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What Google was thinking when redesigning the new Google+

Google’s reworking of its social network, Google+ shows that the company has started to marry data with design and craft new experiences. Will that be enough to turn you and I into active participants? Who, knows, I am just happy it doesn’t look like Facebook.

Not sure about how links are being treat:

The design of the new Google+ is muted and flat. The colors are actually quite neutral, allowing mostly the content to shine brighter. “Flatter design keeps the distraction away,” Gilbert said. This new philosophy is reflected in this new version of Google+, which is marked by simplicity and fewer distractions. For instance, unless you are ready to engage with a piece of content, the links appear as regular text, without the distraction of the blue link. Both the left and right sidebar and menus disappear, sliding in and out as needed.

Goal

Gilbert explained that when Google started working on the new look, the idea was to take a lot of information and show it in as simple a manner, giving the eye the visual cues to understand the importance of content. Bigger photos, for instance are indicative of their importance. Photos become bigger based on analysis of past relationships to the people and the content and their ensuing interactions, Gilbert explained.

Daring Fireball: Facebook Home and Dogfooding

There is a dogfooding lesson here, though. Does Mark Zuckerberg carry an HTC First, or any other Android phone with Facebook Home installed? Does Mike Matas? (Doesn’t look like it, judging by the “via Twitter for iPhone” metadata on his recent tweets.) Why not?

It’s always a sign of trouble when you’ve built something you don’t want to use yourself. Why does everyone I know who works at Apple carry an iPhone? Every single one? Not because they have to. It’s because theywant to.

Turn Facebook Home into an interface that Facebook designers and engineers want to use, not merely feel obligated to use, and then they’ll have something. But if it remains something that even Facebook’s own designers and engineers do not prefer over the iPhone (or stock Android, or any other platform), if it remains something that the company needs propaganda posters to promote even among its own employees, then Facebook Home will remain what it is now. A dud.

The Next Big UI Idea: Gadgets That Adapt To Your Skill

gamification of TV’s - will users have the patience?

As gadgets get more complicated, UI’s must be able to teach their users over time.

…

More and more interactive products are being returned. In 2002, 48% of all returned products were technically fully functional but were rejected for failing to satisfy user needs (28%) or purely due to users’ remorse (20%). Even though a product may have all the features one can hope for, complexity and bad user experience can prevent users from integrating it into their lives.


LEARNING HOW TO USE COMPLEX PRODUCTS IS LIKE LEARNING A COMPUTER GAME

Just like the challenges in video games match the skills of the user, so should TV interactions. For reference, I’ve used four levels described in the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition.

Level 1: Novice

  • Rigid adherence to taught rules or plans
  • No exercise of “discretionary judgment”

Level 2: Advanced beginner

  • Limited “situational perception”
  • All aspects of work treated separately with equal importance

Level 3: Competent

  • “Coping with crowdedness” (multiple activities, accumulation of information)
  • Some perception of actions in relation to goals
  • Deliberate planning
  • Formulates routines

Level 4: Proficient

  • Holistic view of situation
  • Prioritizes importance of aspects
  • “Perceives deviations from the normal pattern”
  • Employs maxim for guidance, with meanings that adapt to the situation at hand

Jakob Nielsen's site has been redesigned

Hell has frozen over or April Fools ?

Comments from blauwbilgorgel:

  • Not all links have a title attribute
  • Large lists of links do not have a skip link.
  • Searchform is a javascript submit, with no fallback or warning (doesnt work without javascript support)
  • Mailto: adresses have subject preset.
  • Links are not underlined.
  • Popular topics links are black instead of blue, and the hovercolor doesn’t register for the colorblind.
  • Larger images often lack an alt-attribute.
  • Inline CSS hampers custom user stylesheets.
  • Submenu is somewhat confusing, visually disjointed from the main menu.
  • The contact form is a table without a table summary, and doesn’t work without javascript enabled, without a warning.
  • Missing a breadcrumb
  • Low contrast for blue links on white background.
  • Trouble finding the contact form. Submenu is initially hidden and you have to select “Contact information” from a list of links inside the “People” page.
  • After submitting form: <h1>&nbsp;</h1><h1><strong>Message Sent</strong></h1><p>&nbsp;</p>
  • Font-stack of Helvetica renders ugly on Windows machines
  • Form labels are not bold, above the form input, or of reasonable font-size.
  • Content pages don’t start with the content, but with a huge sidebar of links, not conform reading pattern.
  • Both HTML and CSS are not valid.
  • http://www.nngroup.com/articles/ is somewhat paralizing with information/link overload.

I do like the design a lot, it being vanilla Foundation.

h/t Hacker News

Redesigning Google: how Larry Page engineered a beautiful revolution

Welcome to the Google Singularity!

Great insight into Google’s redesign via Project Kennedy from Googler’s.

The vision would turn out to focus on on refinement, white space, cleanliness, elasticity, usefulness, and most of all simplicity. “At Google we want to move fast, so a lot of these various products grew up on their own,” says Wiley, and so before Kennedy they didn’t abide by one design standard across the board. “We had a lot of simple and useful products,” Wiley says, “so we turned our focus towards making these products more beautiful, but also more consistent as a suite of products.”

Creating a design vision is the first step, but the product designers had to distill and implement it. “We sat down, locked ourselves in rooms, and we just refined on this design as quickly as we could,” Wiley said in 2011, “[we] created these reference set of designs and then set those onto the world through the ‘productionizing’ of that with the engineering teams.”

At the end of June 2011, just under three months after Page took over as CEO, Google shipped fresh new versions of Google Search, Google Maps, and Gmail, and Calendar. In the next year and a half, Google moved swiftly, launching Google Now, a fresh mobile take on Kennedy ideals, and a host of stunning new iOS apps like Google+, YouTube Capture, Chrome, and Maps that followed much of the original vision, albeit with some variations between the different product teams. What was once Brownian Motion, as Wiley describes it, was now a flowing stream of design ideals with forks along the way, but all heading in the same general direction.

Matias Duarte, senior director, Android user experience, put it this way: “Google is going through a design revolution, for lack of a better word.”

…

Google’s process is quintessentially Google and happened in a quintessentially Google way. Larry Page mandated that there be a new design focus to get the ball rolling, but instead of micromanaging at every step he let his employees to do the rest — guided by an empowered, core team of designers. They organized themselves in a typically Google structure: cross-discipline, informal, but driven to achieve a goal.

While the Eric Schmidt era was perhaps best known for “don’t be evil,” Page’s Google might soon be defined by “don’t be ugly.”

The Top 5 Website UX Trends of 2012

User interface techniques continued to evolve in 2012, often blurring the lines between design, usability, and technology in positive ways to create an overall experience that has been both useful and pleasurable.

Infinite scrolling, for example, is a technological achievement that also helps the user by enabling a more seamless experience. Similarly, advances in Web typography have an aesthetic dimension but also represent a movement toward greater clarity of communication.

  1. Single-Page Sites
  2. Infinite Scrolling
  3. Persistent Top Navigation or “Sticky Nav”
  4. The Death of Web 2.0 Aesthetics
  5. Typography Returns
my 2 cents on the SoundCloud redesign ;) Like: very well thoughtout redesign. Kudos to SoundCloud designers ❤ member pages sounds continue to play while navigating to different pages. Clicking on the duration indicator/status in the main menu returns you to the sound page! larger images removed embedded comments from waveforms. Fast forward without disabling comments! consistent pagination - infinite scrolling combining actions and statuses into one - under the waveform Dislike: Not crazy about #CCC text because it&#8217;s just hard to read Comments have been relegated to right column as basically a link to its own page, see Above &amp; Beyond feat. Zoë Johnston - Alchemy (Submerse Remix). Obviously, not many people were reading comments. SoundCloud is still dead easy to use. Not to mention all of the great tunes. While putting around I found a Biggie remix by Cee-Roo :)
Zoom

my 2 cents on the SoundCloud redesign ;)

Like:

  • very well thoughtout redesign. Kudos to SoundCloud designers
  • ❤ member pages
  • sounds continue to play while navigating to different pages. Clicking on the duration indicator/status in the main menu returns you to the sound page!
  • larger images
  • removed embedded comments from waveforms. Fast forward without disabling comments!
  • consistent pagination - infinite scrolling
  • combining actions and statuses into one - under the waveform

Dislike:

SoundCloud is still dead easy to use. Not to mention all of the great tunes. While putting around I found a Biggie remix by Cee-Roo :)

5 Design Tricks Facebook Uses To Affect Your Privacy Decisions

Great analysis by Avi Charkham

It should be no surprise that in the new App Center Facebook made another leap forward in their efforts to get you to expose your personal info without realizing you’re doing so.

  • The Single Button Trick
  • The Tiny Gray Font Trick
  • The Tiny Hidden Info Symbol Trick
  • The Action Line Trick
  • The Friendly Talk Trick

Read the article for the details!

The Importance of Creative Design For Mobile App User Experience

Some great insights

Forget Web Design

Mobile design comes with its own set of rules and expectations, so when you’re designing for mobile, don’t let the standards of web design dictate what you do. Sure, you should maintain consistency of look-and-feel across devices and stick to brand standards, but you also need to keep in mind conventions that have been established for mobile operating systems.

A great example is how Southwest adapted its website to the iPhone. The mobile app incorporates design elements from the site, but has clearly been created to provide the optimal user experience on a smartphone:

Q. Manning UX and UI highlights of:

Mobile Considerations in User Experience Design: “Web or Native?”

Don’t totally agree with Aral. But I still might buy the book. It’s not either or. It’s about choosing the right option for the requirements of the App, i.e. a newsreader fits a HTML5/PhoneGap model while a RPG game would be native.

The challenge of native apps is to create a UI and UX is that cross platform! Read the comments for differing view points ;)

Here are some goodies:

OUTSIDE IN IS GOOD, INSIDE OUT IS BAD.

Is your first question in a new project which server-side technology you will use or what your database schema will look like? Stop! This is a wrong approach. You’re trying to solve your own problems, not the user’s. That’s inside-out design, and that’s a Very Bad Thing.™

To Tumblr, Love Pixel Union