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Try Blogger's New Interface

draft.blogger.com

68 pointssahaj32 comments

Beautiful and functional. There are things to nitpick of course, but this is light years ahead of the old blogger. It's nice to see Google making a concerted effort to elevate the design of products across their portfolio. I used to think that visual design wasn't much of an institutional priority for G, but they've proven that wrong.

Am I the only one who thinks that the new design colours are somewhat bleached? I would like more contrast.

I also find the "Reading List" from my Blogger account homepage to be useless. If I want to subscribe to a feed, Google Reader is a much better option.

I agree with you on the colors. No contrast, it makes it very hard to locate what you need.

It looks nice, but it doesn't feel quite right.

Too much functionality depends on iconography, which leaves me having to map pictograms to actual words. It's OK for me to read some words. You're going to have to translate the interface anyways.

And there's very little use of contrast or color to help determine what is going on. My blogs and the reading list don't have a lot to differentiate each other, so I was initially confused where I would even go to post to my blog.

Also, the "New Blog" button is confusing. Are people really creating that many new blogs that they need a huge, highlighted button for it? I thought it was to make a new post (using "blog" as a verb, really), so I was confused when I click it and got something else.

Pretty attractive update, but fairly bad functionality and usability.

The huge highlighted button seems to be a common usability issue with many of Google's new designs. They seem to confuse "new user" with "regular user".

Case in point being the new groups design. Huge buttons to create a new group, an action that happens very infrequently for me. Plus a huge splash screen with product information (similar to the Blogger blog in the reading list) which as a regular user, I just don't care.

It’s the page you go to to create new blogs. It is supposed to have a button like that. The most important button on the respective pages looks like that. On that particular page it’s most certainly the button to create a new blog.

This is nice! It also fits the pending revisions of blogger etc to unify the google ui styles etc.

one thing I recently discovered about blogger that won me over is this: you can have you default draft template include the right commands to import the mathjax javascript into every post, so I can then just write inline and display math latex naively with \[ some math \] and \( math \) and it'll just work! (both in preview of post, and the live post!)

Inexplicable. I'm pretty sure Google just released some kind of new social product (although I've been having trouble finding links around here). The word on the street is also that Google has some kind of reader app (the name escapes me). These two things are what this Blogger interface does, so why on earth aren't they integrated?

Instead, they've taken a similar starting point (lightweight, white-heavy design that runs using Javascript and back-end data) and created something lifeless and disconnected from everything else.

This is Big Company Syndrome at work; exactly the kind of thing that you'd expect from a company like Microsoft, rather than the company that just released the best web app in years.

Actually what I'd expect from Microsoft is to delay launching the new thing for several years in order to integrate it with various other services, re-branding it to windows/live/.net XXX, and wondering why the world has moved on in the meantime

All the design changes since the launch of G+ could use some decrease in padding imo . In netbooks the real content will start halfway across the screen - lot of unnecessary scrolling, looks good though .

The killer for me is this: http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lo0ebqK4bl1qzasmo.png

On Google Music, the actual music has good padding, but the rest of the page has so much crap I can barely see any songs. And that's on a 1366*768 display, so I'm a bit miffed.

An option to select from 2 settings would be better , like Gmail's new themes - dense/regular , although dense is still too spaced when compared to the default theme at the moment .

I'm worried we'll lose the look and feel of the old themes once the new Gmail interface is rolled out. I dislike the Big Blue Button that is showing up in all of Google's UI refreshes too. Google's search results seem very cluttered as well.

On the other hand, the desktop interfaces can now be used on a Xoom or Galaxy Tab or iPad without having to zoom in to hit the right link.

It's pretty, but I'm left wondering why they bothered to launch it without the Google+ "funeral bar" integrated, or whatever you want to call it.

I find these UI refreshes an irksome feature of web software. They tend to appear on a day and time when you're most stressed, horking their newfangled wares with pop-ups that only do harm to the software's usability. Recent examples: the new Facebook chat sidebar abomination, the new Gmail people sidebar.

Have you nicknamed the Google bar as the "funeral bar" because it's dark? Are all dark things funeral things?

Never thought about it that way but it does start with a cross and my first name, kinda fits the nickname.

Is that how nicknames work? If a nickname is a reference to a specific aspect of someone or something need it apply to all people or things sharing that characteristic?

You mean the "black bar".

Nice to see Blogger getting some love. They seemed pretty stagnant for awhile.

What happened to the new templates they announced at the end of March? I liked the look and was hoping to try one out for a personal project.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/fresh-new-perspective...

They are not really templates, but separate views. If you append "/view/<template_name>" to any blog URL on BlogSpot, you get this view. Example: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/view/flipcard

Today we’re previewing five new dynamic templates in Blogger that you’ll soon be able to customize and use for your blog.

Looks like the /view is just to preview them

It seems that they have been working on this for a long time, as you can see in this video that they've put up in March: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPhFc6GqVdU#t=97s

I think it's really interesting to see what huge amounts of time goes into these redesigns at a company like Google. It's very different from what I do.

It's also interesting to see how the design has evolved from what they showed in March to what they finally arrived at.

The only real problem I see with this interface is that my own dashboard pages now display content from Google that I don't care about. When I'm doing my content, I just want to see my content. Maybe the page layout of the dashboard is configurable, but ... I dunno. It's just too in-your-face.

Otherwise, though, I like it.

This looks terrible in terms of usability. Everything is so white, there is no contrast at all. I find it really hard to see the difference between elements, and the "highlight" is barely visible. I guess one can get used to it, but would be much better with at least some contrast.

Anyone mind posting a screenshot? I'd like to see the UI but I don't want to create a blog on Blogger just to see it.

http://i.imgur.com/5eSmA.png

Email redacted in the top right. Four blog titles (sites, not posts) redacted down the left.

Glad that now draft.blogger.com and blogger.com are integrated together with nifty UI.

Any hope they might actually revive Google Reader as part of this redesign frenzy?

They are doing browser detection instead of feature detection.

"ERROR: Possible problem with your *.gwt.xml module file. The compile time user.agent value (opera) does not match the runtime user.agent value (unknown). Expect more errors."

It basically looks the same in Opera. (Unfortunately, I'm tempted to say.)

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