Comment by dgimla20
1 month ago
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.
I work with Shopify apps, and we’re currently struggling with this because they enforce their design system to grant you a “Built for Shopify” badge that boosts trusts and listing rankings.
The problem is that to follow their design system, you have to turn a self explaining button into a full page with useless text, because they think your homepage should have an onboarding description to make users “excited to use your app”.
This is so company centric, no one will ever be excited to use your app, they just want to solve their problem and leave as fast as possible.
> 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.
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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.
They just feel like yet more KPI-demanded clutter.
I'm so used to some random bs floating on the screen bottom-right (useless chat assistant or something), so my brain is trained to ignore those elements.
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
They have to pretend you want emotional designs. Because how would they keep their jobs? Every iteration of material design needs some bullshit improvement.
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...)
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.
Just to quote the article itself: Why did all these apps look so similar?
Because of material design already lol
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.
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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).
> 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
It shows that this document is not meant for end users. People who want to sell their apps or indirectly by having people watch the included ads want users to connect on an emotional level.
Publishers don't want you to go back to the "real world", they want your money (or attention). Sometimes, the goals align, like for business software, where they measure productivity, but sometimes not, like with ad supported apps.
Video games are another case. Here emotions are the entire point. But games rarely use standard UIs anyways.
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.