Material 3 Expressive

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

> Hardly anyone prefers actually drinking Pepsi.

You take that back.

>>Show me metrics that move something tangible, like conversion rates. If you can't do that, we both know why.

Personally, I'm pretty cynical on metrics like CTR as well. I think people in this discussion have presented plenty of reasonable criticism on the metrics used in the article, and I don't really disagree. But Google's culture of design by metrics at originates with metrics like conversion rates. I am personally fond of Material 1 but I don't think that the extensive A/B testing really made any real improvements to the design system. What's more, design by testing can really make a mess of things. You can easily end up chasing noise, creating irrelevant p-hacks, pursuing local optima, and tanking the long term experience in favor of short term gains. And you are blinding yourself to these problems with a very precise number.

In market research the concept of the NPS score is instructive: a 100 question survey tells you very little for a variety of methodological issues. Instead just ask the basic question "would you recommend this product to a friend - yes, no maybe?". It's about as precise as the thing it is trying to measure. Something in that style is probably the best way to quantitatively evaluate UX design. More practically though, qualitative research is probably going to be telling you a lot more than a simple number (unless you are actually making ads, in which case, get the CRT as high as possible).