by PennRobotics | 2025-05-19 09:45:57+00:00
I'll cover just a few taste-based issues:

- The abstract doesn't even fit on the first page at a 1500 pixel height. Instead, the generally useless, overly-padded animation takes the majority of the space.

- The animation felt like someone trying to fit every feature of their design software into eight seconds. Filleted text? A nine-sided polygon that morphs into a five-sided polygon and then a circle? That hideous purple-orange flare?

- I'm shocked the animation and images didn't also have border radii. I wouldn't mind one bit if border radius was fully removed from every single website and smartphone app. (Border radius as a mouse hover animation for 186.667 pixel square images, in the hamburger menu? Wtf)

- Hamburger menu is too resource intensive and feels off-center because of two paired columns, where the right side of each pair is an image.

- It was certainly a design choice going with:

Better, Easier, Emotional UX

I think I would've preferred ANY other permutation of line breaks, except for

Better, Easier, Emotional UX

and

Better, Easier, Emotional UX

- I'm glad the font doesn't show up on Firefox. I hate ligatures in nearly all their usages and don't need a font with a dozen variable axes. (Having such a font face for testing new font designs? By all means. Putting it out there for the world to use? Ugh! WHY??)

- Why are designers so repulsed by pure colors e.g. FF0000, 00FF00? (I know the philosophy because it's the previous post of the linked content on their design blog, but I vehemently disagree with the application of "sober" or "nostalgic" or "atmospheric" mood-altering color schemes.)

- The color choices are awful. It's inspiration by pastels and flowers. It's no surprise, since Google's offices seem to be furnished by Liberator and the Sherwin Williams branch of Lockheed.

- The demos are bogus. It's easy to offer mud and polenta to a test panel and then exclaim that users overwhelmingly prefer polenta. What's with the Plank app? Are people planking for hours? But also, who presents time in...

HH :MM :SS

...format??

- . . too . . much . . padding . .

- EXCEPTWHENITSNOT

- two-column images are misaligned vertically because of the scroll animation

- fading in elements. WHY??

- elements shift vertically after clicking them

- elements do not indicate they are clickable

- "Expressive components" on one of the links is so atrocious because of its misuse of color (with further submisuse of hue, contrast, intensity, saturation, and palette), spacing, shape, margins, iconography, font, and words. I also don't know what app is supposed to have menu choices of "Friends, Alarms, Map" but I promise I am not the target audience.

- It's telling that multiple contributors of Material 3 Expressive have their profile pictures left-of-center so that the bridges of their noses are at the golden ratio. You don't need to bang every drum on every beat.

- Do charts really need "eight-petal flower" as marker type? Also, time to first fixation, for me, is usually "OH WHAT THE UGLY SHIT IS THAT?"

- Search menu? Ugly; not very clear why the dozens of buttons are there.

- One of the dumbest mouse cursors we've all encountered ("so far", per Homer Simpson) and that includes a generation of Comet Cursor and classic Mac cursors

- Each of the Components:

-- Button groups, ugliest I've ever seen because of different corner radii, tall rounded buttons, far too much padding, off-centered text

-- Floating Action Buttons, the cousin of checkboxes inside clickable list items, which have ruined the efficiency of the Gmail app

-- Segmented Button, for people who want the first and last tabs in a tab list to look not like the others! (I'm glad Post-It hasn't switched to exclusively rounded notes.)

-- Split buttons, obvious on the m3.material.io page but less obvious after it's the unmarked "customize" selector in the Android Settings menu. (If you don't know, on many adaptations of Android OS, SOME toggles have a nearly imperceptible divider left of the toggle, and if you click the text instead of the toggle, you get an entire submenu related to the toggle.) And does the inner divider of split buttons also need the slightest radius?

-- Loading indicators are the uncanny valley of shapes. Is it a Torx T20? A ouija board planchette? Oh, now it's a dented hub cap bumbling down the highway!

-- Progress indicators, certainly the least favorite of ophidiophobics and cold-hearted professionals.

-- Bottom sheets, less ugly but more likely to screw up gesture navigation & split screen while serving little purpose beyond what a separate view accomplishes.

-- Carousels and cards, so you can make every app feel like a teenager's (or pre-cash startup's) very first website.

-- Adding horizontal rules to Dialogs isn't necessary or helpful, it just adds visual noise.

-- Lists have a differently weighted and colored horizontal rule as Dialogs. Vertical margins should be less than horizontal.

-- Side sheets. You know you want your app to have both side sheets and bottom sheets!! Let the intrusive thoughts win... Also, is the arrow supposed to make the side sheet larger while the X closes it? Or do they both close it? And why not just swipe to close like the bottom sheet? And then why doesn't the bottom sheet have an X?

-- Too many navigation types, especially if the idea is to change between types (and information presentation) based solely on screen size as the descriptions suggest. The shown navigation types implement most of the details previously considered ugly: weird hues, too much padding, unintuitive and single-colored icons, mismatched radii, weird text (Outbox?) Also, why have "Saved podcasts" as an app heading when Google recently sunsetted (murdered) the fairly popular and remarkably usable Podcasts app?? Was the Stadia example rejected in the daily standup?

-- Too many unintuitive edit buttons on the Date Picker. Annoying that the demo shows a date range (poorly) while the large text at top is only the end date. How is a date range starting on Dec 31 and ending on Jan 2 supposed to be displayed if there's no longer a background color?

-- Sliders are not as ugly as possible, although they are inconsistent with Switches, the Date Picker indicators, Progress Indicators, and Buttons/Button Groups.

-- For something like a music equalization widget, it would be nice to have vertical sliders that can have their fill color origin in the middle. You end up spending more developer time creating a custom view than actually implementing EQ filters.

-- Time pickers are dumb as hell. There have been many examples of effective time pickers using text entry, swipes, or dropdowns. But still, Material 3 sticks to hybrid hard-to-click analog clock and "need more clicks and number/enter presses than necessary" digital clock which only really works nicely screens 7 inches or larger. Six different curve radii in that design, and they aren't matched to the scale of the containing element.

-- By showing the full extent of the animation/motion customization as the top examples, a whole generation of graduating CS majors is going to launch a fleet of nausea-inducing/overly animated/Jello text app content into the world.

-- "Abstract shapes" aka Material Shapes Library. Not a single example I've seen has been attractive or clean. I am surprised they didn't include an eye shape but totally unsurprised there are no sharp-cornered variants of the basic shapes.

--- Shape morphing: when you want your buttons to look like they're dry heaving and/or being crushed by a hydraulic press. The suggestion to link the exact morph to device sensor inputs and async events makes this idea worse.

-- Why does the circular arrow rotate in the opposite direction? If you made road signs animated and then made the symbol for a right-only roundabout (CCW) rotate so the entrance at the bottom always shifted to the left (CW) ... how many accidents a day would you expect compared to baseline?

-- They actually have the nerve to put "Use abstract shapes sparingly" as their entire design blog looks like GNOME 3 on mushrooms.

Oh, and someone mentioned how sweet it is that they can quickly Figma an app because of Google's unmatched component implementation. But have you also noticed how Google's UX has stifled creativity? As more and more companies (Philips, Spotify, Bitwarden, Duolingo, nearly all social media, shopping, banking, etc.) switch to Material Whatever, they ditch creative widgets and cool layouts. The original Hue app was a celebration of color with no OS-dictated whitespace and very efficient light setup workflow. The redesign is so complicated, most of my lights throughout my house now have no descriptive name in a single room called Whatever. Nothing looks like Tron. No major app has buttons/cards with sharp edges. The Shure apps have toggles and sliders that look nothing like a Crest audio console. Icons have to be carefully redesigned by each vendor to look equally "less dumb" while placed on a circle, rounded rectangle, or rounded rounded rectangles on a home screen (rounded twice intentionally, because that's what the largest seller of Android phones has as the default for home screen icon outlines).

- On these demos, entered text is often some shade of pastel where you just want plain-ass white or black.

- Back to the website/post. Some of the ugliest bar graphs I've ever seen. What in the actual hell? Everything from breaking visual flow of the bar, using three separate font sizes, needlessly showing the scale (and an unpaired, unneeded arrow) at the bottom and the legend with its fourth font size and padded-unlike-the-others and displayed-like-a-button presentation. Awful use of color. It's as if a labrador ate a carrot, two eggplants, and a jellyfish, then barfed them up, and a half dozen colors were chosen from that mess.

- Keyboard layout (they're on the page, so why not) has traditionally had rows 4 and 5 staggered. If Google made pianos, you can bet they'd have the black keys left-aligned with the preceding white key (actually "sun-drenched lilac") and all keys would have rounded bottoms. Oh, a few keys would have a different width than the others. Everyone focuses on the most obvious send button, but nobody has mentioned the little orange arrow above the keyboard. How are you supposed to know what that does without actually clicking it? And then you're expected to remember that forever although you probably rarely use it? So then why, again, does the send button need to be so very obvious and noticeable when it is used so very often? Also, who amongst us hasn't sent a message prematurely and then had to quickly send the errata to that message? A huge send button is only going to exacerbate this problem.

- Whatever's under the "4x faster" amoeba looks like an "additional photo" thumbnail. If that's what it is, there is NO reason whatsoever for that to have a circular edge and to not align with the adjacent photo.

- I gotta know what that fourth-from-left button in the concept design is (next to the ugly giant send airplane). Is that supposed to be a document but with a microscopic Photos icon in the corner? Also why are buttons 1 and 5 centered but inside of an element where the *insert fancy designer term here* center should be slightly shifted because of the rounded background? Why are there actually nine background shades in that screenshot??

This whole system is the visual equivalent to a college kid cooking their first few meals and just tossing in whatever spice is in the drawer. Too little salt; way too much thyme. Cinnamon on grilled chicken? Why not?? Can we boil the grilled cheese instead?

There's no basis in nature or iteration on renowned classic designs. It's the worst parts of design by committee, trying to stay off the chopping block, hitting KPIs, wanting to prove you're design-ier than the other designers, trying to impress Ivy Ross, and ignoring the needs/wants of a totally average and uninteresting user.

It's a bold experiment—a Throbbing Gristle of application presentation—where outlier data are cherry-picked away. The vocal thousands are "plainly uninformed, emotion-hating" minority and safe to ignore because they'll eventually learn to love it just like the silent, "definitely supportive by default" majority.

In short, the design language is inconsistent and heavily opinionated toward looking like an unkempt cottage garden stashed in an Aerotrim with every unique element's font characteristics set to Random. It provides too much variation where very little (or none) would be preferred and too little where it would help.

Golly, it sucks.