Some first-day gripes on the new #GooglePlus #UI. In short, it seems like the mobile UI has eaten up the desktop one. Here goes (also sending these over the @Google+ feedback form):
- Everything needs a click. No more hovering. While that make sense in mobile, I don’t see why the desktop experience must suffer.
- Hover cards for people (=easily seeing who the person and what your relation to him/her is – also an easy way to circle/un-circle people) are gone.
- Sharing a post quickly to a collection (and collections are supposed to be one of two main features of G+ now) is gone.
- If you have more than 3 collections, it’s even more clicks to share something.
- If you were sharing to specific Circles, it’s also a lot harder
- +1 a comment now takes two clicks instead of one. Is this supposed to lead to more engagement?
- Posts no longer have a drop-down menu when viewed in the stream or profile. You need to click to view the full post and then you have a menu…
- Adding old posts (or posts not already part of a collection) to a collection is gone (e.g. the “Move post to collection” feature of the old interface)
- When you share an existing post of a link or photo, the “originally shared” part (e.g. the comment of the original poster) is now below the link with small grey font. This basically means that sharing other people’s thoughts is secondary to the content that is shared.
- The default view of Communities are recommendations. I’m a member of about 30 communities, more than a regular person can follow. So it’s not very important to recommended some more…
- Viewing a community you no longer have the categories on the side. That’s another click to open a menu and the counters for new posts are gone.
- Autocomplete when writing a hashtag is gone.
- I could go on but i’d better stop at this point :)
Other than that, there are a lot of positive things to say on the new, cleaner design and the increased speed of loading. I have great respect for +Luke Wroblewski (somehow I missed he’s at Google now) and his work. Still, the above problems show some fundamental decisions taken by the designers to forget that desktop even exists. Which I don’t see how it will work out for the best of Google+
Tags: GooglePlus, googleplusupdates, socialmedia, UI
