Good interface design \u2014 the kind that\u2019s simultaneously intuitive, beautiful, responsive, and powerful \u2014 is just so deceptively tricky to get right. Sure, it\u2019s easy to complain about all the things we might not like about one particular UI, but there\u2019s a big difference between being able to express some criticism and building something that everyone\u2019s going to like.<\/p>\n
Right now, Android\u2019s going through some changes, and we continue to see Google push its software in a new direction with the embrace of its Material 3 Expressive<\/a> aesthetic. That new look\u2019s been making its presence felt across Android apps for months now, and when we polled you for your opinions on it last month, the majority of you were big fans<\/a>.<\/p>\n Of course, just because a lot of people feel one way doesn\u2019t necessarily mean that the feelings of those in the other camp are invalid, and those of you who aren\u2019t fully on board with Google\u2019s latest design directives clearly have more to say. A few weeks back we were lamenting the loss of some of our favorite Pixel features<\/a> from over the years and noticed a whole lot of you joining in down in the comments there to commiserate. And more recently, we found ourselves coming to terms with some of those messy M3E feelings<\/a> and similarly found a lot of complicated opinions from our commenters.<\/p>\n In case you haven\u2019t been following along, we wanted to highlight some of our favorite responses that reveal this cloud of resentment that\u2019s hanging over some of Google\u2019s recent decisions.<\/p>\n One of the clearest statements of those frustrations comes from reader carsonmathre, who complains that Android has changed from a neat, consistent UI to something else entirely:<\/p>\n This whole UI looks like a caricature of what it used to be. Comic sans looking fonts right next to sharp ones, wobbly notification swipe animations, and while we\u2019re talking about it the whole notification bar looks horrible now with all the app colors and everything where it used to be monochrome matched to my theme. I miss my (mostly) sleek UI; now my phone is trying to be goofy and playful in all the wrong places, and I don\u2019t have any say in the matter.<\/p>\n That\u2019s a sentiment largely shared by rezervny:<\/p>\n I\u2019m shocked how so many people nowadays lack elementary aesthetical sense. New update is not a clean, aesthetically pleasant UX.<\/p>\n The new font is like a comic sans clone and too bold, icons are also too bold & too rounded \u2013 in general it feels as \u201cchildification\u201d of UX. It looks a little bit as a cartoon.<\/p>\n That said, it\u2019s not a complete wash, with rezervny adding:<\/p>\n To not be completely negative, resizable quick tiles + bolder colours are those few things which are a good change though.<\/p>\n Some of you are open to the idea of these Expressive changes, if only they didn\u2019t arrive alongside functional downgrades, like kristofferkortsen here:<\/p>\n While it looks fresh and is mostly a positive, it doesn\u2019t show both my SIM cards in the top bar anymore! I can\u2019t see immediately which SIM is being used, so it\u2019s a downgrade for me.<\/p>\n Making things look new but sacrificing functionality is not an upgrade!<\/p>\n Are those of us in the media to blame for some of your negative reactions because we\u2019ve oversold Material 3 Expressive? Reader starbogt thinks so:<\/p>\n I feel like it\u2019s gone back in time with the fonts \ud83e\udd23 and very underwhelming after all the hype from media saying it\u2019s the update we should have had in 16 originally!<\/p>\n A recurring theme seems to be how juvenile everything looks, as simon.williams points out:<\/p>\n I used to be able to pick my colour palette for the underlying system, now I can\u2019t.<\/p>\n The power, WiFi and network icons now look like they have been drawn by someone with a sharpie.<\/p>\n Android may never offer the perfect UI for everyone, or even sufficient customization options for us to all feel like we\u2019re in charge of the experience \u2014 and that\u2019s fine. Today\u2019s UI may not be your cup of tea, but Google is anything but a company to get locked in on one specific look, and we would not be surprised to see Android in 2030 tapping into a very different design language.<\/p>\n For now, we\u2019ll just keep rolling with the punches and sharing all its latest changes with you \u2014 and we very much expect to keep hearing your feedback down in the comments!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Good interface design \u2014 the kind that\u2019s simultaneously intuitive, beautiful, responsive, and powerful \u2014 is just so deceptively…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":114077,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[1711,61,60,10439,202,80],"class_list":{"0":"post-114076","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mobile","8":"tag-google","9":"tag-ie","10":"tag-ireland","11":"tag-material-3-expressive","12":"tag-mobile","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114076","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=114076"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114076\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/114077"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=114076"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=114076"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=114076"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}