In each of the screens, how visible an action is depends upon it’s importance. Add a new task is clearly important for a To-do app, and it gets the most prominence on a screen. Google Pay doesn’t need one on this screen, so there isn’t one there. Google I/O has a filter icon on the home, while favoriting is important but not enough to take away focus from the content behind. For Games, the play button needs to be associated with a game, so it’s kept near the description. And finally, for Gmail, the compose button is kept where the previous one used to be to ensure continuity for the older Gmail users, instead of replicating Inbox’s.

Bold and Graphic, when the context calls for it

The final thing I’d like to highlight is the whitespace, since pretty much everyone seems to have taken note of it already. “Bold, graphic and intentional” was one of the key principles behind Material Design right from it’s launch.

While the apps looked great with their bright colors and animations originally, there’s been a trend away from such designs for some time now called Complexion Reduction. The purpose of this trend has been to ensure that the use of colors on the screen don’t take away from the content and actions itself.

Material Design 2.0 doesn’t seem to go entirely into the realm of Complexion Reduction, but instead seems to emphasize a part of the original principle: Bold, Graphic, and Intentional.

Let’s break down the Google I/O app into three states to study this: the home screen with all sessions listed out, the home screen with a filter applied, and the session details screen.

Without a filter, it can be argued that there is an information overload on the user. This is the filter button is promoted, and so is the bottom navigation.

Once a filter is applied, however, we are now aware that the user is more interested in seeing the sessions with the applied filter. This means we can take away the filter button and the bottom navigation, and focus on the session list itself.

As for the Session detail page, while the option to favorite a session and share it are helpful, the user is more likely to be interested in consuming the written description. This is why the screen is mostly white, much like Medium and other reader apps. The share and favorite buttons are easily reachable, but blend in.¹