leave after-end padding to make room for it. And very few actions are so important that you want to display it over everything else, for the same reasons that everyone recommends against popups.

Just put it in the freaking toolbar. Top or bottom, I don't care.

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?

Insert Principle Skinner: "Am I out of touch? No, its the young people that are wrong".

You're talking like Google isn't a ad company trying to keep you staring on your screen.

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

XD

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.

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...)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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

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).

They have to pretend you want emotional designs. Because how would they keep their jobs? Every iteration of material design needs some bullshit improvement.

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.

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.

> 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

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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

> 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.

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

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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...

For anyone not familiar with previous designs, each component in https://m3.material.io/components has a "comparison with Material v2" section.

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...

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.

Those cars look like driveable iMacs.

Good lord, that page you linked is 60MB.

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.

The big thing of this design system is that you can change the colors ;)

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>

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).

Engineers generally hate UIs that consumer loves.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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!

> 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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Especially since it feels so bland and "corpo safe" - the only thing I have feelings about is selling this as expressive :D

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.

I was positive that this was satire, but no that's genuinely right there in the post.

Google became a trillion dollars satire

> willing to break from convention

By following this new shiny convention!

That's disruption, baby!

So google has been tracking rebelliousness since when that today they have a 30% historical comparison?

This reeks of "Defiant Jazz"

I am a little afraid to ask but what is a "jump in rebelliousness"?

It means a trillion dollar company is affirming people’s dissatisfaction with the status quo for even more $$$.

While destroying the meaning of rebellion - which we could use a bit of right now.

Rebelliousness appears to be one of the emotion metrics they used to score the designs.

It's the new way hipsters use their fingers to push the buttons with their fingers. It's magical or something.

And they quantified each of those gains down to two full decimal places of precision!

It doesn't look bland to me at all. Most of the examples look like a failed Linux rice.

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

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.

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*

You assume it's people writing it. It was probably written by AI. Nobody cares.

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 ?

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 détournement back.

Also known as marketing. I don’t know why they need it here so much.

I doubt it's actual people writing it anymore, probably something from Gemini. All the emotions, none of the feels.

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.

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

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.

I'm on mobile and scrolled through most of this waiting for images to load, and wondering why I didn't see any.

Working perfectly fine in LibreWolf on macOS. Huh.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

Can't even move the mouse while scrolling lmao

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.

“then spend zero brainpower on systems without graphics acceleration”

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.

And they are very well paid for all that work!

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

And to imagine that Googlers do not know better... sighs.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

> 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.

> 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.

That sounds like people who don't know web dev trying to do web dev.

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!

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.

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.

Indeed. And all the routing libraries also render <a>s by default

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.

> 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.

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!

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.

> 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.

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...

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...

Browser don't support replacing cursor images natively for obvious reasons. You have to use JavaScript for that.

CSS supports replacing cursor images natively.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/cursor

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.

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).

The cursor color inversion can't be done with CSS though.

Use a different colored image.

The background colour of the hovered element is known. When you specify the bgcolor, also override the cursor image.

I am pretty sure it is doable in CSS.

another thing to block in firefox userContent.css as there doesn't appear to be an option for it in about:config

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?

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.

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.

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!"

They had to add that 500ms of input latency to feel like you're really using Android.

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.

I am on Debian linux with 128 GB of ram running the latest brave browser and the cursor lags for me also.

Leetcode monkeys with little dev experience will do that.

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.

I've been using Flutter again recently because every time I need a workout timer, I spend ages looking for non-adware/crapware in mobile app stores then just writing my own.

This latest version exists because the previous one bit rot so hard it wouldn't compile any more and got removed from the Play Store (and the NHS Couch to 5k app I wanted to use was region-locked). Flutter web output still sucks, but it's better than dealing with any amount of Xcode or Android builds for a one-user app:

https://flutter-workout-timers.netlify.app/

I also used it as an opportunity to create separate Material and Cupertino versions you can switch between, and Material 3 just looks like... well, the complete opposite of expressive. I could just be holding it wrong, of course.

The M3 docs I consulted while making it have always been diabolical, with the most overblown, laggy delayed image loading/placeholder stuff I've ever seen, even on a powerful desktop with fast internet.

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

OMG I thought it was something wrong on my end, privacy add-on or whatnot. Glad to see they just lost it.

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.

These are UX researchers. This is not an engineering project.

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.

Pretty sure Google has used Docs internally since long before COVID.

"used Docs internally" is not the same as:

> on normal consumer internet connections

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.

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.

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.

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?

Ignorance is a key trait for angel investors.

As someone who had a landlord that was a google software engineer, I concur.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

> 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.

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)

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.

Hmm, works just fine on my pixel 6a in chrome.

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.

It comes across as AI-generated diarrhea, without any point. Maybe I am just too dumb to recognize talent?

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.

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).

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.

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?

If you try to move the mouse while scrolling the cursor freezes... jfc bring back 2010's Google.

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.

I only came here to rant about how no one should mess with my mouse cursor.

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.

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

I wish I could upvote you ten times.

> 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.

You are just part of the problem. In which companies do engineers still have the final say? Almost none.

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

Why does everything reek of late capitalism? Even design doesn't fail to emanate a distinct "dystopian megacorp" stench.

What do you expect from an OS that has a trash can for a logo?

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.

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.

I am on a four core also with a (non-recent) NVIDIA graphics card and its laggy...

That's crazy. In many ways we are moving backwards.

m1 pro using firefox, I can notice the cursor not being smooth, and if I move the mouse while scrolling then it lags hard

I have no cursor lag and I'm on a 2019 Intel MBP.

I’m on an iPhone, and I see no cursor lag!

[Ticket Closed] resolution: user should buy a macbook pro with at least the M3 processor

/s

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.

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 !

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.

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.

And after all that, your company gets hacked through a misconfigured router.

> 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.

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.

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?

It's working perfectly fine on my m1 Mac + firefox.

My comment was a joke

Images loading is lagging on my M3 pro with 48gb ram on fiber

[dead]

[flagged]

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

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.

> 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?

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?

> 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.

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.

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.

>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?!

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

> 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).

I guess Gemini will be writing emails going forward so no need to have a meaningful text input field.

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.

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.

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.

> Hardly anyone prefers actually drinking Pepsi.

You take that back.

> 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.

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.

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

> > 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

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

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...

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 ...

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."

> This happens despite user's clearly communicated "prefers-reduced-motion" setting

Let's not forget the user's clearly communicated "prefers-color-scheme" setting.

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.

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/

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 4× 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.

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.

> 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.

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

It's funny that the people who designed this monstrosity of a web page feel qualified enough to advice other people about design.

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.

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.

> honestly these are so obvious that I assume you viewed the website on mobile

The page is terrible UX on mobile too. After the random switch from dark mode to light mode I tapped what looked like a dark mode button and got a full screen about page with no close or back button, so I pressed my phone's back button but ended up back on HN. It turns out to navigate back out of the unexpected about screen you have to press what looks like a forward button (I think they're trying to indicate that it goes away to the right, but the thing is full screen like a full page navigation so that doesn't make sense).

> the page flashbangs you

Did anyone understand what the purpose of that was?

Emotional connection.

Those who experience trauma together often form a strong emotional bond.

emotional connection!

efb

Read the rest of the comment thread. It is obviously not a singular opinion, as you seem to think.

> 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?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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)

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.

This post explains the methodology:

https://m3.material.io/blog/testing-material-3

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!

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.

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

But pinkish is just the default. You can select a color scheme and theme color like blue, indigo, etc. Looks better off the bat.

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.

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'?

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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

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.

Ya, but it lands so well with those 18-24 year olds that make all the clicks!

If there's one thing I know about 18-24 year olds, it's that they love sending emails!

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.

it increases the efficiency of sending short messages...

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"?

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.

I feel like they did already lay them off, which is how we end up with this...

Redesigning corporate branding is the revolving door of getting a promotion package, won't someone please think of the middle managers!

We know what happens to "done" Google products though... they're going to keep making changes until Android goes away.

Android doesn't have to remain a Google product though. Google is mostly a terrible maintainer of AOSP.

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.

My pet peeve is user interfaces that simply hide options away and give zero indication that they exist.

The assumption is you know how to find them.

Google has this sort of thing everywhere.

Instantly hate that page for changing my cursor. Why do they even do that?

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!"

The cursor being captured when hovering buttons is the worst UI I've seen in a very long time

It's what iPad does when you use a mouse. https://web.archive.org/web/20200602200001/https://www.apple...

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?

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.

It sucks on there too. Thankfully it can be toned down/disabled there.

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.

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

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.

They made you "feel something" I guess

That feeling is hate

  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. Hate

First, they came for my scroll bars...

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.

> 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

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.

> 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)

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

After saying they weren't letting data make the decisions too...

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?

Try with a smartphone, the very first toolbar "Overview/specs/guideline/accessibility", tap the specs to see both left/right buttons

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.

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.

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.

Most users cannot handle more than two buttons anyway, at least outside of professional tools for power users.

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

"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?

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.

>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.

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.

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.

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.

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.'

I wish they were "restating" them. They're not, they're ignoring those principles in favour of vibes design.

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.

> So expressive = make things usable?

An acquaintance said: "For all the talk about accessibility there's less and less contrast in everything"

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?

mui.com is still around and IMO way better than this crap

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).

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.

The progress bar looks a bit like a snake being electrocuted.

https://m3.material.io/blog/building-with-m3-expressive#what...

And the circular one is the icon for head trauma.

I cannot scroll down that page, wtf.

It looks like "expressive" in this case means "various pastel shades of pink and purple".

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).

It looked expressive and unconventional for the internal committees.

God damn, this is the ugliest design system I've ever seen in my life.

If the rest of the design is as annoying as the circular cursor enforced on me I'll pass, thanks.

I'll never know, I don't have enough time to wait for it to load.

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.

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.

> M3 Expressive designs were rated higher across desirability attributes, including “modernity,” “subculture,” and “rebelliousness.”

The more UI "evolves", the more I crave Win98.

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.

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.

Ah, yes.

Just what I am looking for when I think about GUI on my computers checks notes rebelliousness, subculture, modernity.

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.

Viewing the page source, I love the way many inline css widths have values such as 83.33333333333334% or 66.66666666666666% !

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

"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...

These assclowns are designing for emotions, not usability. And the send button example is the best example why this is an abomination.

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."

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.

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.

Whenever I interact with google UIs, the question is always "which ellipses do I have to tap to find the action I want?"

Innovative compromise between light/dark mode; just have the page switch between the two repeatedly as you scroll.

Hybrid mode. A full 24 hours are passing by scrolling the page

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

How designers see the icons / how I see the icons

https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1400/0*X5Zz-PxT8087KG2...

70+ is not a marketable demographic.

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.

Google is great at many things, design is not among them.

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

Going for that aesthetically pleasing CGA look I see.

https://imgur.com/a/vh8ui8I

Because we all want our daily driver apps to look like a fucking SaaS landing page.

Clowns.

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.

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

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.

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?

Let's just go back to system wide skins. Let users make everything look as boring or fun as they want.

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.

It feels a lot like "duotones everywhere" - i.e. the hottest trend of 2022

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

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?

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.

I fully agree. The word I would describe this is indeed Flat.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

What I care about the most in UIs is latency. Not a single mention of it.

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.

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.

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)

> 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.

>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...

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?

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

Love how design is finally leaning into emotion.

I've sent many an angry tweet about how ugly Material UI is, and this doesn't appear to be any better

The spacing changing with scrolling makes me feel … nauseous

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.

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.

The flat surfaces, the fonts, the colors... Material 3 has potent Windows Phone vibes (Metro), don't you think? Such an underrated UX.

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...

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...

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.

welp back to the terminal I guess ?

These subtle animations while reading the text make me dizzy. What are they animating the text for?

Im dying inside at the thought of outsourced junior designers redoing gcp dashboards this way. im already confused enough in there

Yikes... everything looks like jelly. Best served with Comic Sans MS.

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.

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.

All samey and meaningless with no attention to detail.

Challenge: find positive comment about m3 here

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.

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.

These weird pastel heavy color-themes feel like they give me eye fatigue very quickly, is that just me?

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.

Did anyone notice the mouse cursor changes color when you hover it over the video, try moving it around. How does it work?

It pulsates expressively between nausea and diarrhea.

Is purple the main color? Or can you choose tints?

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.

> create interfaces that connect with people on an emotional level

No, thank you.

Animated border radius

Coming to your neighbourhood theatre in an Android phone. Yeah! Brace yourselves. They have gone full bonkers this time.

Brutal. But it resonates with those 18-24 year olds, at least.

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.

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.

> 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.

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

> 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.

Isn't this just Lisa Frank?

Gradients are so fucking back. Where's my old copy of Flash MX 6?

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.

It seems UI trends are going to repeat like fashion repeats itself in cycles.

UI trends _are_ fashion trends.

Alternative nominations for design excellence:

- Rock Auto

- Grainger

- Craigslist

I want a UI that caters to grown-ups!

So it's about to put less information on the same amount of surface? Got it, it goes directly to the trash.

What a joke. Material has been the excessive epitome of form over function form the beginning, but this really takes the cake.

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.

You can't ever win with people that freak out when they see a settings menu. There's no point trying to appease them.

> It's time to move beyond “clean” and “boring” designs to create interfaces that connect with people on an emotional level.

No.

Emotional UX aka Designed for Addictiveness.

> 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".

> 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.

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.

…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.

This effect is brutal and made me feel a bit motion sick trying to scroll the site :/.

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

I'm still on 11 (thank you lineageos security updates) so I've managed to avoid the material you madness.

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!"

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.

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!

Terrible

Wow; if you squint - it looks like the Apple design. But with really awful colors. And near Comic Sans fonts.

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.

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)

ikr? I'm still amazed at how bad material is from a UX point of view. All the gear, no idea I guess

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.

More like Material 3 Nausea

> After mentioning her initial findings to colleagues in a Munich beer hall

Uh oh...

We're still waiting to read about her struggle.

I hated old Material 2. I hate this even more.. with a passion. What the hell!?

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?

This comment section is predictably boring and shows that HN isn’t always a great place for discourse. Change is hard, I guess.

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

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.

I've noticed that lately too.

And any thread with a political tinge has a comment section indistinguishable from Reddit, complete with the doomerism.

made with uh....angular

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

... which is such a pity. One of the best component library still.

"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

And they moved it closer to the keyboard, which is where the primary buttons should be on mobile anyways. Total incompetence.

[dead]

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.

[dead]

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.