Transform UX with Google Material Design

Contrary to the popular assumption, user experience is not a field limited to software applications, web sites, and web applications. In addition, people mix up UX and UI, which stands User Experience and User Interface respectively.

Let me differentiate UX from UI with an experience I had recently. One of our generous team members bought all of us nice hot coffee from a popular coffee shop. The coffee was scorching hot and it came in a plastic-like paper cup with a lid. When I picked up my cup, I noticed a cylindrical enclosure around the cup. The diameter of the enclosure was larger than the bottom of the cup allowing a consumer to roll up the enclosure up to 80% of the cup’s height, stopping where a consumer holds the cup. It was perfectly designed to prevent a consumer from burning his/her hand when drinking the coffee. The enclosure had a nice design printed on it. Here the enclosure stands for User Experience and the design printed on the enclosure stands for User Interface. A better UX always wins, if you sell it for the right price.

Let’s leave the coffee cup on the table for a moment and focus on delivering better UX to our software consumers. Our software may contain fancy UIs and stylish features, but do they offer a better user experience to the real consumers?

A “software” is just a collection of codes until it develops the ability to be used efficiently and effectively. To survive the fiercely competitive software market, a software needs to provide a better user experience to the users. Few years ago, software were not so interactive or user friendly. Simply, software those days didn’t deliver a good user experience.

User experience is a very deep subject, and to become UX expert takes a lot of time, experience, and research. To enhance the user experience of a software, it is necessary to survey large user bases. As a pioneer company in the software industry, Google has one of the largest user bases. With petabytes of user data, Google conducts many user-centric research and tests in order to deliver software with delightful user experience. One of their core principles is to Focus on the user and all else will follow.

Google wanted to provide consistent user experience to its users across all other platforms and devices. In order to make design consistent, Google came up with a new design concept named Material Design.

Google started working on a new concept named Material Design (also known as Quantum Paper), which they announced in 2014. Material Design is a design language purely based on just Paper and ink. Unlike the real paper, what you see digitally can be reformed or resized intelligently. Material environment is always a 3D space, it has x, y and z axes.

Google Material Design is an outcome of extensive research and testing. Google somewhere mentioned the extent of effort they put to make the Gmail logo adhere to the rules of Material Design. They have created the icon using paper envelop and used different kind of lighting to get the actual shadow, which then they reflected on the Gmail logo.

These Polymer paper elements (Yes! that’s how they call the Material Design user interface elements) and ink are subjected to three principles in order to form the Material Design concept.

1. Material is the metaphor. “The material is grounded in tactile reality, inspired by the study of paper and ink, yet technologically advanced and open to imagination and magic.” – Google
2. Bold, Graphic, and Intentional.“The foundation elements of print-based design—typography, grids, space, scale, colour, and use of imagery—guide visual treatments. These elements do far more than please the eye. They create hierarchy, meaning, and focus. Deliberate colour choices, edge-to-edge imagery, large-scale typography, and intentional white space create a bold and graphic interface that immerses the user in the experience.” – Google
3. Motion provides meaning.“Motion respects and reinforces the user as the prime mover. Primary user actions are inflection points that initiate motion, transforming the whole design.” – Google