
New Google+ is beautiful? - alexdong
http://alexdong.com/google-plus-is-skin-deep/
======
k-mcgrady
>> "First, images are out-of-proportionally big. They steal the attention away
from the texts... You eyes will inevitably look at Larry’s face and the new
Android Studio but did you notice much of the text at all?"

I think this is the point. I can immediately tell what these posts are about
via the image without having to read anything. I can then read the details if
I want. Also, If G+ is anything like Facebook one of the most shared content
types is photos so it makes sense to prioritise them.

>> Third problem, the lack of discipline in using the whitespace. Whitespace
is one of the most powerful, visually pleasing and least intrusive way to
bring orders and visual hierarchies to a design. Yet what do you think of the
whitespace in this Best of #Python page?"

This seems like a bad example. Normally that whitespace (the link) would
contain an image and some text previewing the link. They just couldn't parse
it from the webpage. In this case the OP just picked an example to fit his
complaint.

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thebear
I commented earlier that I had a hard time figuring out the chronological
order of the posts in the stream. I've learned since that Google doesn't want
us to care about that. Fine, that's their prerogative. But now I have a new
problem: I don't know how to read this thing at all. I can't read it "by
column," that is, one column after the other, because it's infinite scroll.
But I can't read it "by line" either, because there are no lines, given that
the posts have different heights. This is mildly annoying in two-column mode,
and impossible in three-column mode (to which it switches automatically if the
space is there). How do you read this, particularly in three-column mode, and
be reasonably sure not to miss a post?

~~~
k-mcgrady
You can switchback to one column in the 'more' menu.

>> "How do you read this, particularly in three-column mode, and be reasonably
sure not to miss a post?"

I think that might be your problem. Maybe Google doesn't think many people
want to see every post in their stream. Personally I just skim through it and
see what catches my eye. I much prefer this design (2 column, my 15" monitor
apparently isn't large enough for three regardless of the lagre whitespace to
either side of the two columns).

~~~
thebear
Given the fact that I can switch to one-column layout, I should probably shut
up now. But just for the sake of a lively debate, let me say this: if I can't
read the thing, I can't skim it either. I just don't know how to move my eyes
around. Instead of skimming for the posts that I find important, I would end
up making a random choice between things I see and things I overlook. But then
perhaps that's fully intended with any kind of social media: you can never be
sure if you missed anything or not.

~~~
kpanghmc
Disclaimer: I work for Google.

For what it's worth, I felt the same way when I first dogfooded the new multi-
column layout. I couldn't figure out how to read my stream. While reading a
post, I kept getting distracted thinking about where I should focus my
attention on next. It made scanning my stream more stressful and I was
confident that I did not like it. This was before they added the option to
switch to a single stream view, so I couldn't do much but submit my feedback
and deal with it.

Then, one day, the G+ team added the option to switch back to single stream
view. I thought "great!" and immediately went into G+ to switch back to
single-stream mode. And I hated it. I hated having to scroll so much. I hated
not being able to scan a large number of posts with a quick glance. I hated
all the unused space on either side of the stream.

I'm not saying the same thing will happen to you, but maybe give it a week
before giving up on it. You may just find that it grows on you.

~~~
thebear
First off, I admit that I am hypersensitive to any form of bastardization of
language. So please don't hate me for I'm going to say, I'm just a victim of
my hypersensitivities. But: the word "stream" in the English language means "a
steady flow or succession." Or, if you prefer the CS definition, it means "a
sequence of data elements made available over time." When I'm looking at a set
of boxes of different heights arranged in three columns with no apparent
ordering, then I'm not looking at a stream. As other commenters have pointed
out, the multi-column layout is more than a different way of displaying
things. It redefines the entire experience of receiving posts as something
different, something Pinterest-like. Maybe that's a good idea. But please,
let's don't call it a _stream_.

~~~
archgoon
I would normally let this go, but I really dislike the holier than thou
attitude with your "bastardization of language". Computer Science and
mathematics would be much poorer if it didn't allow for people to generalize
concepts. So let's get started.

1) Streams branch and merge all the time.

[http://www.mightystreamradio.com/PHOTOS/STREAM%20PHOTO%202.j...](http://www.mightystreamradio.com/PHOTOS/STREAM%20PHOTO%202.jpg)

If anyone's bastardizing the language, it's computer scientists being overly
restrictive with their allusions.

2) <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphrys_law>

> But please, let's don't call it a stream.

"But please, let's not call it a stream."

~~~
thebear
You live and learn. I always thought "Let's don't" was a joke, something you
say facetiously to indicate that you _do_ care about grammar. It turns out
that "Let's don't" has arrived in that grey area between grammatically right
and wrong where many consider it just non-standard, but not wrong:

<http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/let%27s>

What I find really interesting is that in British English, it's "Don't let's."
How does that happen? But we digress.

~~~
transient
"Don't let's" is grammatical - "do not let us" is the opposite of "let us". A
bit old-fashioned, though.

~~~
thebear
Ah, of course, I should have seen that. Now it all makes sense. Thanks for
explaining!

------
Kylekramer
Seems to be operating under the assumption that text = photos for the user. My
observations of social networks has definitely not borne that out. People love
photos. Due to the demographics of Google+, What's Hot is skew toward tech
news. But I am pretty sure the intention of Google+ is not to provide news,
but to appeal to the general public. General public loves pictures.

~~~
lelandbatey
Indeed, the fact that people love and respond to pictures more than text is a
very important one.

I'm reminded of my time working at [0]StudentRND. We had a [1]CodeDay coming
up and we wanted to promote the event to people we know using Facebook. We
submitted a couple of different text based update reminders and mini-
promotions for the event and watched as they largely didn't get a lot of
attention.

However, while my friend [2]Adam was laser cutting some of the event-giveaways
he casually uploaded a picture of the process to Facebook with the caption
"Making some CodeDay giveaways."

In surprise we watched as that photo got 4-8x the exposure and response from
people compared to the previous text-based posts. While watching this, I
thoughtlessly stated "Wow, we should be posting more photos to engage people."
Upon saying this, everyone in the room froze at the abrupt realization that we
should have been posting more photos _right then and there_. At the passing of
that most tense of pauses, each person in the room started scrambling in
search of an interesting photo to post about CodeDay.

So yes, photos are important for people. They communicate more info, and they
communicate it faster than text.

[0] -- <http://studentrnd.org/>

[1] -- <http://codeday.org/>

[2] -- <http://adamryman.com/>

------
burke
Everyone loves to dress it up with "facts" and "data", but I have always been
and will continue to be confident in viewing these sorts of posts as barely-
glorified change aversion. Three weeks from now everyone will prefer this
iteration.

~~~
LnxPrgr3
For what it's worth, they did similar things to the iOS app a good while ago
and I still haven't gotten used to it. It's profoundly wasteful of my 4" of
screen real-estate.

I never got used to Facebook's timeline either before they had the (IMO) good
sense to put the wall back into a single column.

Change aversion is a real thing, but not every new change is actually a good
idea. My feeling is there's a lot of legitimate bad idea in this redesign.

But you know how opinions go…

------
thebear
I find the two-column layout hard to deal with. I think I have figured out an
algorithm for visually determining the chronological order of the posts,
without having to read the timestamp in each post. But my algorithm requires
considerable visual and intellectual effort. Is there an intuitive way to see
the chronology of the posts? BTW, I'm not a huge fan of facebook's two-column
layout either, but at least the arrows pointing to the time axis show the
order of the posts.

~~~
mayanksinghal
You can use J/K to traverse through the stream in a chronological fashion. Not
as quick is SPACE but the animations are a lot _cleaner_. You can also force a
single column layout using the More button in top toolbar.

~~~
zarify
Thank you so much for pointing this out.

Multi column mode is actually usable for me now. Before I just couldn't make
up my mind what to read next and it kinda screwed up my concentration, and
single column had so much white space it was off-putting.

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capex
If one of the smaller guys had created this UI and had built H+ for example,
they'd have been showered with praise. We've come to expect some kind of magic
from Google. UI/ UX always has some trade offs, and I think the decisions
taken are wise. I love the auto-hiding sidebar, and the plethora of options to
respond add to the responsiveness of the app. They've rethought hashtags too.
Quite a nice experience in my opinion.

~~~
Samuel_Michon
Funny, I think it’s the opposite. When Google designs something, it’s lauded
as good because they have the funds and the talent, so they must be right.
Startups doing a ‘Show HN’ on the other hand get real, brutally honest
critiques.

In a ‘Show HN’, G+ would receive criticism that gray text on a light gray
background is a bad idea, that the font-weight is too light, and that there’s
too little contrast between the various sections on the page. As someone with
bad eyesight, G+ is unusable to me (without loading other CSS).

------
thrill
I am a Google Fan Boy. The new G+ is simply horrid.

------
lee94josh
I agree with the premise of this article. It looks "pretty", but I can't look
at the page and easily navigate. While obviously part of the issue might be
I'm not used to the new design, but there needs to be some kind of "intuitive"
factor, right? But just my opinion obviously.

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ChuckMcM
Someone should do a comedy video of them sitting in a car where every time you
change your seating position all the controls re-arrange and change size.

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sspiff
Great, my employer switched to Microsoft Forefront as a firewall, and now this
site is blocked because it has "dong" in the name.

------
moystard
My main concern regarding the new Google+ is how slow and resource consuming
it is. Using Firefox 21 on OSX, scrolling is just a continuous pain, and my
browser hangs up quite often with the Rainbow Wheel of Death. Switching to the
single column layout gets things better, but still, far from being a slick
experience.

Regarding the design, they gave the ability to switch back to a single column
layout. Still people complain about the new design, just switch back if you
don't like it.

------
cnp
Anything designed around non-uniform rows and columns is immediately a no-no
in my book. I was very pleased when Facebook reverted that change back to the
single column

------
billnguyen
I find it makes more sense when you're zoomed out enough to have it rearrange
itself into 3 columns vs 2.

When its at 2 columns I waste a lot of eye and brain strength trying to make
some order out of it. But when its at 3 columns my brain just stops trying to
make any sense of order and just starts consuming content.

------
bastijn
Can anyone find the 27 actions? I find only one, add a school. the rest is
just normal interwebs stuff. if you feel that every link is a must-click, even
button a must-do, and every post a must-read (all contents), you have to
rethink your web experience.

Personally I feel the images made me read the post instead of skip it
altogether. I feel the white is indeed a bit much, luckily a lot of people add
pictures to fill that up (pun intended). I dare to say that pictures are to a
post, what icons are to your desktop. Try removing all icons from your desktop
and just use textual shortcuts. That will make sure it is a pain to get in a
glance what is there.

Lucky for people like the poster, google tends to make stuff configurable. As
said before you can tune things (a bit) to your likings.

------
brianwillis
My experience with the iPhone app has been pretty bad. Functionally it's
passable, but from a design/presentation/aesthetic perspective it's just plain
bad.

The hamburger-button menu which slides in from the left overlaps the content,
but the notifications panel which slides in from the right pushes the content
out of the way. Inconsistencies like these break my mental model of where I am
in an app.

The pull-to-refresh rainbow zebra stripes look awkward, don't provide any
hints about what's going on, and are inconsistent with the folding circle
animation that Google uses in its other iOS apps (like Gmail).

This business of having cards fly in diagonally as you scroll bothers me too.
It's cute the first couple of times, but breaks the flow when you're trying to
read from top-to-bottom.

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mmuro
The main problem I see with these types of layouts is that if you are
displaying reverse chronological content, it needs to be in a single column.

Items that have no bearing on when it was posted, i.e. Pintrest, can adapt
just fine to this multi-column layout.

~~~
saraid216
They haven't been reliably displayed in reverse chronological order for some
time now. I noticed it being messed with at least a year ago.

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merraksh
Let's see if The Oatmeal is right this time too about new user interfaces:

<http://theoatmeal.com/pl/state_web_winter/facebook_layout>

(see second part)

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minimaxir
It's interesting that Google+ switched to the tile-style method of presenting
information immediately after Facebook tried that with Timelines and failed
miserably.

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jhdavids8
Wow, if this author hates the new G+, he better steer clear of Facebook then.
If you said pick the social network where numerous large images, too many
actions, and lack of whitespace was a problem, I'd say 1 in a 1000 would pick
G+.

Plus, the too many actions argument is silly. Each post constitutes at least
one action, usually a few. Just the way of the social network world.

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mindcrime
Just switched my stream back to single-column mode and realized something:
Google have now resurrected Google Buzz.

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r00fus
I just checked. Perhaps it's my circles (which have a heavy tech bent) but I
really don't see meaningful stuff there. Mostly images are I/O related stuff
that I don't honestly care about (do I want to see an animated image of
someone giving a preso?)

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lurkinggrue
Reading this I just get the urge to replace the word Google+ with Windows 8.

------
kvee
Did anyone else notice that they just changed how chat windows look today to
be more like the new google plus?

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shmerl
I prefer open source social networks. And decentralized with that, such as
Diaspora.

~~~
train_robber
The discussion was about design. Not about G+ being closed.

~~~
shmerl
My point was that it's kind of not interesting to follow their design, when
underlying idea isn't the best.

By the way, early G+ itself borrowed design from Diaspora, as well as the
concept of circles.

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mamby
What is G+? They need a lot more then that to beat fb!

~~~
saraid216
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4etXBEq-ug>

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workbench
> It looks pretty because of the two high quality photos which have taken up
> the majority of screen real estate. You eyes will inevitably look at Larry’s
> face

> looks pretty… Larry’s face

