Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

New Google+ is beautiful?

alexdong.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 82 posts

Re: New Google+ is beautiful?

#11

Post by billnguyen »

thebear wrote: post #8
jack-r-abbit wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

two? I have three on my monitor. I really hate what Pinterest did for UI... the multi-column layout with blocks of various heights. I scan left to right, top to bottom. This layout breaks that horribly. Maybe they were not the first but that is where I first saw it and right after they took off... I saw it everywhere. So I blame them for it. lol

As I learned from billnguyen's post, you can make it change the number of columns by zooming in and out. With the 3 column layout your mind immediately gives up on wanting to figure out the chronological order. Am I the only one who thinks that the chronology matters?

@jack-r-abbit: its just a setting in your browser, chrome makes it sticky so once you set it for your google+ page you should always see it zoomed in/out to your setting

Re: New Google+ is beautiful?

#12

Post by jack-r-abbit »

billnguyen wrote: post #11
thebear wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I learned from billnguyen's post, you can make it change the number of columns by zooming in and out. With the 3 column layout your mind immediately gives up on wanting to figure out the chronological order. Am I the only one who thinks that the chronology matters?

@jack-r-abbit: its just a setting in your browser, chrome makes it sticky so once you set it for your google+ page you should always see it zoomed in/out to your setting

oh.. ya I know how to zoom my browser. But that is gross. By the time I zoom enough to get two columns... everything is freaking huge. I'm not blind... I just don't want random sized blocks randomly thrown onto the page.

Re: New Google+ is beautiful?

#13

Post by 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.

Re: New Google+ is beautiful?

#15

Post by 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.

Re: New Google+ is beautiful?

#16

Post by tomkarlo »

thebear wrote: post #8
jack-r-abbit wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

two? I have three on my monitor. I really hate what Pinterest did for UI... the multi-column layout with blocks of various heights. I scan left to right, top to bottom. This layout breaks that horribly. Maybe they were not the first but that is where I first saw it and right after they took off... I saw it everywhere. So I blame them for it. lol

As I learned from billnguyen's post, you can make it change the number of columns by zooming in and out. With the 3 column layout your mind immediately gives up on wanting to figure out the chronological order. Am I the only one who thinks that the chronology matters?

Facebook's stream hasn't been chronological (for most users) in a long time - I think years, and it doesn't seem to bother most users.

Re: New Google+ is beautiful?

#17

Post by mayanksinghal »

thebear wrote: post #2

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 arro…

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.

Re: New Google+ is beautiful?

#18

Post by billnguyen »

jack-r-abbit wrote: post #12
billnguyen wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

@jack-r-abbit: its just a setting in your browser, chrome makes it sticky so once you set it for your google+ page you should always see it zoomed in/out to your setting

oh.. ya I know how to zoom my browser. But that is gross. By the time I zoom enough to get two columns... everything is freaking huge. I'm not blind... I just don't want random sized blocks randomly thrown onto the page.

if you want single column theres an option under More called Steam Layout

Re: New Google+ is beautiful?

#19

Post by lelandbatey »

Kylekramer wrote: post #3

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.

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/

Re: New Google+ is beautiful?

#20

Post by jack-r-abbit »

tomkarlo wrote: post #16
thebear wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I learned from billnguyen's post, you can make it change the number of columns by zooming in and out. With the 3 column layout your mind immediately gives up on wanting to figure out the chronological order. Am I the only one who thinks that the chronology matters?

Facebook's stream hasn't been chronological (for most users) in a long time - I think years, and it doesn't seem to bother most users.

Mine is. They do reset the sort order back to "top stories" once in awhile which is annoying but I always just set it back to sort by date
Post reply on HN