That's a mixed bag.
Have a look at the linked https://m3.material.io/blog/building-with-m3-expressive to get a better impression of what this is about. From the guidelines given there, many parts of the design make sense and will help designs work better - grouping objects properly, be aware of contrast to highlight important elements, more options for good typography (instead of basically none, Android/Material offered nothing by default), helpers for highlighting buttons etc. It's also still simply a good idea to focus on good animations that actually work for the UI, instead of being superfluous baggage, and then to make them feel nice. I'm not saying it's groundbreaking, but it's helpful to have something like this as an official guideline, and be it to reign in rogue designers.
But it's still a flat design, and thus does not properly transport clickability. And their weird approach for the color schemes still leads to an ugly mess, pastel with weird contrasts and color combinations that just are ugly. I haven't seen a proper analysis what's going on there, but it sucks. Also, this whole design system is very far from leading to a consistent system, but that seems to be a non-goal, just some standard component building blocks are there to foster familiarity.
Better than nothing and probably a step up, but M3E doesn't convince me totally so far.
> But it's still a flat design, and thus does not properly transport clickability.
And toggled / disabled states. With mobile’s lack of hover, it’s often a game of trial and error to figure out what’s even interactable.
> And their weird approach for the color schemes still leads to an ugly mess, pastel with weird contrasts and color combinations that just are ugly.
It looks like a poster for a party. To extrapolate, it feels like the lineage is digital marketing, especially video centric content on mobile-exclusive byte sized attention-scape. This style draws less attention to your options (what you can do), and more towards content (what’s provided for you). It’s reduced decision making, highlighting the happy/desired path even more. No wonder it scores higher in user testing - it requires less thinking IF you take the happy path.
I’d imagine it works great for simple commercial products with single call to actions. But for apps (not posters) it leaves a lot on the table.
> And toggled / disabled states. With mobile’s lack of hover, it’s often a game of trial and error to figure out what’s even interactable.
The toggle switch is one of the worst UI conventions to come out of mobile IMO and I get irrationally irate when I see it in desktop UIs with a mouse and keyboard.
A simple checkbox would have done just fine, we've those since forever, and they clearly convey either an on or off state.
Nope, not good enough, we need a toggle switch. Which color or direction is on or off? Who knows, because everyone implements it differently.
> This style draws less attention to your options (what you can do), and more towards content (what’s provided for you)
I see this is as a good thing, apps are finally being designed with the assumption that people will use them more than once. Previous design systems prioritize "first discovery" so much it gets in the way once you're a regular user. Once you know your way around the actual content of the app should be most of the screen.
I have simple question:
WHY that page results, in recent chrome with all sorts of hw acceleration, on powerful laptop, to suck over 6 cores of cpu. As in, Chrome's internal task manager shows over 600% cpu use.
I have less cpu use playing recent-ish AAA game with maxed out details in 4k resolution
The one I linked to? No idea. Works fine in Firefox with Ublock Origin from that perspective, but also there the side menu does not render properly and the JS console does not look happy.
> The one I linked to?
Yep. I have to say that it differs - it happened over half of the times I opened it, but never when I tried to figure things out with DevTools. Originally I noticed when I had it open in background and entire system started lagging from load.
Can you recommend another comprehensive design system? As an engineer, that's the most valuable thing about MD3: the figma design kit and per component design guidelines. It lets me offload a ton of workload I'd otherwise have to do myself (poorly) or outsource to a designer.
I haven't seen another design system that is as comprehensive to material. Express seems like an evolutionary refresh with some things I could use right away, but otherwise most of the content is MD3. It's valuable to me as part of the larger ecosystem.
I am not aware of a better alternative. It is a good question, that would be quite helpful!
What I did in the past (with M3) is to add some additional design tweaks (in flutter), like giving buttons an elevation. That worked when I had the designer on my side and since the app came from flutters M2 style, which had similar aspects. But it is cumbersome to argue against a google guideline with only usability knowledge and test results, and it also frankly depends on each component what can be done, which means the adapted design can easily become inconsistent if one is not careful.
It's been a meme [0] for a while that Google is eventually designing all icons to look the exact same. I think the UX engineers have been kicked out.
[0]https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1400/0*X5Zz-PxT8087KG2...
For anyone not familiar with previous designs, each component in https://m3.material.io/components has a "comparison with Material v2" section.
Biggest change seems to be that everything is round and purple now. It looks more playful and less professional.
Edit: I dislike their recent color picks. First that teal in Google Maps, now the purple. Why? Are they trying to copy the color paltette of the first Mecedes A-Class (aka "Listerine" colors [1][2])?
[1] https://prestigeandperformancecar.com/wp-content/uploads/A97...
[2] https://image.stern.de/31749130/t/Ag/v2/w1440/r0/-/01--artik...
