from Hacker News

Material 3 Expressive

by meetpateltech on 5/13/25, 5:20 PM with 557 comments

by diegof79 on 5/16/25, 7:16 PM
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 dgimla20 on 5/16/25, 9:25 AM
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.
by jamalaramala on 5/16/25, 1:22 PM
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.
by onli on 5/16/25, 9:01 AM
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.
by arp242 on 5/16/25, 8:48 AM
> 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!
by amluto on 5/16/25, 3:00 PM
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>
by bflesch on 5/16/25, 11:38 AM
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.
by OsrsNeedsf2P on 5/16/25, 10:22 AM
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.
by maelito on 5/16/25, 12:57 PM
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.
by idle_zealot on 5/16/25, 9:51 PM
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.
by lanyard-textile on 5/16/25, 6:10 PM
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
by aylmao on 5/16/25, 9:48 AM
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/
by kqr on 5/16/25, 12:54 PM
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.
by myfonj on 5/16/25, 1:25 PM
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
```
This appears to be a heading and subtitle, but in reality consists of two styled <spans> with no space between them (hence the peculiar "1.0Start" fusion). The spans are marked with `class="title"` and `class="description..."` respectively. 8. User boldly clicks that tile. 9. User gets a new browser tab opened. 10. User wonders why there was no visual indication this would happen. 11. User evaluates the content of this unsolicited tab, decorated with "cheering megaphone" emoji. They conclude there is actually no clear path toward "Starting to use lightweight and accessible Material Components" there. 12. User decides to close the tab and return to the original "M3" page. 13. The original "M3" page no longer looks as it did before. It has scrolled back to the frozen orange-violet thingamajig, causing the content with the tile to vanish from the viewport. 14. User decides that they've encountered enough WCAG violations for this month. 15. User closes the tab.
by hexomancer on 5/16/25, 10:46 AM
It's funny that the people who designed this monstrosity of a web page feel qualified enough to advice other people about design.
by freedomben on 5/16/25, 2:12 PM
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.
by fedsocpuppet on 5/16/25, 3:47 PM
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
by antonyh on 5/16/25, 9:26 AM
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.
by nkrisc on 5/16/25, 4:31 PM
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.
by ggm on 5/22/25, 3:27 AM
I volunteer with seniors helping them with online problems. The lack of clear guidance what is and what is not an active element in a web view, responsive to touch, is their biggest cognitive burden. They really struggle.
Seniors make up 4-5% of the online population. As a cohort they're growing. Cognitive decline, visual acuity, memory all fade. So these are otherwise competent people who made good livings, now struggling with design choices with consequences for them.
There is simply no single abiding rule. It may be a red box, or a yellow circle, it may be words or a logo or a skuomorphism in cartoon sense.
I would suspect toddlers are the same. Who knows?
Gov.uk is exemplary for understanding this problem.
Material design isn't orthogonal in this, because it's flat aspects de-emphasis any clear distinction where prior coding models tended to have a gui look to buttons which lay outside this design imperative.
by divan on 5/16/25, 11:23 AM
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
by Pesthuf on 5/16/25, 1:33 PM
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"?
by AJRF on 5/16/25, 8:25 AM
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.
by grishka on 5/16/25, 12:56 PM
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.
by martin_a on 5/16/25, 8:33 AM
Instantly hate that page for changing my cursor. Why do they even do that?
by eviks on 5/16/25, 9:11 AM
> 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
by LeratoAustini on 5/16/25, 11:19 AM
"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?
by dickiedyce on 5/16/25, 1:39 PM
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.
by uxcolumbo on 5/16/25, 9:13 AM
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.'
by anentropic on 5/16/25, 8:45 AM
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?
by jakubmazanec on 5/16/25, 8:18 AM
It looks like "expressive" in this case means "various pastel shades of pink and purple".
by travisgriggs on 5/16/25, 1:37 PM
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.
by jiehong on 5/16/25, 8:58 AM
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.
by boobsbr on 5/16/25, 9:05 AM
> M3 Expressive designs were rated higher across desirability attributes, including “modernity,” “subculture,” and “rebelliousness.”
The more UI "evolves", the more I crave Win98.
by solardev on 5/16/25, 2:07 PM
God damn, this is the ugliest design system I've ever seen in my life.
by lol768 on 5/16/25, 11:21 AM
The progress bar looks a bit like a snake being electrocuted.
https://m3.material.io/blog/building-with-m3-expressive#what...
by gadders on 5/16/25, 11:24 AM
If the rest of the design is as annoying as the circular cursor enforced on me I'll pass, thanks.
by xnx on 5/16/25, 2:56 PM
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.
by varbhat on 5/16/25, 9:28 AM
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.
by _pdp_ on 5/16/25, 9:25 AM
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.
by 90s_dev on 5/16/25, 12:42 PM
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?
by ugh123 on 5/16/25, 3:37 PM
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
by bschwindHN on 5/16/25, 10:53 AM
Whenever I interact with google UIs, the question is always "which ellipses do I have to tap to find the action I want?"
by emmanueloga_ on 5/16/25, 3:12 PM
"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...
by ustad on 5/16/25, 12:56 PM
Viewing the page source, I love the way many inline css widths have values such as 83.33333333333334% or 66.66666666666666% !
by wiseowise on 5/16/25, 8:33 PM
Ah, yes.
Just what I am looking for when I think about GUI on my computers checks notes rebelliousness, subculture, modernity.
by dmkolobov on 5/16/25, 3:45 PM
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.
by vessenes on 5/16/25, 11:31 AM
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.
by unsungNovelty on 5/16/25, 10:09 AM
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.
by jfoster on 5/16/25, 11:35 AM
Innovative compromise between light/dark mode; just have the page switch between the two repeatedly as you scroll.
by suddenexample on 5/16/25, 9:34 PM
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.
by munificent on 5/16/25, 5:14 PM
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.
by wewewedxfgdf on 5/16/25, 11:51 PM
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.
by ninetyninenine on 5/16/25, 1:12 PM
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.
by xiphias2 on 5/16/25, 8:31 AM
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.
by andrepd on 5/16/25, 9:00 AM
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.
by AbraKdabra on 5/16/25, 4:34 PM
These assclowns are designing for emotions, not usability. And the send button example is the best example why this is an abomination.
by bloggie on 5/16/25, 5:15 PM
>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...
by nottorp on 5/16/25, 2:51 PM
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?
by MrBuddyCasino on 5/16/25, 11:20 AM
> 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.
by Onavo on 5/16/25, 8:22 AM
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.
by hokkos on 5/16/25, 8:50 AM
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
by LauraMedia on 5/16/25, 7:53 PM
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.
by jonasdoesthings on 5/16/25, 11:24 AM
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
by rrgok on 5/16/25, 5:45 PM
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.
by rkachowski on 5/16/25, 8:27 AM
It feels a lot like "duotones everywhere" - i.e. the hottest trend of 2022
by coastalpuma on 5/16/25, 11:18 PM
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.
by WithinReason on 5/16/25, 12:41 PM
What I care about the most in UIs is latency. Not a single mention of it.
by TehCorwiz on 5/16/25, 4:12 PM
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.
by the_third_wave on 5/16/25, 8:53 AM
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
by KaiserPro on 5/16/25, 7:35 PM
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.
by drcongo on 5/16/25, 8:39 AM
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!"
by ravenstine on 5/16/25, 2:12 PM
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.
by aucisson_masque on 5/16/25, 10:32 PM
> 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.
by zecg on 5/16/25, 10:22 AM
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.
by cut3 on 5/16/25, 2:54 PM
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
by void-pointer on 5/16/25, 9:30 AM
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.
by meindnoch on 5/16/25, 8:41 PM
Because we all want our daily driver apps to look like a fucking SaaS landing page.
Clowns.
by mwkaufma on 5/17/25, 1:16 AM
Where does "please make the play/pause button on the android lock screen big like it used to be, for my big thumb" land w/r/t Modernity, Subculture, or Rebelliousness?
by storus on 5/16/25, 3:19 PM
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.
by affenape on 5/16/25, 11:35 AM
Yikes... everything looks like jelly. Best served with Comic Sans MS.
by saubeidl on 5/16/25, 8:52 AM
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?
by chanux on 5/16/25, 2:54 PM
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.
by methuselah_in on 5/22/25, 3:31 AM
Green is always soothing in software! Apart from that colors are good i suppose too. Currently no device going to get A16 i guess I am happy with a15 as of now. Maybe when things settle down I will be seeing how it works.
by vunderba on 5/16/25, 9:22 PM
Going for that aesthetically pleasing CGA look I see.
https://imgur.com/a/vh8ui8I
by josefrichter on 5/16/25, 9:43 PM
Google is great at many things, design is not among them.
by igouy on 5/16/25, 11:00 PM
> 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.
by cubefox on 5/16/25, 4:30 PM
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.
by neilv on 5/16/25, 8:13 PM
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.
by Workaccount2 on 5/16/25, 2:11 PM
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)
by pawanjswal on 5/16/25, 11:29 AM
Love how design is finally leaning into emotion.
by ramesh31 on 5/16/25, 3:21 PM
What a joke. Material has been the excessive epitome of form over function form the beginning, but this really takes the cake.
by Traubenfuchs on 5/16/25, 9:04 AM
…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.
by ekianjo on 5/16/25, 3:22 PM
So it's about to put less information on the same amount of surface? Got it, it goes directly to the trash.
by utkarsh858 on 5/16/25, 4:30 PM
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.
by rado on 5/16/25, 8:21 AM
Animated border radius
by LoganDark on 5/17/25, 4:53 AM
This is just an attempt to copy iOS, in my opinion. Even the website is - the way your cursor is no longer an arrow but just a circle that molds to the shape of nearby buttons is a (very badly executed, at least on this website) clear attempt to copy iPadOS.
by Ninjinka on 5/16/25, 7:00 PM
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.
by wolpoli on 5/17/25, 4:54 AM
According to the page, with M3 Expressive, Time to first fixation is .65s for 18-24 year old, 0.93s for 25-45 year old, and 0.81s 45+ year. It doesn't make intuitive sense that 45+ year old are now faster than their younger group.
by dreamcompiler on 5/17/25, 3:21 AM
> We found that well-applied, expressive design is strongly preferred by people of all ages, with that preference being particularly strong — up to 87% — among 18-to-24-year-olds.
Another colorful thing popular with kids: Tide pods.
by deadbabe on 5/16/25, 2:15 PM
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!
by ionwake on 5/16/25, 10:25 AM
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
by brap on 5/16/25, 6:54 PM
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.
by webprofusion on 5/16/25, 9:16 AM
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.
by rienbdj on 5/16/25, 8:53 PM
The spacing changing with scrolling makes me feel … nauseous
by nipponese on 5/16/25, 4:35 PM
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.
by erkt on 5/16/25, 2:15 PM
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.
by sanex on 5/16/25, 1:03 PM
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.
by PaulHoule on 5/16/25, 1:17 PM
All samey and meaningless with no attention to detail.
by theletterf on 5/16/25, 4:11 PM
The flat surfaces, the fonts, the colors... Material 3 has potent Windows Phone vibes (Metro), don't you think? Such an underrated UX.
by cut3 on 5/16/25, 2:50 PM
Im dying inside at the thought of outsourced junior designers redoing gcp dashboards this way. im already confused enough in there
by eurekin on 5/16/25, 2:01 PM
Challenge: find positive comment about m3 here
by wiradikusuma on 5/16/25, 12:16 PM
Did anyone notice the mouse cursor changes color when you hover it over the video, try moving it around. How does it work?
by crowcroft on 5/16/25, 2:06 PM
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.
by Ninjinka on 5/16/25, 6:51 PM
I've sent many an angry tweet about how ugly Material UI is, and this doesn't appear to be any better
by deafpolygon on 5/16/25, 2:05 PM
Wow; if you squint - it looks like the Apple design. But with really awful colors. And near Comic Sans fonts.
by ilioscio on 5/16/25, 2:23 PM
These weird pastel heavy color-themes feel like they give me eye fatigue very quickly, is that just me?
by deburo on 5/16/25, 4:52 PM
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...
by precompute on 5/16/25, 3:24 PM
I want a UI that caters to grown-ups!
by bromuro on 5/16/25, 4:38 PM
These subtle animations while reading the text make me dizzy. What are they animating the text for?
by apt-apt-apt-apt on 5/16/25, 11:05 AM
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.
by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF on 5/16/25, 8:57 PM
Gradients are so fucking back. Where's my old copy of Flash MX 6?
by not_a_bot_4sho on 5/16/25, 2:51 PM
> create interfaces that connect with people on an emotional level
No, thank you.
by SecretDreams on 5/16/25, 2:06 PM
Brutal. But it resonates with those 18-24 year olds, at least.
by mattgreenrocks on 5/16/25, 5:54 PM
Is purple the main color? Or can you choose tints?
by zwaps on 5/17/25, 3:49 AM
Pretty successful at invoking the emotion rage
by pandemic_region on 5/16/25, 6:03 PM
Emotional UX aka Designed for Addictiveness.
by crossroadsguy on 5/16/25, 6:38 PM
Coming to your neighbourhood theatre in an Android phone. Yeah! Brace yourselves. They have gone full bonkers this time.
by drbig on 5/16/25, 8:47 AM
> 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 hidelooktropic on 5/16/25, 4:20 PM
Isn't this just Lisa Frank?
by Workaccount2 on 5/16/25, 2:22 PM
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.
by everybodyknows on 5/16/25, 3:41 PM
Alternative nominations for design excellence:
- Rock Auto
- Grainger
- Craigslist
by junon on 5/16/25, 11:38 AM
> 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.
by bn-l on 5/16/25, 3:52 PM
> It's time to move beyond “clean” and “boring” designs to create interfaces that connect with people on an emotional level.
No.
by fHr on 5/17/25, 10:13 PM
Clear regression
by calrain on 5/16/25, 9:43 PM
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.
by dreamcompiler on 5/17/25, 3:14 AM
Oh good. Everything's purple now. And in your face. And the background color changes as you scroll. If this catches on I'll have to write a browser extension to get rid of it.
Hey Google, why don't you just bring back the <blink> tag?
by Oarch on 5/16/25, 11:05 AM
> After mentioning her initial findings to colleagues in a Munich beer hall
Uh oh...
by yahoozoo on 5/16/25, 2:09 PM
Terrible
by SirMaster on 5/16/25, 6:45 PM
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.
by caulkboots on 5/16/25, 3:40 PM
More like Material 3 Nausea
by chakintosh on 5/16/25, 2:42 PM
I hated old Material 2. I hate this even more.. with a passion. What the hell!?
by rpcope1 on 5/16/25, 5:28 PM
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?
by throwingrocks on 5/16/25, 1:23 PM
This comment section is predictably boring and shows that HN isn’t always a great place for discourse. Change is hard, I guess.
by lerp-io on 5/16/25, 12:50 PM
made with uh....angular
by asah on 5/16/25, 12:41 PM
"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
by jdougan on 5/16/25, 8:46 AM
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.
by margorczynski on 5/16/25, 10:56 AM
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.
by tavavex on 5/16/25, 4:12 PM
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."