Did anyone tell Material Design about Gesture Navigation?
The screen shot above is from Google Fit. Which icon is active? I can't tell any more. Is it the blue one or the underlined one which is a much stronger cue?
Of course none of the icons are underlined. This is a bottom navigation bar on top of the Android navigation bar on Android 10 with gesture navigation enabled. My brain knows this but my finger still tries to click on Home. Journal just looks so much more active I can't help it. This friction is also in Google Photos and Google Maps and presumably Google everything before too long.
Maybe the Google app developers don't have access to recent Pixels, or maybe the Material Design team all have iPhones?
(Previously: Material Design 3)
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(Published to the Fediverse as: Did anyone tell Material Design about Gesture Navigation? #marketing #google #design I can no longer tell which tab of most Google Android apps is active due to confusion between gesture navigation and the bottom navigation bars. )
Material Design 3
Material Design brought bland consistency to the Android ecosystem. Every app had some sort of bold header and a floating action button. There is some value in consistency and at least some personality was retained. It's red, it's probably Gmail. Yellow, I must be in Keep. Boring but tolerable.
Material Design 2 solves mainly for the problem of knowing which app you're looking at. Colors have gone. Every Google app is now an oppressive black list with some oppressive black icons. To add to the misery the icons have a shade of stock-library amateurism and are just a little too heavy. Unless I look really closely or the what-icon-did-I-just-click region of my brain is on top form there is no longer any way to tell the difference between Google apps.
I'm pretty sure Material Design 3 is just going to be a command prompt. What Android customers really want is telnet or wget and some raw JSON.
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(Published to the Fediverse as: Material Design 3 #marketing #google #design The slow death of personality via bland consistency that is Material Design. )