Are you guys tired of the “Material You” design? I don’t really like the huge paddings on everything aspect of it. Also a lot of it feels too flat. What do you guys think?
As a UI/UX designer myself (hobbyist, to be clear), I really like it.
There seems to be this notion in the homebrew/FOSS/Linux community that “wasted space” is always non-preferable. I can see this being true for some people, but I feel like a lot of people and band wagoning this opinion.
It’s pretty universally known and accepted in the design community that padding is extremely important when it comes to helping your brain read and separate content. And to be fair, most non-tech people prefer space and padding in their applications to make things easier to understand.
I can be entirely off base here, but TLDR: I like padding and it’s literally beneficial to helping your brain understand the layout of what you’re looking at better.
It’s nice to see your perspective on it, you make some great points.
Its funny how the places that I dislike the most (status bar toggles and recently google search) are used often and thus do not need the benefits of reading and content separation. You already know by heart what it says and where they are.
Maybe I would like it more if the big padding would only be used in places where I do not interact often with. This would make consistency difficult though.
Good point but just because you know where certain things are on screen, that doesn’t mean everybody knows. So you have to account for that too. Like design considering that that’s the first time someone’s looking at that screen.
As a UI/UX designer myself (non-hobbyist), there’s UI and there’s UX. What differentiates a good-looking design from a crappy-looking design, most of all, is space (or padding). There are many other factors, of course, contrast being also very important for example, but space is number one. But that doesn’t make a design good, just good-looking, which is a very different thing.
Adding steps to take a common action (turn off wifi or whatever) because you used to have a certain number of buttons and now you have to hide some to add space… That’s bad design. Good looking, good UI. Shit UX.
Space should be added when needed. And you need it, when you do, to make thinks clearer. You shouldn’t add space to make it look better if that’s gonna make the experience worse.
The number one rule of design is that form follows function. You should make things as pretty as possible until you find the wall of functionality, and then you stop. Going from six quick access buttons to four was breaking that wall. You wanna be just on top of the wall. Go to one side, you get a great looking interface people hate to use. Go the other side, you get an interface that’s dense and full of things you want, but looks like a piece of nerd shit.
I’m also tired of people repeating the same copypasted ideas about any new design system out there (as I’m sure most people are when hearing people talk about their area of expertise), but they are not wrong on that regard when it comes to material you. Shit name by the way.
While you’re here, I’m curious about your opinion on the latest Spotify client design. It feels like they want to bring the desktop design closer to the touch screen client (maybe to reduce the codebase not shared by the projects). Personally, having grown up with Winamp, I find it very uncomfortable how images are dominant in both list and grid views, and how much space is left (really wasted) around texts. I think it’s just a very inefficient interface with way too much useless visual fluff.
spoiler
(the application on the left is a terminal-based client that really only needs a tiny corner on the screen)
Not who you’re replying to, but I don’t like the giant album art menus. Save that for a now playing screen that should still be able to be shrunk down.
There’s a fine line between desirable ‘white space’ and too much padding, which Google should probably do a better job at finding.
UI dev here. To add to this, good use of “negative space / white apace” is also beneficial in signalling abundance. The more negative space you can afford to “waste”, the more resources you signal to have.
Luxury brand ads are good examples. Compare this Citizen Watch ad (https://images.app.goo.gl/mALYonDz6qzKJjuJ6) to this (https://images.app.goo.gl/sTXzyrFXNDUxR8AR9)
Neither of the images links work?
personal opinion, i think padding is worse for delineating objects than a bit of colour; or just, like, a line. look at this example - there are four distinct segments on the left, whereas on the right they all merge into one and a half
padding is really useful, yes, but if you put padding on everything then what’s there to be separated?
The one on the right looks like different buttons and that everything is clickable. A quick glance shows you different elements and you can easily find what you’re looking for. An example of form and function working together.
The one on the left looks like a text area showing different symbols. A quick glance shows you a blue area and a white area. Seems like you need that extra moment to find what you want because everything looks the same. An example of function over form.
Cramming a lot of things together isn’t always good (probably it’s just bad in general) because it just makes things confusing and ends up wasting time more than having bigger things but less of them.
The colors are auto-generated from your phone wallpaper. Maybe choose one that is less homogenous :)
Yeah, choose a wallpaper you like less so your calculator doesn’t suck!
The dynamic colors are a fucking nightmare. No, I don’t want all my ui elements to be the same color as my girlfriend’s skin tone. And the worst is even if I change it, it resets every update. I also don’t like the new quick access controls in the pull down. This is really the first Android update that’s felt like a flat downgrade for me.
I’m not upset by it because, like all Google design eras, nearly no one uses it uniformly.
I like it fine, I just wish Google (and Microsoft, Apple, etc) would decide on a consistent UI theme instead of completely changing it every few years. They don’t even have time get all their first party apps up to date with the latest design trend before they move on to a new one, and third party apps are even worse. I have apps on my phone in like 4 different UI styles now.
And it would be different if it was always improving, but these sideways or even backwards moves… forget it:-(.
I love it. Personal preference, of course. :)
I’m personally not that fond of it, and kind of want it to blow over in favour of a new trend.
It lacks the charm, and neat little 3D effects that skeumorphism had, but that’s also not helped by it being implemented poorly.
yeah, i hated material ew as soon as it was announced. so much padding everywhere, and so little contrast - to paraphrase the incredibles: if everything’s orange, nothing is. i want actionable items to stand out, not be a slightly lighter shade of the same colour
The colors I do like personally, it’s the huge buttons that make me feel like it was made for the elderly lol.
Its nice to see everyone has their own take. :)
i wouldn’t even mind the colours if they didn’t tint the background. tinting solely the main text colour and the main buttons might look quite nice. to be honest though, i just loathe pastel colours in general, so it’s possible that’s influencing my opinion
Big fan of material you.
Design preferences has a tendency to be “cyclical” appearing to be tiresome. That’s fine and an encouraged strength of customisablility.
The issue is unified design language across android devices. Material You attempts to solve this to limited success. But it’s better than the alternatives I’ve seen in the past.
The over-padding (especially default widgets) is something I take issue with but it’s a preference and can easily be adjusted.
I like the integration of adaptive icons for Android. I’m really keen on selecting a theme based on my current wallpaper and that color being used for all apps.
Not many apps are currently supporting it, even Facebook and other players you’d assume could do it in a seconds aren’t.
Implementing it looks fairly straight forward, you provide a transparent image of your logo and it adaptive naturally to suit your theme. I assume apps are intentionally being difficult because that visually changes their logo / branding.
It’s great when it works tho!
I’m over pastel colors, honestly. I want bold, vibrant colors. At least the option. It feels like Google is stripping more and more customizability with every update.
actually, google is planning to add bolder, vibrant colors in android 14
(but you can already use repainter app)
i always disliked material and material you. They look too coperate.
The only thing I hate about MY is its comically big quick settings. Give me back the Android 11 quick settings and it will be fine (the Internet QS be damned)
If you are not afraid to experiment with some more advanced tools, AOSPMods has options to set the number of quick settings rows and columns, which worked well for me. (I was initially annoyed by this change as well, but I eventually got used to it.)
As a professional UX designer, the padding is the least of the issues.
I’m hoping I get used to it, but I miss more skeuomorphic design. It’s like a designer wanted to push it to be edgy and forgot about real people using it… which describes the bulk of Apple design, too, for that matter. I think we overshot the balance point.
Edit: forgot my real point halfway through commenting: I will say even that isn’t the worst of it, though. The dynamic theming is a bit of a branding nightmare.
I miss the UI from android 4.3… it was so clean and minimal.
The dynamic theming is a bit of a branding nightmare.
Probably one of the reasons I like it. Big red company icon next to the big black company icon next to the big pink company icon. Nah, I’ll take the uniform design, please.
But companies like to brand for, among others, usability and legal reasons. They aren’t going to participate in neutering the brand they have invested so much in. It doesn’t really matter if the user “likes” it because it’s pretty. What matters is if the companies pouring money into app development like it, and if the users can easily identify the apps they want to use. That’s why it has such low adoption.
It doesn’t really matter if the user “likes” it because it’s pretty.
I prioritize apps that have the option. If companies want me to choose their app over another, they’ll offer it.
I have no problem identifying the app I want to use. My apps are alphabetized. Easy peasy.
Most apps aren’t “choice” apps. Things like banking, transit, etc. I doubt you’d change your bank or refuse to take the bus just because they don’t allow their app to be colored based on a random pixel measurement from a background image. I’ll go out on a long and guess you’d also not choose an app with that option but fewer features. And if so, I’d like to think you’d be in the limited minority.
Edit to clarify: Good companies, given a choice, will by and large invest in material (pun intended) improvements over a confusing and variable prettification feature with no real usability advantage.
True, which is why I said prioritize. If I have no other option, I have no other option. Some of my open source, small project apps have already made icons available. I really have a hard time understanding why a big business is so resistant to it other than they want to train the customer rather than listen to their requests.
As it is now, apps without the material you theming go on my second “page”. Only apps with material you go on my main screen.
I didn’t like it a ton initially, but after seeing the new Sync for Reddit redesign, and seeing how perfectly they’ve implemented it, I love it. Props to the Sync dev, they really got the idea behind Material You. Can’t wait for the alpha of Sync for Lemmy.
