Google+ gets a redesign
googleblog.blogspot.com
googleblog.blogspot.com
I find it hard to tell if this is going to be a step in the right direction or not. There are some red flags that go up for me, but it's obviously hard to judge based on descriptions and videos alone.
One of the biggest UX problems with G+ today is the way it handles notifications and conversations. Every event gets a notification, to the point that I rarely see a Google page without some red number in the top right, usually indicating nothing more interesting than "{random user} has added you to their Circles." The signal-to-noise ratio for the notifications is so poor that I've developed notification blindness. I've subconsciously tuned it out, so if someone actually does have something to say to me, I miss it.
Conversations on G+ are also poorly handled today. Because so many things are handled in the notification overlay, they all have to live in a narrow band on the right that is very hard to process visually. Whether in an overlay or on Plus itself, conversations are difficult to follow with their collapsed views and lack of adequate visual cues for the reader's attention.
I'm intrigued by the "Conversation Cards" that are mentioned on the redesign announcement, but the fact that they don't warrant their own demo video leads me to suspect that Google hasn't considered the usability of their conversations to be a top priority.
One last red flag for me is the customizable "navigation ribbon." It's an adage in UX that when you see an interface that asks the user to customize the layout, it means the designers gave up trying to find the right solution themselves. I'm not saying it can never work, but it is a red flag for me here.
I hope the new G+ is a big step forward. I've been wanting to love Google Plus since it first arrived. At least they're devoted to G+, and they're staying hungry.
It's always depends on the app. If you have a tool where you primarily have heavy users e.g. a programmer's IDE - then customization makes sense. But in the case of Google+ I don't see the point either - it just adds extra complexity.
I ended up deleting my Google+ account because that was the only way to avoid this constant badge spam.
The navigation ribbon reminds me of the OSX dock in how it works. I don't think they gave up on the right solution, but rather the right solution is to allow people to decide what's important to them.
In a nutshell, Facebook is a network of people I know first IRL, so getting pictures of their dinner last night or latest cat's antics and other useless stuff I can sort of live with, it goes with the territory.
But G+ is more like Twitter with longer posts - I follow a a lot of people I don't know IRL, but only because of a shared interest, and I'm only interested in their posts on that interest, not the other noise.
Whereas pointless posts on Twitter are only 140 characters, don't take up much screen real estate, and are easy to skim and/or skip, that's less the case with G+. I really want a way in G+ to filter out posts by those people that don't have anything to do with the shared interest.
For example, if I create a "Functional Programming" circle and subscribe to a bunch of Haskell, Ocaml, ML, Lisp, and Scheme programmers that I don't know IRL, I'm really not interested in their vacation photos and whatnot. But currently there's no way to filter their vacation photo posts from their posts on functional programming.
An effective 90% solution would be to simply add hash tag filtering to circles, so I can instruct my Functional Programming circle to only accept posts with #functional, #functionalprogramming, #haskell, #ocaml, #ml, #lisp, #scheme, and block anything else without at least one of those hash tags in it.
Not quite perfect, and G+'ers would have to develop the habbit of using hashtags more than they currently do, but it's functional and flexible enough and provides the tools necessary for the community to solve this problem themselves.
This is my biggest G+ pain point, and while I have nothing negative to say about the redesign (it's nice), as long as it doesn't solve this one problem, it will do nothing to get me using G+ more (I check in about 2 or 3 times a week currently).
Unfortunately his only takeaway from the experience was that designing extensions for chrome was really hard, and stuff kept breaking. He eventually gave up, IIRC.
His complaint was the lack of a G+-specific DOM API, and how (at the time at least) Google kept changing things that broke everything.
Then I guess you can add your own "topic alerts" by simply doing a search for haskell, lisp, scheme or whatever at the top and then click "Save this Search" to permanently add it below the "What's hot" button on the right (I don't think there's a way to limit that search to one of your circled though... maybe there is I'm not sure).
EDIT: You can limit a search to all your circles, but not to individual circles. Then again it is unlikely that your "Gardening" circle will have much to say about #haskell.
Google+ offers many ways for me to target content to a group of people that I personally know, and only one, "Public", to distribute content to anyone who might be interested.
Unfortunately there are at least 3 common use cases that need to be considered:
1. I target a message to people I think are interested. (Google+ does this well.)
2. I broadcast a message to people who may be interested. (Google+ sucks at this.)
3. A group of people forms for some purpose (work, game, whatever), and needs to be able to communicate within that group. (Google+ has no support at all for this, and the result is that I was forced to go to Facebook to communicate with people I was playing a Google+ game with.)
There is a real need for all three modes, and I don't know of anyone who does all three well.
As cumbersome as it is, the solution to 3 would be to have everyone in a circle create the exact same circle.
The big/rich displaying of every link is as big of a problem as the filtering for me. After looking at the update, I appreciate how easy it is to ignore Facebook posts and thus quickly engage with the few posts I can in a given day. Just imagining my current Facebook news feed formatted like G+ is exhausting.
"Home" being "EVERYTHING" is just a disaster. I want to see what the people I actually personally care about are up to first and foremost, and then I want to browse around to what the rest of the Internet is doing. Instead, everything is shoved down my throat all the time.
More fundamentally: I don't care to transact my private life on someone else's server (especially someone whose business model is based on mining that life for marketing and other undisclosed purposes).
My professional interests and certain hobbies: not such an issue. Though I see no reason to tie these to a hard and real identity. I managed fine for my first quarter century on the Internet without that.
I can actually get the pure topics/interest stuff from subreddits like /r/haskell and speciality sites like lamda-the-ultimate.org.
I think the piece that's missing is integration from other third party services - I would use my google+ account a lot more if I could post to it from apps I use often like twitter, instagram etc. There's always share to twitter in almost every app, which makes it easy. But to share anything to google+ i always have to go all the way to their site, which isn't worth it since many of my friends don't use it anyway.
[1] http://code.google.com/p/google-plus-platform/issues/detail?...
I always wondered why the Google+ team didn't implement that from the get go but after reading that, that's probably the biggest reason as to why they haven't.
https://plus.google.com/107117483540235115863/posts/FXaGHpa1...
It's a not very thinly-veiled shot at frictionless sharing and the like.
Having seen the hellhole my Facebook stream has become (while I've tried hard, it's almost impossible not to end up with unintended consequences for Apps and such), I'm on Vic's side.
Me either, but - IMO - the answer to this isn't to leave out the "write API," but rather the answer is to give users better filters and the ability to define their stream to meet their own desires. Of course doing so with a simple and intuitive UI is the tricky part, but hey... those G+ engineers make a lot of money, they should be able to come up with something, no?
no! :)
Probably the hardest thing in social media is noise filtering via a UI (it's hard for Google, it's hard for Facebook, it's just a hard problem).
For my own (app) selfish reasons, I'd like to see a write api for comments first as that doesn't cause issues on the same scale as writing posts to the stream. Could be a nice place to start.
Ad hoc groupings of people in your Lists and ad hoc set operations on your current groups (school intersection friends, union of all groups filtered where profession = X or Y, etc.) is something a write api would let a budding entrepreneur develop an app around and potentially make a lot of money.
Logically you might think so, but noise is not always noise, sometimes it's what you're interested in reading about, some days it isn't. Spam, however, is always spam.
Google+ have tried to solve this "noise" problem through the ui with a "volume" slider. But it's like fine tuning a recording desk if you have to do that to 50 circles to get the mix just right.
I'm just not sure it's solvable through the UI and that we may have to be quite harsh on what "noise" we let through and rely on "if it's important enough, it will find me". There's just too much data to consume otherwise.
The problem is, that's not even the right approach. It's built on a faulty assumption - that "who" is the sole determinant of whether or not I'm interested in something. That's not even close to true, unfortunately. I have plenty of social-network connections for whom I value their posts on certain topics and have less-than-zero interest in what they have to say about other things. For example:
"I follow Bob, and I want to see Bob's posts on technical topics, but NOT Bob's posts on religion."
Or more generally:
"I follow all these people, but regardless of who posts what, I never want to see pictures of cats."
I'm just not sure it's solvable through the UI and that we may have to be quite harsh on what "noise" we let through and rely on "if it's important enough, it will find me". There's just too much data to consume otherwise.
I don't know, I think a solution that was 80% effective would be incredibly valuable. I don't see this as something that's "all or nothing."
And my personal take is that, in the case of G+, the Circles thing is a good start, but they need a way to specify "excludes." Whether those excludes should be explicitly defined by the user, or whether they can use machine learning to figure out what I don't want to see is an open question, granted. But I'd take some UI for specifying "exclude this topic" (while acknowledging there is some inherent fuzziness in this) in the meantime.
Spam is not always spam. There is a subset of spam that are obvious spams such as ones that tries to sell you viagra. Outside of that, there are mails that are harder to classify since different people will respond differently to them. It might seem like that's just me being pedantic but the result is that user end up with mail they do not want to receive, and mark it as spam. This is similar to how I respond to news feeds except I dont have an easy "mark as spam" button without blocking that person forever.
G+ should implement some sort of rating system to rank items that I liked and push those ones similar to it higher on the feed.
Different people might have different opinions about what is and is not spam, but one person will be fairly consistent about it. For example, it doesn't matter much what mood I'm in - I'll almost always classify the same things as spam. But the same cannot be said of classifying things as "interesting" or "not interesting".
Your idea about a preferential ranking system would probably be a good way to go. Definitely better than trying to train a strictly go/no-go filter to recognize "interesting". The way Google+ posts seem to jump around every time I open the page (with no obvious correlation with things like number of comments or +1's), I actually wouldn't be surprised if they are already doing something like that.
This is all just part of the master plan. If/When Facebook implodes, there is already a place set up for everyone to go. Google has the staying power to weather a long lull in usership; there are other properties to support them. Facebook has 1 angle and history shows that to be a dangerous position--one bad decision can bring the whole thing crashing down a-la Digg.
I'm surprised no one seems to see this.
What does it take for someone to switch to another social network? Actually quite a bit. One, I want my friends to be there too. That alone is pretty difficult, and a common complaint with G+.
But I think the real roadblock is probably photos. People love their photos. Can you imagine the work some people would have to do just to move that all to a new network? Some people I know have thousands of photos of themselves, and have posted thousands of photos. That is no small task. It helps keep people tied to Facebook, in my opinion.
Certainly I think Facebook could be usurped, but I don't think it's trivial and it is probably going to require some competitor finding a good way to help someone move their social life (i.e. photos and friends) trivially.
I wouldn't be surprised if the EU would introduce laws for that at one point. Also, it would be cool if a social news site could parse the ZIP dump of your data you can request from FB.
I think it would be very difficult for it to happen any other way. Indeed, the points you make reinforce this idea.
The problem comes down to engineering however - or more precisely, engineers.
I have always gotten the sense that G+ is a social network for "nerds". In this context, "nerds" refers to people that (like me) are:
1. More technically inclined than the average person 2. Willing to invest more time and effort into their social circles 3. Capable of grasping more abstract social concepts 4. Have an attention span longer than a gnat
While this is a very nice social network, G+ features are not designed for the instant grasp that Facebook has perfected. I think that FB's strategy of catering to the lowest common denominator - literally - in an elegant and usable way is what continues to cement their dominance over the space.
This latest redesign seems to be still very technically oriented, despite the pretty icons. The entire concept of reordering things is quite literally bunk when you get down to the average joe.
When are you going to reorder your icons on the left? What utility does it provide? As a regular user, you want something but the entire concept of moving stuff around on the screen isn't your priority. It is parsley on a dish, not the main course. Each G+ design feature I've seen so far continues to be just little bits of garnish, providing little in the way of truly useful functionality that makes the overall experience as a whole better in some way.
Of course, nothing is guaranteed in business and most certainly no one will be king of the hill forever. The world changes after all, and the generation that is being born now will utilize social media in a way we can barely imagine. However, that still doesn't change the fact that G+ as a whole seems to be an effort to make a social network for Googlers, not the world. We as HN readers should not gauge G+ by what we see through our own experience - we should gauge it by what our non-technical friends, family and random-acquaintances do, and that is how I'm gauging this design change right now (go FaceTime!).
That is the problem with G+ for me in a nutshell, and the reason why I killed that part of my Google account. I rather liked Google+ as an environment; it was the spillover into the other Google properties that I found irksome.
Frankly, I don't mind so much that Google learns a little bit about my habits and develops recommendations that are in accordance with them. But when I visit, say, YouTube, I would like the recommendations driven by my tastes (driven by my history) and subscriptions/follows -- I don't want political or religious/anti-religious rantings driven by my professional colleagues, pseudo-scientific claptrap shared by my (otherwise interesting) meatspace friends, and so on. They've already shared that stuff on G+; I don't need it pushing down stuff that is likely more relevant to my interests (or needs) on other Google properties.
I also had to select "other" for gender, there's no option named "I just don't want to write it."
Yeah, sure:
"By focusing on you, the people you care about, and the stuff you’re into, we’re going to continue upgrading all the features you already know"
Context:
http://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/10/google-nymwars-redux/
https://plus.google.com/111588569124648292310/posts/SeBqgN9Z...
In short it just prove the unenforceability of the policy.
I heckled them about that in a conference and when offered to get help to have my account fixed, I declined saying that the only thing they need to fix is the policy itself by retracting it and apologizing.
Brilliant.
But despite all of that. Something is missing, and i just cant quite put my finger on it.
Of course, this could all be made up for if they had good email notifications, which they don't. I have a lot of people I follow on G+ to make up for the lack of people I know using it. With that, conversations from my real friends get lost. I'd love to have email notifications based on which circle someone is in, and have email notifications for everything my friends post.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070723/
(not sure if you were being sarcastic)
It is missing "Google". For me Google means plain flat interfaces to best-of-breed tools (search, maps, mail). Many of their new tools (Play, Google +) are trying to resemble an iPad app. That's not Google's DNA, maybe. (Only maybe, because Chrome is the one tool they made that have this sexy look while keeping, for me, the pure Google DNA.)
In fact, I think Google may, one day, want give up doing business things. Look, they have plenty of ad money coming in the safe for years. I won't say they don't deserve it but instead of paying very clever people trying to beat Facebook, trying to have a better ad model, scratching their head on how to place an icon on the left (or right? or top?) with which gradient to have the "best" interaction, or even trying to make AR glasses, they could just give up on these childish tasks and just become the real New University of the 21st.
Ok, it is off-topic, but think about it: so many great brains, with enough money to pay them. They could be teaching everyone many fields of Science, and beyond, for free. They could scratch their head on how to get more food for less water, and write about it. Each Googler would have to publish one thing every week, on their channel of choice. A central feed would list them. Free access to knowledge. That, would be grand. Nearly as grand as Wikipedia...
I hope they will add anchor with target to images (and content posts in general, I guess). You can't middle click to open image in background and you can't do anything at all with javascript disabled. I really, really hate that (the former). Especially because they change the cursor on hover which makes you think it's an clickable anchor.
Double middle-click used to work (seriously, what?) but it doesn't for some time now.
The main nav bar on the side reminds me of Unity. And yes I know that many people don't have wide screens and many also despise Unity (for that or other reasons) but this feller here sure likes it.
http://facebook.com (Lucida Grande is a fab choice)
http://readability.com - one of the key things this app changes is typography.
Check out default typography on thesis theme - http://64notes.com/thesis
Examples of bad typography:
google groups, Google Plus
I've many more if you want.
Seems to me that continuing to count everyone who gets an Android phone or signs up for Gmail as a G+ user just invites people to pile on and point out how underwhelming G+'s userbase has been to date.
http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=Google%20Plus%2CPin...
Maybe some things work better, but I didn't have a good gut reaction at all seeing the new thing.
P.S. I didn't watch the explanatory video, they are good at those but I wanted to see what it was without guidance.
Historically, no tech company stays in the #1 spot for more than a decade. That doesn't mean Facebook won't be around in 10 years, but it does show how volatile the tech market can be.
XBox was viewed as a joke but they kept at it with their cash machine, and now they're successful.
Dreamcast was awesome but they didn't have the cash to keep at it and had to throw in the towel.
If google keeps at it, they'll sink or swim, but you have to be persistent to try to take that share.
Personally, I think google hires at a far more talented tech pool. They're doing things like VR glasses and automatic parking cars while facebook makes a big deal about integrating with Skype. So the talent is there. The money is there. The marketing is there.
We'll see how this plays out. I'm excited to see the outcome.
If that were a fixed law, then Facebook could still wait for Windows, Photoshop, Skype and Google Search to disappear before they had to worry about themselves.
I hope I will remember to revisit this comment in half a decade. :)
IMHO, facebook is GREATLY overvalued, but only time will tell if it's true. Their investment in price assumes that they will continue to grow and will still have no competition in a 1/2 decade.
$120 billion, or $80 billion - depending on who you talk to. Google is making cars that the blind can drive and glasses we saw in terminator. Facebook, they're giving us timeline. GE makes light bulbs, owns NBC, create military jets. Facebook gives us status updates. You think facebook can possibly be worth 1/3 of ALL of GE?
Of course, I'm joking a lil about facebook's offerings. I know they offer far more. However, to think they're going to be the only dog in town doing what they do is just being ignorant.
Tech is filled with creative people who fuck shit up all the time. Just as facebook made some people turn heads at MSFT and GOOG, so will someone else in the future.
FWIW, I interpreted this as the #1 spot for any given category of software. Facebook are clearly the #1 for social and have been so for a while. That's good enough in the context of this discussion.
It surprises me too, actually, given their absolutely terrible mobile apps. :(
For example, I have circles for Java, Clojure, AI, Ruby, Semantic Web, etc., etc., and near the top of the screen I'll switch from All Circles to just AI, for example.
Also: the red notification number in the upper right corner: I usually ignore this and look at them all just once a day.
I don't treat G+ as stuff that I have to read. If I read useful and/or fun information that is fine, but I don't get concerned about missing something.
What this really meant was that I could get an "All" view that excluded those circles holding people I'm only sporadically interested in, without having to play with the circle frequency slider thing.
This new g+ design obliterates that plugin. The inability to view sets of circles is a major failing of the UI.
So you're complaining that you can't get a filtered stream of posts without having to use the feature for filtering your stream? It's not like you have to do it more than once per circle you want to exclude.
No, I'm not.
It's not like you have to do it more than once per circle you want to exclude.
I have, say, a dozen circles. Can you tell me how I can quickly choose to view a stream that consists of all of the content from only a subset of those circles? Then quickly choose a different subset of circles? Or view a stream of all content except those in the PostTooMnayPictures circle?
I know of no way to do any kind of circle grouping/ungrouping, but if it's there I'd love to know about it.
The plus/minus extension allowed this by turning the list of circles into a multi-select checklist. Two seconds to change to any subset of circles to view.
Edit: It looks like the +/- developer is planning on updating his extension to work with the new layout
https://plus.google.com/117134788479394921938/posts
I'm thinking the other layout issues (too much whitespace, useless menu-y cruft) can be fixed with greasemonkey.
I'd like to see more confidence shown by social networks. Who's forging ahead when they're all chasing each other's tails?
I thought the web reading public already expressed their disfavor of frames.
I wish they'd be more original and old-Apple-product-experience changing with this damn "project."
This has saved me some time as I didn't have to go hunt and peck for information about who the sender is.
So plus 1 Google ... that alone has proved valuable and falls more align with being a search/identity company rather then a social network.
Also funny: https://plus.google.com/u/0/s/%23usesforwhitespace
But on google+, when they have a column on the extreme right (for chat), you can not ignore the damn white space. It is always there. It just looks a design push that had not been taught out completely.
Apparently, NoScript disables local storage in such a way that even testing for it (using if(window.localStorage)) throws a NS_ERROR_DOM_SECURITY_ERR and terminates the script. This is obviously problematic, and seems a bug in NS instead of Blogspot, although it can be a deliberate decision by the NoScript devs, I don't know.
Following the instructions in the NoScript forums[1] works by making it return "null" instead of an error, thus letting the script run.
I'd still prefer if Blogspot didn't need Javascript to display a simple post, but alas, the trend seems to be unstoppable.
[1]: http://forums.informaction.com/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=5208
But even more I like this #usesforwhitespace meme that is going on right now:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/s/%23usesforwhitespace/posts
Some fun ideas in there.
You're making just the exact same mistake my comment referred to. The 'joke' is that it's just Google employees, but guess what? Reality doesn't mirror that. My circles are full of people who aren't Google employees. If yours are, then either you work at Google or you have a weird selection of friends and associates.
If you have proof that the 170million odd members are predominantly Google employees (which seems unlikely, unless they've spent their 20% time developing AI to be used as social networking bots), then I'll be pleased to see it.
The biggest barrier for me is the inability to login in with whatever I want and then hook in whatever networks I want.
It is good hangouts is getting much more prominence.
Sort of what those Mac commercials did by comparing themselves against boring old Windows.
They would never get the anti-social-network audience, though. And this, which seems trivial, is important, because (for me) it's not that I am anti-Facebook, it's that I would never spend my time on a social network.
Besides, the same arguments that goes in an anti-Facebook opinion, are relevant also for g+