[Design Overview] Google+ - a community that’s not dead and an app that should be
As opposed to what many think Google+ is still a popular social media platform and it’s getting new features and updates monthly. It maybe isn’t for everyone but it definitely has its strengths that nothing else offers. But let’s talk about its design and user experience it provides.
In “Eyes on Paper” I’m trying to get through design of apps looking at Material Design practices and overall User Experience and saying what could make them better. I’ve made one about YouTube earlier.
Website
I really enjoy the design of web version of Google+, except for some little details and recently bleached top bar, it is a great example of Material Design.
On the left side you’ve got a clear navigation drawer that you can collapse. In the bottom right sits a FAB button, which as opposed to its mobile brother doesn’t have broken shadow. Its functionally is doubled by a card on top of the posts stream which I think it’s a good thing here. Why? When you visit a social media site you can have one of two goals — either post something or read other posts. When you’re reading through others’ stories and you want to write your own meanwhile you can still do that by using the FAB. But when you’re there to write something before browsing you probably have to move your mouse through basically the whole screen so the card presents you an easier-to-reach alternative. I accented ‘here’ because the same thing is being done on mobile which doesn’t have the problem of reachability and just makes a small screen more cluttered.
Back to the feed — it’s a really nice looking grid of cards. They adapt the number of columns depending on how wide your screen is (you can turn it off) and look like true Material Design cards, which Google seems to not be able to achieve in it’s more recent redesigns. As a web developer, I always feel impressed and inspired when I see that layout — it’s not easy to achieve something like that on the web.
The background is grey, not white and helps separate the content from the surroundings. The cards themselves provide everything you need — author, collection, content, comments, +1’s and a share button. They also have an indicator of when they were posted that on hover switches to a menu button which reveals a list that isn’t cluttered and presents useful functions.
The integrated image viewer has everything you might want in an image viewer: metadate living in side panel that you can hide, no duplicated elements, working zoom and nice animations make a hugely positive impression. It even reassembles the look of a image viewer that might be very familiar to you — Google Photos. And since uniform design is the best design I love it. I only miss the transition between images from Google Photos but most graphics here, on Google+ aren’t shared in more than one per post so this isn’t something you’ll notice everyday. And it has in-line video playback with all of YouTube’s controls — great!
There are a few things that aren’t so nice, tho:
Firstly, the cards expand on click to show more comments and longer texts, and that’s great but when one card is expanded, the one that was expanded before should collapse automatically, which doesn’t happen. It’s a small detail but if you’re viewing posts with many comments it may quickly clutter you stream.
And secondly: their recent change to move the comments on posts from a button to a short expandable list (which was a good change) also resulted in +1 button moving to the right. It wouldn’t be bad if it wouldn’t go in between the comments and share button when the post is opened in a new tab. It is a bit misguiding as I (and probably more people) got used to expect it on the first position.
Oh, animations, they are so well placed that it makes the whole app look so Material Design-ish. However, they could be smoother, because on mid-range devices they seem to lag, quite heavily.
Another thing that fits the Material Design spirit almost perfectly is the top bar. It adapts it’s colour to match the colour of current section and expands or collapses tab interface. It was even better when it was red, matching the Google+ brand but ehh… Google seems to love the overly-white UI 😩
The web app scales really well too. On the phone side navigation changes to bottom bar which is one of the most reasonable uses for bottom bar I’ve seen so far. I also really enjoy the fact that it is visible only on home page — it makes it way more expectable and less buggy than e.g. YouTube which keeps the bottom navigation in almost every view. However, on mobile the notification duplicate that isn’t so bothering on desktop is more noticeable here. As is the lack of easy way to enter Collections view. But it’s details such as changing popup menus to full-screen dialogs are what make this a really pleasant experience.
However, I wouldn’t go with only the web app on my phone. Even tho it’s great, it doesn’t provide same performance, reliability and ease of use as it does on desktop. It’s especially unfortunate given how bad the Android app is, more on that in a second.
The search functionality has also improved a lot in recent months. Firstly, they changed annoying behaviour that swapped the page whenever you clicked on search bar to an expanding list of quick suggestions. Then, it also gained advanced search capabilities which can really help you save hours of scrolling when searching for something from the past.
One small detail that just won’t get out of my mind is how broken the Google+ logo in the top right corner looks. It’s out of place, it usually has different shade of grey than buttons next to it, it’s a low resolution JPEG (why not SVG?) and it’s damn not centered vertically! Why?!
Going on you can notice another duplicate feature, which I think isn’t that bad. It’s the notifications button. One lays where it does in every Google product, in the top right corner. It lets you read not only notifications from Google+ but also other services (more specifically one — Google Photos) and also a button in the drawer which leads you to a wiev with only Google+ notifications but also let’s you see the ones you saw earlier and provide much more detail.
Could it be better? Of course! In a perfect world we would see those two views merged together and only the bell in the app bar occupying space. But it’s not perfect and even tho it brings some confusion it isn’t really that bad, even inexperienced users should be able to get over it pretty quickly.
The thing I cannot get over is the lack of Collections section, or more specifically a button to enter it. When Google introduced Discover feature it took the place of Collections in the nav bar. Now if you want to see your collections you need to either find it disguised in Discover or type it in URL bar which is far from convenient.
An experience that gets amazingly annoying when you leave it — because of notifications. Those little beasts can keep you informed and encourage to come back to an app or website… when executed properly… And on Google+ they just aren’t. If you get a notification from the web version of Google+ you have either saw it earlier, unsubscribed from this kind of alerts, it’s late or it’s appearing for another time after you dismissed it just a millisecond ago. And the last one is especially annoying because it will keep reappearing until you open the website! That is enough to block notifications from specific source but if you do you will also probably miss stuff that you care about.
The last thing that needs a redesign is the settings page. It is a weirdly formatted page that just looks bad. You might create something like this for a preview where you need settings to change something on the fly and then remove that page as soon as you stop playing with it — something like the Remixer tool by Material Design team… which has a better UI than the discussed settings page.
Android app
Beware as we’re approaching a big disaster… The disaster that should have been killed a while ago, when Google redesigned their social media platform. Instead they kept it alive trying to add features and keep it in usable state — a state that allows to use the app but isn’t quite a state in which you would actually like to use it.
To start the rain of terrible things just look at those animations. If you’re wondering what animations do I have in my mind there’s nothing wrong with you. They are hard to call animations. They are blinking. Or blinking with a tiny bit of fade-in. Or elements blinking after blinking. That’s just bad.
Some views load differently compared to others, the search button (top-right corner) disappears in Notifications (why if it’s everywhere else?), some elements (such as profile pictures under communities or images in Collections view) load or reload after the view is opened…
If that’s not bad enough there’s still a bug that makes one view stay behind other ones. Or another one which makes the stream in Home view go down by random amount and lives just blank space between the first post and app bar. I haven’t captured those but they do happen. And they have been happening for a year or more and still aren’t fixed.
I appreciate that they stayed with red in app bar this time but the colour of bottom navigation surprises me a little. It’s just took from nowhere. Nothing else in the app has this color and it strongly catches attention which is a thing that navigation element shouldn’t do, you should focus on the content. At least it hides when scrolling which is a good thing… But again back to the bad sides, it doesn’t have a shadow which again breaks Material Design feel. But maybe that’s better because if you focus on an element that has a shadow — the FAB button — you’ll notice it’s cut on the left side. I’m not an Android developer but I guess it isn’t easy to cut a shadow like that… Guys who made it were good…
Another thing that I got used to but still shouldn’t be there (or at least there should be option to toggle this behaviour) is the fact that the app doesn’t refresh when opened. If you want to see new posts you have to swipe down to trigger a refresh. It’s not a huge deal, but when you open social media app you probably don’t want to browse the posts you have already seen before but the newly added ones. It adds another step to achieve this and it can make users feel like they wait longer to see the content.
If we’re talking about loading, I just have to say how terrible this app is at loading basically anything. I find myself constantly copying the post link to open it in browser because that one GIF is taking hours to load. Literally. And it’s not because I’ve got poor connection because in web app the GIF loads fastly. Similar things happen to refreshing posts, notifications, images and videos. Also the images often load or are uploaded in potato quality 🥔 Oh, yeah video — where’s inline video player? On iOS and web app but not on Google’s own platform.
Another thing that is purely bad is uploading images. On the web you are presented with a nice pop-up allowing you to choose image from your Google Photos library or upload a new one. On Android you have an elderly-looking bottom sheet with button to camera, button to your files and a list of… Images that I took months ago? What?…
When you stop enjoying old memories and tap the file picker button you’ll quickly see that choosing an image from Google Photos downloads it to your phone and uploads it again… to Google+ but also… your Google Photos…
Error 404 — logic not found
The more you dig into the design of it the more you find it awful. Basically the whole app is shouting “update me!”. It still hasn’t caught up to the redesign done quite some time ago.
What annoys me more is the fact that Google can create a very nice iOS app that is kept up to date but struggles at giving users of their own platform a good way to access their own product 😤
What else is there? More duplicates. They’re everywhere. In menus, in buttons, in navigation drawer.. Wait, the navigation drawer — let’s talk about it for a second.
I think that Google made a really good use of it on desktop — it hides where it’s not necessary, shows to don’t leave too much whitespace and is there when you need it. It is a bit similar in the web app on phones and Android app but there you can’t access it by swiping from left and it hides sometimes, such as when viewing post or profile. It makes it a lot less useful. I’d love to be able to quickly go from viewing a profile to my main stream but sometimes that can be tons of back-button presses before you can do that. And that’s bad. Because the navigation drawer here doesn’t make any sense if it doesn’t have this behaviour. Everything that’s there can be accessed through the bottom bar so I’d love to be able to use it when the bottom bar goes away.
And just to mention — why are there still shortcuts to other Google apps on Android app? You know, you can just open your app drawer… Or ask Google Assistant…
There’s basically nothing good in this app and I just don’t want to rant it. So I’ll stop here.
The solution? Redesign it from the ground up. Just as the two other Google+ apps. Maybe that will come one day.
So what can you do about it? If you’re expecting an answer “nothing” you couldn’t be more wrong. Send feedback — that’s the best you can do. Because Google will hear you and hopefully it will take action.
