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Google Keep’s latest test ruins its airy interface

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Why This Matters

Google Keep is undergoing incremental updates as part of Google's Material 3 design overhaul, with recent tests introducing a larger, more prominent floating action button that includes text. While these changes aim to enhance usability, they currently disrupt the app's clean aesthetic and may impact user experience. This ongoing testing highlights Google's approach to iterative design, which can influence future app updates across the Android ecosystem.

Key Takeaways

TL;DR Google’s Material 3 Expressive upgrades for Keep continue with another floating action button redesign.

Along with the larger size spotted last month, the button also displays the text “Create Note” for some time.

This new button, unfortunately, ruins the app’s aesthetics by taking up a lot of space and mismatched font size.

Google tends to roll out changes to its apps incrementally rather than all at once. That’s also what we’ve been seeing with Google Keep, the default notes app for Android. Even though Google first started pushing out Material 3 Expressive changes to the notes app last year in July, it is still going on, adding small tweaks. The latest in line is a change to a useful button in Keep notes.

Google is now testing extensions to the new floating action button (FAB) that we spotted last month in the Keep notes app. While the FAB had already gotten bigger last time we spotted the change, it now occupies an even larger space when you’ve just opened the app or scrolled to the top of the notes. That is because when you do so, the button expands to include the “Create note” text along with the (+) icon, which has been self-explanatory since Google first added it. The button collapses back to the (+) icon when you scroll back down.

Old FAB Bigger FAB, now rolling out to some users New FAB, with Create Note text

The other thing we notice is how comically big and absurd it looks. As you can see from the images above, the font for FAB’s text is also noticeably bigger than the text from the notes in the background.

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Thankfully, these changes aren’t final and are currently only being tested in Google Keep with version 5.26.121.00.90. These haven’t been rolled out to the public yet, which means Google can reverse or amend them before it brings them to the users. Alas, some users have already started to see that the bigger FAB, which we reported on last month. This could mean Google might even implement this against our wishes.

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