How harnessing user feedback made Material 3 the world’s most popular design kit.
It’s an internet truism that if you want to maintain your sanity, you should never read the comments.
More than 1 in 4 Americans have had their day ruined by a mean online comment, and many influencers and brands are shutting off comments entirely. However, research suggests that’s not the best approach. A study from the Harvard Business Review found that turning off comments can actually make people see influencers as less likable and sincere — even more so than if they just left the negative comments up.
As a UX Designer and the manager of the Material 3 Design Kit — a Figma library with 3.5 million users and counting — I’ve had to learn the hard way not to take negative feedback personally. Today, I’ve fully embraced comments. I believe that reading and considering this feedback is an essential part of making a valuable design resource. Whether positive or negative, user feedback helps me and the Material team get people what they need.
Read on for the most helpful comments I’ve received on our Figma library, and what I learned along the way.
“The switch component is a mess.”
This comment alerted me to a major bug with Material’s switch component — a small but surprisingly complicated UI element that had 40 possible variants. We dug into the switch and found out that the component was not set up properly, with issues from inconsistent icon logic to incorrect actions and state layers. Once we got the greenlight, we restructured the switch from scratch — and then realized that this issue was symptomatic of the kit as a whole.
I used this comment to help make a case for why my team should take ownership of the M3 Design Kit. We needed a cohesive approach to structuring all the other components in the kit. We also created a QA process to catch mistakes in component construction and functionality before they’re published.
“Please add the keyboard & numpad.”
When working on a complex system like Material Design, it’s easy to get caught up in our own bubble. This feedback — that keyboard and number pad elements were missing from the kit — let us know that there were gaps in our offering. Since things like keyboards are part of the Android System UI, we didn’t think about them as part of Material Design. But this comment helpfully reminded us that Figma users don’t care about the nitty gritty distinctions between internal Google teams. They’re just looking for the UI elements they need to make their product! By adding these utility elements to the kit, we could make it more helpful to our users. We’ve since added other utilities such as avatars, device frames, example screens, and more.
“I don’t get updates from Google, so what’s the point?”
This comment raised an extremely valid provocation: How do you deliver a design system outside of your own Figma organization? Yes, Figma has community files, but they can only be used by making a copy of them — and those copies don’t receive updates when the original file is changed. If I added a new feature to the community file, users had to make a new copy of the file and manually port over the update into their existing designs — it just wasn’t working. Material Design is ever-evolving, and we want all makers to be able to use the latest and greatest that Material has to offer.
I took this comment to heart, deeply considered the available options, and filed a feature request with Figma. As a result, Figma developed the UI Kits feature, which was unveiled in June of 2024. The Material 3 Kit, Apple’s iOS UI kit, and Figma’s Simple Design System are all now default kits in new Figma files, and users can inherit updates from the authors.
“The file is corrupted! Everything is blank! Where are the components?”
After the UI Kit feature was rolled out, the prompt on our page changed from “Get a copy” to “Open in Figma.” An influx of comments like the above let us know that something was not right with the new experience of getting to the kit. Clicking “Open in Figma” opened a new untitled file with the kit enabled — but the users couldn’t see that it was enabled, because the file was blank and the assets panel wasn’t immediately visible. We worked with Figma to improve the UI Kit flow and wording, and made it so that when you create new files with the UI kit, the assets panel is revealed. I could tell this effort helped when the incoming comments were about other things 😉.
Takeaways
With all this experience in mind, here are tips for anyone making a Figma Community File or UI Kit:
Listen to your customers. Whether they are helpfully pointing out bugs or angrily remarking that something sucks, it’s feedback! Take ego out of it and use the feedback as a tool for improvement.Test everything. When you make a new component or add properties and variants, test to make sure they are working properly. As a user, try to pull in an instance of your component and apply it to every option. Is the instance operating as intended when you select different properties? Consistency and quality will always lead to a better experience for your customers, and it’s worth investing in.Design Systems are not “set it and forget it.” They take careful tending, like a garden, as things evolve and the seasons change. Don’t expect to be able to set up a file and then neglect it.
Building a design system for millions is a constant conversation — one that requires listening, iterating, and embracing the unexpected. But I’ve learned that when we design with the community, the results can be truly transformative for everyone.
A huge thank you to every single person who has left a comment, reported a bug, or requested a feature. Your feedback fuels the evolution of Material Design.
✌️Euphrates Dahout
UX Designer, Google
Have a question, suggestion, or wild design idea? Let us know:
Material 3 Design Kit@GoogleDesign on Instagram@GoogleDesign on X
Images by Arthur Ribeiro Vergani.
Designers: always read the comments was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
