Material 3 Expressive

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>

> 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.

Engineers generally hate UIs that consumer loves.

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 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.

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).

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!

> Phones are bigger than ever

If you want to experience what your app is really like for the vast majority of real world people, go get a cheap monthly prepaid phone and try it out. Using the modern web on them is a complete nightmare. The screens are physically small and low resolution. The phone I had to use for a year and a half is 800something by 500something, which is literally first generation Android era resolution from over ten years ago. Information density matters. Huge buttons that get in the way are not merely frustrating, they are a design mistake and a demonstration that the designer is out of touch with reality, just as you seem to be here.

Please, get a crappy phone, get a crappy chromebook, make sure your app isn't frustrating to use for people that can't afford new, fast things.