Personalized design with Material You: how far can it extend?
Yesterday was the first day of this years GoogleIO keynotes. Many very interesting new things were presented, including of course the brand new Material You design system. It is developed by Matias Duarte, the same creator of Material Design and it has apparently been in the making for a while being the largest overhaul of the product in years. We got to get a glimpse of what it will look like in the keynote.
The concept is basically that instead of Google selecting the color scheme there will be an AI that picks a personalized palette of colors for the UI. The personalization is derived from the background image the user chooses for the device.
Accessibility
Not only does this look really cool, but it is also potentially a great thing for usability and accessibility. By letting the user have influence of their own user experience they can choose to optimize it to their own liking.
But one thing that I could not stop thinking about was: will the changing colors also extend to events and state changes in the app?
What I mean by this is, for example, if there is an error, will the entire UI change into a soft red color? If there is a success event, will the UI change to hues of green?
We’ve already seen UI components signal events to users, such as “shaking” input boxes on incorrect login attempts. What other components and in which other ways can we also do this?
This would be greatly useful in terms of accessibility. Using the whole UI, including interactive components, display components and even the background, to communicate with the user what is happening could be game-changing for people with visual impairments. The clarity of the message being sent would be unmistakable.
Looking ahead
I think it’s inevitable to involve the entire UI, including the background, in the user experience. And it is inevitable that someone will try it out and share it with the world.
Overall, I’m excited for the new Material You design system and I will certainly try it our whenever it hits a platform I develop for. I’m looking forward to seeing how far they can push the concept for personalized theming and where it will lead to.
