Google just redesigned Android in a big way
Imagine if you could design your phone’s operating system to look and feel exactly the way you want.
You might soon be able to that with Google’s new design language called “Material You” which is meant to be an evolution of the current “Material Design” that Android (and pretty much all of Google’s products) uses.
The idea behind Material You is that the user is a co-designer and by allowing greater customization it allows each user to create a custom Android experience that is unique to them (which is where the “you” in “Material You” comes from).
“Instead of form following function, what if form followed feeling?” — Matías Duarte, Vice President of Design at Google.
How Material You works
Users get more control over design
Google showcased the ability of users to change the design right down to the smallest details such as border thickness. This could be the start of a user customization trend at a level that is much greater than before.
Responsive components
Components can now change shape, size and position based on the available screen space similar to the way responsive websites work. This might solve the challenge of getting Android apps to work with different device specifications, such as tablets, dual screens and screens with weird aspect ratios, without having to be rebuilt from the ground up for each new device type.
AI generated colours
With Material You, colour schemes are generated automatically based on the core colours that one chooses i.e. a primary colour and a secondary colour. You can then pick the colour scheme that suits you best. Developers and designers can now focus more on the functionality and less on testing different colour combinations to find the ones that match.
Dark mode Everything
As dark mode becomes more common, Material You makes it easy to switch between light mode and dark mode by also generating a dark colour scheme to match your existing colour choices for the light mode.
Greater focus on accessibility
Variable component size. User specific colour schemes. More customization. All these things point to a greater focus on design inclusivity to enable every user to use their device with ease according to their personal needs, not just to suit the ideal or average user.
Over-customization is a real risk
Most people I know who are not techies or designers don’t really care much about customizing their phones. They want something that looks good and is easy to use. For non-technical users, more customization usually leads to more complexity and more frustration because users either never discover the new features or have trouble setting them up and changing them if they need to.
Given that few people actually know how to increase the font size on their current phones, it will be interesting to see how well Android users will be able to make use of Material You and its customizations.
What does this mean for Material You?
The Good
Material Design was functional but boring. It got the job done but there was little customization that could be done since it was built on the principle of minimalism and any major change would violate that principle. On the other hand, Material You is both beautiful and functional and is built on the principle of simplicity according to necessity, thereby allowing greater flexibility.
The bad
Most Android device manufacturers design custom user interfaces for their Android devices. How they will implement Material You(if they even choose to implement it) is yet to be seen.
Similarly, giving more control to users might mean giving less control to designers and developers, and they might choose to either not follow the design guidelines (which is what happened a lot with Material Design), or to limit user customization within their apps.
The Ugly
Since the launch of Material Design in 2014, the Android User Interface has undergone major design changes with every new Android version release in every single year.
This means that there is no consistent Android user experience and an Android phone from one year feels like it is running on a completely different operating system from one of the next year. This is also one of the reasons that Android device manufacturers use custom UI since it allows them to create a consistent experience across different Android versions.
While the user interface inconsistency continues for another year with the launch of Material You, hopefully this marks a change in the Android’s design strategy going forward.
