Much like the Material Design effort itself involved basically every design team inside Google, we approached research - both the formative, and validation - as something that we needed to do together and that we couldn’t centralize.
There were lots of specific studies that we ran from the core team - mostly to validate the usability of certain controls or conventions - like the toggles and the FAB, and with a strong focus on accessibility.
We also leveraged every study from every team implementing Material - piggybacking additional questions where it seemed appropriate - to validate the use of Material in context.
We also run a large amount of foundational research to help us understand device use, and for the last few years that effort has been international with a particular focus on developing countries. That’s not to say developing an international design system is not daunting. We actually had some goofs in the original spec for dialogs that didn’t provide enough cues for what’s actionable in certain locales - that’s why in addition to usability we also worked with i18n experts and specialists from different markets.
Much like the Material Design effort itself involved basically every design team inside Google, we approached research - both the formative, and validation - as something that we needed to do together and that we couldn’t centralize.
There were lots of specific studies that we ran from the core team - mostly to validate the usability of certain controls or conventions - like the toggles and the FAB, and with a strong focus on accessibility.
We also leveraged every study from every team implementing Material - piggybacking additional questions where it seemed appropriate - to validate the use of Material in context.
We also run a large amount of foundational research to help us understand device use, and for the last few years that effort has been international with a particular focus on developing countries. That’s not to say developing an international design system is not daunting. We actually had some goofs in the original spec for dialogs that didn’t provide enough cues for what’s actionable in certain locales - that’s why in addition to usability we also worked with i18n experts and specialists from different markets.