Google Design

Hmm. There is a (minor) flaw in your argument.

But before I get to that, there are a few places where non-developers have user interfaces that reward expertise. One prominent example are Bloomberg terminals: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2013/05/13/business/sub-jp-bloomberg/sub-jp-bloomberg-superJumbo.jpg

Notice that the interface (which is extremely customizable, feel free to look up other images, each will be rather different) is more-or-less a tiling window manager with terminals in each window that have rich media, nice fonts, non-ASCII UI elements (albeit ones that seem somewhat stuck in the '90s), etc. Quite bit to learn from there.

So here is the flaw: I am afraid the reason most interfaces that non-technologists have to use cater to intuition and a pleasant appearance rather than rewarding expertise is all to simple: No one wants to spend any time becoming an expert at using a gajillion specialized, but infrequently used, software interfaces, each of which would, according to your ideal, be optimally designed to allow an expert to perform the associated task efficiently and well.

The average person pays off their credit card once a month, and pays their taxes once a year. The incentive for them to learn to do these things more efficiently isn't very compelling, and the number of people who have 20 active credit cards for whom it would be compelling isn't large enough to be worth creating an expert UI for (that may change as another couple of billion people…

I just installed Firefox 57 (thanks jacek for the link) and the first things I noticed are:

- The cross to close a tab and the one to create a tab are aligned in a weird way.

- Opening a tab is laggy (I'm on a MBP with an Intel Iris chip and 16GB of RAM).

- The scrolling still does not feel native (I'm on macOS High Sierra).

I'm very impressed by the work that has been done for this release as a dev but this does not give me a great first impression as a user (I haven't used Firefox these past 5 years). Google Chrome since its Material UI redesign (https://medium.com/google-design/redesigning-chrome-desktop-769aeb5ab987) is snappy and has a clean UI, I hope that Firefox will also reach this point.

Anyway, this release is a major achievement. Congrats to the contributors!

Material UI is ... well. It just is. It's mediocre at best, and hilariously bad at worst:

- Insufficient contrast everywhere https://grumpy.website/post/0TEJkwzPA

- Inconsistent use of their own guidelines: https://grumpy.website/post/0Ra93yy33 (references the old design of the site, but the new one is just as bad)

- Bad physical metaphors: https://grumpy.website/post/0UnXYXhD9

- Or the hilarious story where they needed a user study involving 600 people to tell them that if a text field doesn't look like a text field, people won't be able to tell it's a text field: https://medium.com/google-design/the-evolution-of-material-designs-text-fields-603688b3fe03

And that's just off the top of my head.

But all of that could be forgiven if Google bothered or cared. They don't.

No one should ever recommend Material Design for anything.

In their original iteration they had to do a study with 600 people to find out that text inputs should look like text inputs: https://medium.com/google-design/the-evolution-of-material-designs-text-fields-603688b3fe03. (Edit: and their text fields by default still don't look like text fields, you have to specifically set them to `outlined`)

Their latest abomination has almost nothing aligned optically: https://twitter.com/dmitriid/status/1643607965935476737 When there are 5 elements, they follow 5 different guidelines: https://twitter.com/dmitriid/status/1643682248959328258

Here's a 2019 Google blog post about Google's user studies to redesign their Material Design text field. They ran three separate studies testing over 140 combinations of 7 text field characteristics with 600 participants. The end result is better but they basically just discovered that users couldn't identify text fields that had only subtle visual affordances (like a light gray underline instead of a black rectangle). The exercise reminded me of the Google designer story about testing "63 shades of blue links".

https://medium.com/google-design/the-evolution-of-material-designs-text-fields-603688b3fe03

Google photos is the best I've found. Your privacy feature seems to be a "nice to have", so I would use that. The UX and cross-device syncing is far better than anything else I've used.

To your bonus points: Google photos web UI is truly impressive even ignoring the awesome search capabilities. They wrote an article[0] on how they built it and since then I've been keeping an eye out to use similar techniques in different applications.

[0]: https://medium.com/google-design/google-photos-45b714dfbed1