Form follows feeling: How Google is making digital experiences personal

It’s Nice That’s 2022 Forward Thinking campaign is supported by Material Design, whose latest design system update, Material You, signals a radical new way for the tech industry to think about design. Material You foregrounds a humanistic approach to design, celebrating the tension between design at scale and individual preference. Click here to find out more.

“Despite technology becoming an increasingly important part of our lives, it’s been pretty monotonous aesthetically,” says Google product designer Tyler Gough. “Until recently.” He’s right. Up until this point, the tech industry has focused more on offering tailored content and information to consumers, rather than personalising the experience itself.

Google’s latest design system update, Material Design 3, puts control in users’ hands, allowing them to design their experience, pick colour schemes and express their own personalities through a series of features called Material You. The culmination of many years’ work across several Google teams, Material You provides users with an abundance of choice and new ways to customise their devices, whether through function, colour, icons or design. “Different people have different wants and needs, and those can be incredibly diverse,” adds designer Karen Ng. “One low vision user’s needs may be completely different than another's. Personalisation puts agency back into the hands of people so they have the freedom to pick the best, most suitable experience for themselves.”

Here, we speak to a number of Google designers to find out how Material Design 3 caters to consumer needs around personalisation, adaptability and colour, introducing a more humanistic approach to digital design.

Material You allows users to fine-tune new devices to feel instantly like their own. The biggest obstacle – and one that will be discussed in more detail below – was around colour options, because we all relate to colour so individually. To accommodate this, the Material Design team introduced dynamic colour, which enables custom colour schemes for each individual.

Most of us are aware of the importance of contrast for pairing colours that look good together, but it’s also crucial for readability. To create a colour system that allows for both, the team relied on tonal palettes based on luminance rather than hue. This ensures that all colours maintain consistent contrast, satisfying the user’s functional needs – while also providing aesthetically complementary colour schemes.

Colour

With insight from Javier Lopez, James O’Leary, Tyler Gough and Ayan Daniels

Colour is the element that Google’s designers have been most excited to speak about. When it comes to colour choices, there is a lot of baggage. “There were a lot of opinionated views on colour, because it’s such a big part of how we express ourselves,” says Tyler Gough. “Colour choices really reflect personal expression.”

Associations with certain colours across UX design are rife. Take functional associations – like green for affirmative, red for negative – and then also account for cultural, even personal connotations. The consequences are extensive. Allowing users to personalise colours for themselves paved the way for new forms of visual expression, and with it, naturally, a host of new challenges.

Figuring out how to break traditional digital rules around colour required diving deep into the colour science to develop an algorithm that could reliably output accessible palettes.

“Historically, as designers, we’re used to having control over every design decision, colour relationships, but we had to cede some of that power and create a system of dependencies,” says visual designer Ayan Daniels. “Everything in Material You is negotiable – that’s how we built the system. No colour is static; so different hues and tones can be decided on by the user.”

Users can upload their own wallpaper to systematically generate colour palettes, select the scheme of their choice, which are then reflected across their device. Material You invites the user to participate in the design process and express themselves through colour while keeping visuals clear and readable.

“Material You doesn’t provide a one-size-fits-all approach; we aren’t looking to build a homogenous colour system,” says Ayan. “It’s really up to the user to figure out what they think is beautiful and become a part of the co-design process.” The available designs are limitless and the team knows that the product and its features will evolve through consumer use.

“A predefined direction isn’t important for us,” says visual designer Javier Lopez. “We want to react in real time to where users are, and to be able to experience co-creating with them.”