Use Google+ to Improve Your UI

I, personally, hate buttons without cursor:pointer. Hover effects are nice and all, but they're often rather subtle, and your eyes are attuned to the cursor already. Changing it is extremely visible, and gives you immediate feedback that you're hovering something actionable. Anecdotal, but I find I "see" when my cursor enters a clickable region much more quickly if the cursor changes - I click sooner, rather than making sure it's positioned inside the element.

Well, the old technical limitations of the web have muddied the affordances somewhat, but my rules is generally "add cursor:pointer if the button behaves like a link, leave it unchanged if the button behaves like a button".

Most of the G+ buttons actually behave like buttons, i.e. you click on them and something happens on the current page. They don't have cursor:pointer, but they have other standard button hover effects. Pre-AJAX, the web had a history of tarting links up to look like buttons so they would seem more "clickable". Those kinds of "buttons" should get cursor:pointer, but not any other hover effects.

This is absolutely terrible for accessibility. Screen readers will not handle these buttons properly leading to a significantly more difficult experience. James Edwards actually talked about this at The Highland Fling conference a few weeks back.

FWIW, I asked also this here: http://www.quora.com/Whats-best-practice-for-buttons-on-sing...

Would be cool to get more opinions on it.

Also note that the buttons in the header area of Google+ are <a> tags, probably since they actually link to separate pages. I guess that's Google's practice.

Yes, use pointer. I don't know why G doesn't, but that is not good practice. There should be a visual indication that an object can be clicked, other than a highlighted border.

Yes, changing the cursor to indicate the element can be clicked is the easiest method to communicate this and for the user to understand it.

But it is not unheard of since desktop applications most likely do not change the cursor hovering on a button. It is mostly a web browser feature.

It's always been my belief that one should try to stick to the browser's native behavior when possible. Web browsers (on personal computers) have pretty consistent pointer states for links (which take you to another page) and form elements (which activate an ability on the current page [with the exception of 'submit' buttons]).

In this regard it seems like Google is doing the right thing. Only run against the user's previously acquired assumptions if there is a very good reason.

Is there some downside that I am not seeing with relation to using <button> instead of a <div>?

I have always used <button> tags (occasionally <a> tags as well). Along with a css reset and some custom changes I can make the button look like anything I want.

I like the buttons described there. They were also rolled into blueprint css as the 'buttons' plugin.

https://github.com/joshuaclayton/blueprint-css/tree/master/b...

I like the "flatter" UI design overall, but I agree on the whitespace. Especially in Gmail. I wouldn't mind a flatter phase going through The Internets, as I think it's less distracting, but I entirely agree. Less wasteful display of data, please.

I would be interested in any info people may have as to whether such a large amount of whitespace does or does not improve user's understanding/use of sites. I like dense displays, but I'm also willing to learn how to use more powerful tools, as I value the efficiency.

This has nothing to do with whitespace. It's just a CSS library for Google+ style buttons.

I think you're going to lose this battle :)

I like the new layout and white space, it's much easier for me to read, but I've always liked this style. In fact, I have a tendency to double space much of my code and other coders hate that I do this.

The only think I REALLY don't like is the giant red COMPOSE button. Uhg. I just want to change it to another color. I REPLY all the time but don't compose often, and having this giant red eye-sore there all the time is very uncomfortable.

I'm using the new gmail theme, and I don't have any of those complaints. I'm on a medium resolution screen (1400x1050 I think) and I currently have 18 mail entries visible.

It definitely took me a bit to get used to a typography-centric layout. I really do like it now, however.

Okay, thanks. I was just about to write the exact same thing (although I may have been more dramatic complaining about the huge amount of unnecessary white space that fills my small netbook screen).

The new buttons however are quite nice and simple. There should be a hint of 3D though, to make them feel more "press-able". Other than that, I am okay with them becoming wide spread on the web, just don't surround them with so much wasted space.

Nice catch. Know of an easy workaround to this?

Unless we're talking about different things (I'm thinking http://jqueryui.com/themeroller/), it feels completely different from jQueryUI. jQueryUI is much glossier and not as muted.

Reminded me of the aristo theme which I quite like https://github.com/banzor/Aristo-jQuery-UI-Theme

In what way? The sites don't look similar, and neither do their buttons.