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 one of those "it depends" things. I've been working on a pretty data-dense webapp and as time goes on we've been shaving bits of padding off and instead relying on elevation and borders to signify the UI hierarchy of the app.
For normie apps where there's hardly anything to present, I think all the spacing helps people not get overwhelmed as much.
Yep, it all depends on use case. If the goal of the app or site is to wade through data, then extra padding is a waste of space and should be minimized.
Also, if it's something that you use quite a bit, then I often find the extra padding annoying as well. This is more about the user than the use case. As a user becomes more familiar with the app, extra steps (like scrolling or switching tabs) becomes less desirable than just having a jam-packed screen.
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.
Some padding is necessary and important to most good design; that doesn't necessarily mean all usage of padding is great, or that "more" padding is always better.
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 spoiler https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/cb7969d2-30db-425f-a5c8-f471e72241b7.png:::
(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.
Padding sometimes seems like it's used as a crutch to get around placing stuff more thoughtfully. I agree there's nothing inherently wrong with it, but it is particularly annoying in feeds where it results in an excessive amount of scrolling
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 has more of a nostalgic feel of physical "buttons". Then again, it takes up more space so that your capabilities are restricted. Then again, square root, pi etc. - those are all more useful than INV, DEG, & e for me. So I could see where people could go either way, up to personal preference and even more so on the need that they are trying to meet. Although the one on the left just flat entirely wastes 3 buttons worth of space...
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.
Gotta agree. On the left, I’m drawn straight to the secondary set of symbols.
On the right, the “distinct segments” are more distinct to me, because of the colors. Primary symbols, All Clear(?), numpad catch me first. Then I notice the lack of shapes and color on the secondary set of symbols.
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.
Most corners are more rounded by default, especially buttons, which are pills now instead of rectangles. You could make them pills before and they offered examples showing how to do it, but hardly anyone did.
Buttons are a little bigger, and there's a little more padding between most things.
There are more transition effects, making apps feel a bit more fluid and "interesting", in a good way, I think.
Nav bars and rails do a much better job of highlighting the active item, by adding a pill-shaped background behind it. (This one addresses a frequent complaint that I received when using material components on websites.)
The rest is somewhere between "exactly the same" and "really minor", but the minor changes vaguely contribute to a different feel from before.
My short answer is no, matter of fact I'd like to see it being used even more. I really like Material You and I think it's one of the best design languages I've seen so far.
Before Material, I generally didn't mind UI languages that much, I just liked the #holoyolo lifestyle because it was dark. Material 1 came and I hopped on the praise DuARTe bandwagon until its end, but when I look back, I never actually liked it, nor did I dislike it. I always thought it was too square and a bit aggressive.
Material 2 is one that I disliked. It seemed like they just took away all the color and plastered whitespace everywhere just for the sake of making something different. There was no thought on form or function, it was just trendy minimalism (I love minimalism, but trendy minimalism is just that, taking away form and function just because less = more). That's also when I changed to Samsung devices and would barely see Material design anymore.
At first, I didn't believe in Material You. I liked what Google was trying to do, but all we had were design concepts that, as usual, never come to light. Then I started seeing it more and more and I understood. It seems like every piece of the puzzle fits together beautifuly, something that can join form and function without being a detriment to each other. The colors are subtle but there's enough contrast and shades to fit everywhere. The elements aren't square enough to seem like an outdated, old design, and also aren't too round to seem like it's trying too hard to be modern. The paddings are just right, and like another user here said, are very important to separate information and content. Obviously there are many flaws, but with a few tweaks, Material You could be a behemoth in design languages.
I'm way more tired of the designs before it, or the apps halfway into the design language but not really. Especially if it is to the point where just using the material you colours you have seperates it, signal comes to mind there for example.
Some apps can keep their design layout but please let me use my material you colours anyways
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 think it's nice as long as you have a custom ROM with root to tweak it. It's UNUSABLE on its default state.
But I still miss Holo and its mystique so much, it was perfect on small screens and needed some tweaking to be a mature, elegant, unique and expressive UI design language.
I like MY — I just wish I could design more of it on the user side.
Auto generated colorschemes are great and give Android a level of class it has been missing for a while. But I wish I didn't have to rely on a third party app like Repainter to finely choose my palette rather than hope the theme engine makes a good one. I also resent my icon shape, font, and icon options being ripped away from me.
There was a section on the original MY Google IO announcement that implies that the padding and roundness could be freely adjusted throughout the system. I wish that materialized (rimshot) into the final product.
The only objective regression I can think of with MY, rather than just an annoyance, is the Quick Settings. A merged internet toggle that no one asked for, a further reduction in a available toggles from Android 11, and not even bothering to make the Bluetooth toggle one of the fancy expanding ones instead of sending you to settings or surfacing the audio playback toggle (why can't I change the output before I play media, Google?). Ugh.
I hate that desaturate bluish background that is everywhere now. A lot of the apps look the same, and the removal of colours from notification icons just makes everything feel flat, soulless, and unsuitable for quick glances.
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