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Material 3 Expressive

(design.google)
360 points meetpateltech | 8 comments | 13 May 25 17:20 UTC | HN request time: 1.135s | source | bottom
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diegof79 ◴[16 May 25 19:16 UTC] No.44008902[source]▶
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.

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1. thewebguyd ◴[16 May 25 21:00 UTC] No.44009794[source]▶
> 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.

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2. formerly_proven ◴[16 May 25 21:26 UTC] No.44009932[source]▶
> 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?

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3. thewebguyd ◴[16 May 25 22:10 UTC] No.44010216[source]▶
True, even Apple has been slipping lately too, particularly with apps.

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

4. dmix ◴[16 May 25 23:39 UTC] No.44010763[source]▶
Similar to Settings app I think the Photos app was because they rewrote it in Swift.
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5. LoganDark ◴[17 May 25 04:42 UTC] No.44012086{3}[source]▶
I hope the rewrite will eventually allow me to tell it to stop pausing sync for "optimizing system performance". Every time I find that my photos have not uploaded despite the phone being locked on the charger for hours it is because of Optimizing System Performance. What a joke.
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6. indemnity ◴[17 May 25 05:42 UTC] No.44012274{4}[source]▶
Yep. One of my top annoyances. I don’t pay for top tier internet to wait hours for ten goddamn photos I just took to upload to the cloud so my Mac Photos library can see it.
7. formerly_proven ◴[17 May 25 09:00 UTC] No.44013018{3}[source]▶
There's multiple things to this.

One is the complete change in how the app is structured. Many feel going from tabs with purposes and distinct UIs to one "mono UI" where you navigate between the sections by scrolling a lot is a regression. (On the other hand, the new UI can be customized a bit)

The other is the pretty severe performance regression. The old Photos app was mostly fairly smooth when it came to scrolling and zooming. In the new Photos app literally every time you start moving even a few cm on the timeline it's choppy and stuttering for a second. Zooming is likewise a stutterfest. That's pretty bad because it's just an extremely obvious and reproducible straight-line regression.

And finally there's changes like how the timeline is now always wrapped to a full last row, which means anytime a photo / video is added, the whole timeline is re-wrapping. For reasons only known to Apple this rewrapping will happen visibly and stutteringly when you open the Photos app even if the picture was taken five minutes ago. That change is incomprehensible because clearly people spent a bunch of work adding all those stuttering animations, yet nobody questions how obviously retarded it is to have an infinite scrolling timeline where _appending_ an item causes everything to shift? And then you don't even make an effort to hide that, but instead show a grid of photos when opening the app, then notice "oh, the user took a photo some time ago! How very unusual! Let me wait half a second and then reshuffle everything on screen!".

It's the exact equivalent of having ads pop in or layout shifts two seconds after page load. It's extremely and very obviously bad.

These are the kinds of thing that make it obvious that none of the people working on this software actually use it. It's the kind of garbage you expect - and get - from throwing JIRA tickets over the fence to some random lowest bidder sub-sub-contractor five continents away.

And that's the level of quality you get in one of Apple's "flagship use case" apps (how many iPhone ads focus on the camera? Most of them).

8. Aerbil313 ◴[17 May 25 22:42 UTC] No.44017573[source]▶
It was overdue for a redesign. I find the iOS 18 Photos app much more usable, it's been clearly redesigned with a focus to make a faster and more aesthetically pleasing interface for the experienced user. It's significantly denser too, with a single scroll (under half a second) you can access way more collections and utilities, and those you want because you can customize. And this makes sense, the Photos app is not a new-user app, every iPhone user uses it every day, every user is an experienced user.