It's going to change the face of podcasting, that's for sure. Case in point https://plus.google.com/110701307803962595019/posts - and maybe that will drag in more users (by interest graph rather than friend/family graph).
I genuinely think Google+ has plenty of potential. Google's strategy seems a little more unified in terms of the way the posts are linking to search results, how you can setup circles and the other more niftier features that have been added that Facebook has yet to add.
But despite all of that. Something is missing, and i just cant quite put my finger on it.
I've got loads of people on my G+. I feel there's more to it, but i think "Jenius" has hit the nail on the head. I think its third-party app integration that's missing.
For me, it's not having a native client for my phone, and not having a good web interface to make up for it. I know Windows Phone doesn't have a large marketshare, but at some point Google+ will have to work with the Metro framework if they want Windows users to notice them in the future.
Of course, this could all be made up for if they had good email notifications, which they don't. I have a lot of people I follow on G+ to make up for the lack of people I know using it. With that, conversations from my real friends get lost. I'd love to have email notifications based on which circle someone is in, and have email notifications for everything my friends post.
> Something is missing, and i just cant quite put my finger on it.
It is missing "Google". For me Google means plain flat interfaces to best-of-breed tools (search, maps, mail). Many of their new tools (Play, Google +) are trying to resemble an iPad app. That's not Google's DNA, maybe. (Only maybe, because Chrome is the one tool they made that have this sexy look while keeping, for me, the pure Google DNA.)
In fact, I think Google may, one day, want give up doing business things. Look, they have plenty of ad money coming in the safe for years. I won't say they don't deserve it but instead of paying very clever people trying to beat Facebook, trying to have a better ad model, scratching their head on how to place an icon on the left (or right? or top?) with which gradient to have the "best" interaction, or even trying to make AR glasses, they could just give up on these childish tasks and just become the real New University of the 21st.
Ok, it is off-topic, but think about it: so many great brains, with enough money to pay them. They could be teaching everyone many fields of Science, and beyond, for free. They could scratch their head on how to get more food for less water, and write about it. Each Googler would have to publish one thing every week, on their channel of choice. A central feed would list them. Free access to knowledge. That, would be grand. Nearly as grand as Wikipedia...
This is a huge step up for G+ and ultimately may lead to me using it it more. The problem I had with it before was it just wasn't intuitive to do anything with the interface. Now its easy to use, and I know exactly how to do everything without having to think about it. Its good to know that Google is sticking with their strategy of "Internet + you", I think its a good strategy.
Wow, huge improvement! Is the cover photo new too? (I haven't checked out G+ in a while.. - copied from FB?!) Looks more "fun" in any case, which is good. (Not saying they have to go completely spastic but this is a good mix)
The cover photo is to social networks as extra blades are to razors. Features are being stockpiled as if these companies were caught up in an arms race. It seems platform won't risk being caught without equivalencies, without questioning the worth of mimicking in the first place.
I'd like to see more confidence shown by social networks. Who's forging ahead when they're all chasing each other's tails?
Yeah I really like this, and I also like how google is not giving up. I do think it has potential, and if google can hit it, it will be huge for the company.
I think the piece that's missing is integration from other third party services - I would use my google+ account a lot more if I could post to it from apps I use often like twitter, instagram etc. There's always share to twitter in almost every app, which makes it easy. But to share anything to google+ i always have to go all the way to their site, which isn't worth it since many of my friends don't use it anyway.
I downvoted you for using the word "ghey" as some sort of perjorative, but the rest of what you're saying isn't doing much to dissuade me from my assessment. (Edit - the OP has edited to remove the word "ghey" since my comment, it was originally right before the phrase "blog posts" as an adjective.)
IBM didn't lose out to an "operating system," if anything, it was Microsoft that made them capable of competing in the personal computer space.
Google+ is not having trouble gaining traction because they don't have enough features.
I get that you're trying to make a salient point about not underestimating new products, but it's not really cohesive. The fact that Microsoft and Google have succeeded with products in the past doesn't lead automatically to the conclusion that G+ is going to succeed.
Google+ could be a success, or it could wither and die. For any positive example you cite, you could equally cite things like Microsoft BOB, the Zune, Apple Newton, OS/2, WebOS, Maemo, Sega Dreamcast, etc.
There's far more to success than buckets of cash, innovation for the sake of innovation, or yard-long feature lists. I hope G+ continues to improve, but its success is not a foregone conclusion.
"IBM didn't lose out to an "operating system," if anything, it was Microsoft that made them capable of competing in the personal computer space."
Yea, I discussed OS/2 before. The JDA was not particularly good, but the alternative MS chose was a lot worse, and that was MS's fault. See my username for my other posts discussing this matter.
Part of me wants this, too. But the other part of me hates it when a majority of my Facebook timeline is just updates from apps, games, and other crap that get automatically shared. This is a delicate balance.
One of the most hotly discussed API feature requests [1] but I'm nervous about it. I don't want my stream filled with junk the way my Facebook stream is.
> I don't want my stream filled with junk the way my Facebook stream is.
I always wondered why the Google+ team didn't implement that from the get go but after reading that, that's probably the biggest reason as to why they haven't.
It's a not very thinly-veiled shot at frictionless sharing and the like.
Having seen the hellhole my Facebook stream has become (while I've tried hard, it's almost impossible not to end up with unintended consequences for Apps and such), I'm on Vic's side.
I don't want my stream filled with junk the way my Facebook stream is.
Me either, but - IMO - the answer to this isn't to leave out the "write API," but rather the answer is to give users better filters and the ability to define their stream to meet their own desires. Of course doing so with a simple and intuitive UI is the tricky part, but hey... those G+ engineers make a lot of money, they should be able to come up with something, no?
> they should be able to come up with something, no?
no! :)
Probably the hardest thing in social media is noise filtering via a UI (it's hard for Google, it's hard for Facebook, it's just a hard problem).
For my own (app) selfish reasons, I'd like to see a write api for comments first as that doesn't cause issues on the same scale as writing posts to the stream. Could be a nice place to start.
Noise filtering is just another form of spam filtering, Google has a lot more in-house experience with that than Facebook I imagine. I think even something as simple as a personalized Naive Bayes filter would go far.
Ad hoc groupings of people in your Lists and ad hoc set operations on your current groups (school intersection friends, union of all groups filtered where profession = X or Y, etc.) is something a write api would let a budding entrepreneur develop an app around and potentially make a lot of money.
> Noise filtering is just another form of spam filtering
Logically you might think so, but noise is not always noise, sometimes it's what you're interested in reading about, some days it isn't. Spam, however, is always spam.
Google+ have tried to solve this "noise" problem through the ui with a "volume" slider. But it's like fine tuning a recording desk if you have to do that to 50 circles to get the mix just right.
I'm just not sure it's solvable through the UI and that we may have to be quite harsh on what "noise" we let through and rely on "if it's important enough, it will find me". There's just too much data to consume otherwise.
Google+ have tried to solve this "noise" problem through the ui with a "volume" slider. But it's like fine tuning a recording desk if you have to do that to 50 circles to get the mix just right.
The problem is, that's not even the right approach. It's built on a faulty assumption - that "who" is the sole determinant of whether or not I'm interested in something. That's not even close to true, unfortunately. I have plenty of social-network connections for whom I value their posts on certain topics and have less-than-zero interest in what they have to say about other things. For example:
"I follow Bob, and I want to see Bob's posts on technical topics, but NOT Bob's posts on religion."
Or more generally:
"I follow all these people, but regardless of who posts what, I never want to see pictures of cats."
I'm just not sure it's solvable through the UI and that we may have to be quite harsh on what "noise" we let through and rely on "if it's important enough, it will find me". There's just too much data to consume otherwise.
I don't know, I think a solution that was 80% effective would be incredibly valuable. I don't see this as something that's "all or nothing."
And my personal take is that, in the case of G+, the Circles thing is a good start, but they need a way to specify "excludes." Whether those excludes should be explicitly defined by the user, or whether they can use machine learning to figure out what I don't want to see is an open question, granted. But I'd take some UI for specifying "exclude this topic" (while acknowledging there is some inherent fuzziness in this) in the meantime.
> Logically you might think so, but noise is not always noise, sometimes it's what you're interested in reading about, some days it isn't. Spam, however, is always spam.
Spam is not always spam. There is a subset of spam that are obvious spams such as ones that tries to sell you viagra. Outside of that, there are mails that are harder to classify since different people will respond differently to them. It might seem like that's just me being pedantic but the result is that user end up with mail they do not want to receive, and mark it as spam. This is similar to how I respond to news feeds except I dont have an easy "mark as spam" button without blocking that person forever.
G+ should implement some sort of rating system to rank items that I liked and push those ones similar to it higher on the feed.
As I understood it from the context, the point of the quoted comment was that, even for the _same person_, whether something is noise or not varies wildly depending on their state of mind but for spam that is much less true.
Different people might have different opinions about what is and is not spam, but one person will be fairly consistent about it. For example, it doesn't matter much what mood I'm in - I'll almost always classify the same things as spam. But the same cannot be said of classifying things as "interesting" or "not interesting".
Your idea about a preferential ranking system would probably be a good way to go. Definitely better than trying to train a strictly go/no-go filter to recognize "interesting". The way Google+ posts seem to jump around every time I open the page (with no obvious correlation with things like number of comments or +1's), I actually wouldn't be surprised if they are already doing something like that.
This is all just part of the master plan. If/When Facebook implodes, there is already a place set up for everyone to go. Google has the staying power to weather a long lull in usership; there are other properties to support them. Facebook has 1 angle and history shows that to be a dangerous position--one bad decision can bring the whole thing crashing down a-la Digg.
I'm not saying Facebook is here to stay and has nothing to worry about, but Digg is a pretty poor comparison. What does it take for someone to switch news aggregators? Pretty much nothing. I just need to find another site that has links/discussion I find interesting.
What does it take for someone to switch to another social network? Actually quite a bit. One, I want my friends to be there too. That alone is pretty difficult, and a common complaint with G+.
But I think the real roadblock is probably photos. People love their photos. Can you imagine the work some people would have to do just to move that all to a new network? Some people I know have thousands of photos of themselves, and have posted thousands of photos. That is no small task. It helps keep people tied to Facebook, in my opinion.
Certainly I think Facebook could be usurped, but I don't think it's trivial and it is probably going to require some competitor finding a good way to help someone move their social life (i.e. photos and friends) trivially.
> it is probably going to require some competitor finding a good way to help someone move their social life (i.e. photos and friends) trivially
I wouldn't be surprised if the EU would introduce laws for that at one point. Also, it would be cool if a social news site could parse the ZIP dump of your data you can request from FB.
What I meant with the Digg comparison is an "implosion" scenario whereby Facebook does something disastrous to itself which causes a mass exodus, as opposed to something better coming along to supplant it.
I think it would be very difficult for it to happen any other way. Indeed, the points you make reinforce this idea.
I had the same problem, so I looked into it a bit more.
Apparently, NoScript disables local storage in such a way that even testing for it (using if(window.localStorage)) throws a NS_ERROR_DOM_SECURITY_ERR and terminates the script. This is obviously problematic, and seems a bug in NS instead of Blogspot, although it can be a deliberate decision by the NoScript devs, I don't know.
Following the instructions in the NoScript forums[1] works by making it return "null" instead of an error, thus letting the script run.
I'd still prefer if Blogspot didn't need Javascript to display a simple post, but alas, the trend seems to be unstoppable.
You're making just the exact same mistake my comment referred to. The 'joke' is that it's just Google employees, but guess what? Reality doesn't mirror that. My circles are full of people who aren't Google employees. If yours are, then either you work at Google or you have a weird selection of friends and associates.
If you have proof that the 170million odd members are predominantly Google employees (which seems unlikely, unless they've spent their 20% time developing AI to be used as social networking bots), then I'll be pleased to see it.
I'm just never sure which Google+ I'm supposed to use - my work email, my other work email, my personal email, the email associated with my social networks?
The biggest barrier for me is the inability to login in with whatever I want and then hook in whatever networks I want.
If only they could understand that UX is showing less, they would have won half the battle. Who needs all these buttons thrown at your face. If I need them Ill get them, please don't clutter and make user feel, "oh its so complicated". I had hopes on google plus, but this new UI, first thing that comes to my mind is Google Wave, less is more is the lesson for Google, the magic they have known for long(Google HomePage) but are discarding now.
I hope they fix their typography too. Arial is not the way to go, especially when you allow paragraphs as posts (or essays). Line-height makes it even worse. </designer's-rant>
I was quite relieved to find that this iteration is actually semi-usable without JS. Still doesn't degrade as well as facebook mobile. Can't tell what the buttons are without the rollover, unless you have learnt them. Both Gmail and G+ rely on background images for buttons too, which leads to quite a bit of mystery meat navigation for me (I prefer to set my own background in my browser.)
I thought the original G+ design was refreshing and original.... but this is... so much better!
The main nav bar on the side reminds me of Unity. And yes I know that many people don't have wide screens and many also despise Unity (for that or other reasons) but this feller here sure likes it.
The first thing I have to do when looking at a demo video like this is mute the music so I can actually look at the usability of the interface without the soundtrack trying to tug at my heartstrings.
I find it hard to tell if this is going to be a step in the right direction or not. There are some red flags that go up for me, but it's obviously hard to judge based on descriptions and videos alone.
One of the biggest UX problems with G+ today is the way it handles notifications and conversations. Every event gets a notification, to the point that I rarely see a Google page without some red number in the top right, usually indicating nothing more interesting than "{random user} has added you to their Circles." The signal-to-noise ratio for the notifications is so poor that I've developed notification blindness. I've subconsciously tuned it out, so if someone actually does have something to say to me, I miss it.
Conversations on G+ are also poorly handled today. Because so many things are handled in the notification overlay, they all have to live in a narrow band on the right that is very hard to process visually. Whether in an overlay or on Plus itself, conversations are difficult to follow with their collapsed views and lack of adequate visual cues for the reader's attention.
I'm intrigued by the "Conversation Cards" that are mentioned on the redesign announcement, but the fact that they don't warrant their own demo video leads me to suspect that Google hasn't considered the usability of their conversations to be a top priority.
One last red flag for me is the customizable "navigation ribbon." It's an adage in UX that when you see an interface that asks the user to customize the layout, it means the designers gave up trying to find the right solution themselves. I'm not saying it can never work, but it is a red flag for me here.
I hope the new G+ is a big step forward. I've been wanting to love Google Plus since it first arrived. At least they're devoted to G+, and they're staying hungry.
I agree that the conversations are difficult. When I click the notification window to see a reply, all I get is that one reply. I find it cumbersome to find the full conversation, to the point where I usually go to that person's page and find the original, eschewing the notifications altogether.
"It's an adage in UX that when you see an interface that asks the user to customize the layout, it means the designers gave up trying to find the right solution themselves."
It's always depends on the app. If you have a tool where you primarily have heavy users e.g. a programmer's IDE - then customization makes sense. But in the case of Google+ I don't see the point either - it just adds extra complexity.
Think a/b testing: if your users start customizing around a particular pattern (particularly in larger numbers), there might be something to learn from that.
Can't you configure what gets delivered as a notification? If you're so popular that people are adding you to circles all the time, can't you just turn those notifications off?
As far as I can tell, you can customize email and phone notifications, but you can't customize the notifications that appear under the red alert number on Google web pages. (I might be missing something.)
There's a "Who can send you notifications?" section on the settings page which allows you to configure who can send you notifications that trigger the red alert.
Notifications are pretty easily turned down. I only see notifications for things I'm tagged in, or when I've replied to a post previously. Maybe I'm just unpopular but I don't find that I'm being overwhelmed with notifications.
The navigation ribbon reminds me of the OSX dock in how it works. I don't think they gave up on the right solution, but rather the right solution is to allow people to decide what's important to them.
I hope they will add anchor with target to images (and content posts in general, I guess). You can't middle click to open image in background and you can't do anything at all with javascript disabled. I really, really hate that (the former). Especially because they change the cursor on hover which makes you think it's an clickable anchor.
Double middle-click used to work (seriously, what?) but it doesn't for some time now.
192 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 257 ms ] threadBut despite all of that. Something is missing, and i just cant quite put my finger on it.
Of course, this could all be made up for if they had good email notifications, which they don't. I have a lot of people I follow on G+ to make up for the lack of people I know using it. With that, conversations from my real friends get lost. I'd love to have email notifications based on which circle someone is in, and have email notifications for everything my friends post.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070723/
(not sure if you were being sarcastic)
It is missing "Google". For me Google means plain flat interfaces to best-of-breed tools (search, maps, mail). Many of their new tools (Play, Google +) are trying to resemble an iPad app. That's not Google's DNA, maybe. (Only maybe, because Chrome is the one tool they made that have this sexy look while keeping, for me, the pure Google DNA.)
In fact, I think Google may, one day, want give up doing business things. Look, they have plenty of ad money coming in the safe for years. I won't say they don't deserve it but instead of paying very clever people trying to beat Facebook, trying to have a better ad model, scratching their head on how to place an icon on the left (or right? or top?) with which gradient to have the "best" interaction, or even trying to make AR glasses, they could just give up on these childish tasks and just become the real New University of the 21st.
Ok, it is off-topic, but think about it: so many great brains, with enough money to pay them. They could be teaching everyone many fields of Science, and beyond, for free. They could scratch their head on how to get more food for less water, and write about it. Each Googler would have to publish one thing every week, on their channel of choice. A central feed would list them. Free access to knowledge. That, would be grand. Nearly as grand as Wikipedia...
I'd like to see more confidence shown by social networks. Who's forging ahead when they're all chasing each other's tails?
I think the piece that's missing is integration from other third party services - I would use my google+ account a lot more if I could post to it from apps I use often like twitter, instagram etc. There's always share to twitter in almost every app, which makes it easy. But to share anything to google+ i always have to go all the way to their site, which isn't worth it since many of my friends don't use it anyway.
IBM didn't lose out to an "operating system," if anything, it was Microsoft that made them capable of competing in the personal computer space.
Google+ is not having trouble gaining traction because they don't have enough features.
I get that you're trying to make a salient point about not underestimating new products, but it's not really cohesive. The fact that Microsoft and Google have succeeded with products in the past doesn't lead automatically to the conclusion that G+ is going to succeed.
Google+ could be a success, or it could wither and die. For any positive example you cite, you could equally cite things like Microsoft BOB, the Zune, Apple Newton, OS/2, WebOS, Maemo, Sega Dreamcast, etc.
There's far more to success than buckets of cash, innovation for the sake of innovation, or yard-long feature lists. I hope G+ continues to improve, but its success is not a foregone conclusion.
Yea, I discussed OS/2 before. The JDA was not particularly good, but the alternative MS chose was a lot worse, and that was MS's fault. See my username for my other posts discussing this matter.
[1] http://code.google.com/p/google-plus-platform/issues/detail?...
I always wondered why the Google+ team didn't implement that from the get go but after reading that, that's probably the biggest reason as to why they haven't.
https://plus.google.com/107117483540235115863/posts/FXaGHpa1...
It's a not very thinly-veiled shot at frictionless sharing and the like.
Having seen the hellhole my Facebook stream has become (while I've tried hard, it's almost impossible not to end up with unintended consequences for Apps and such), I'm on Vic's side.
Me either, but - IMO - the answer to this isn't to leave out the "write API," but rather the answer is to give users better filters and the ability to define their stream to meet their own desires. Of course doing so with a simple and intuitive UI is the tricky part, but hey... those G+ engineers make a lot of money, they should be able to come up with something, no?
no! :)
Probably the hardest thing in social media is noise filtering via a UI (it's hard for Google, it's hard for Facebook, it's just a hard problem).
For my own (app) selfish reasons, I'd like to see a write api for comments first as that doesn't cause issues on the same scale as writing posts to the stream. Could be a nice place to start.
Ad hoc groupings of people in your Lists and ad hoc set operations on your current groups (school intersection friends, union of all groups filtered where profession = X or Y, etc.) is something a write api would let a budding entrepreneur develop an app around and potentially make a lot of money.
Logically you might think so, but noise is not always noise, sometimes it's what you're interested in reading about, some days it isn't. Spam, however, is always spam.
Google+ have tried to solve this "noise" problem through the ui with a "volume" slider. But it's like fine tuning a recording desk if you have to do that to 50 circles to get the mix just right.
I'm just not sure it's solvable through the UI and that we may have to be quite harsh on what "noise" we let through and rely on "if it's important enough, it will find me". There's just too much data to consume otherwise.
The problem is, that's not even the right approach. It's built on a faulty assumption - that "who" is the sole determinant of whether or not I'm interested in something. That's not even close to true, unfortunately. I have plenty of social-network connections for whom I value their posts on certain topics and have less-than-zero interest in what they have to say about other things. For example:
"I follow Bob, and I want to see Bob's posts on technical topics, but NOT Bob's posts on religion."
Or more generally:
"I follow all these people, but regardless of who posts what, I never want to see pictures of cats."
I'm just not sure it's solvable through the UI and that we may have to be quite harsh on what "noise" we let through and rely on "if it's important enough, it will find me". There's just too much data to consume otherwise.
I don't know, I think a solution that was 80% effective would be incredibly valuable. I don't see this as something that's "all or nothing."
And my personal take is that, in the case of G+, the Circles thing is a good start, but they need a way to specify "excludes." Whether those excludes should be explicitly defined by the user, or whether they can use machine learning to figure out what I don't want to see is an open question, granted. But I'd take some UI for specifying "exclude this topic" (while acknowledging there is some inherent fuzziness in this) in the meantime.
Spam is not always spam. There is a subset of spam that are obvious spams such as ones that tries to sell you viagra. Outside of that, there are mails that are harder to classify since different people will respond differently to them. It might seem like that's just me being pedantic but the result is that user end up with mail they do not want to receive, and mark it as spam. This is similar to how I respond to news feeds except I dont have an easy "mark as spam" button without blocking that person forever.
G+ should implement some sort of rating system to rank items that I liked and push those ones similar to it higher on the feed.
Different people might have different opinions about what is and is not spam, but one person will be fairly consistent about it. For example, it doesn't matter much what mood I'm in - I'll almost always classify the same things as spam. But the same cannot be said of classifying things as "interesting" or "not interesting".
Your idea about a preferential ranking system would probably be a good way to go. Definitely better than trying to train a strictly go/no-go filter to recognize "interesting". The way Google+ posts seem to jump around every time I open the page (with no obvious correlation with things like number of comments or +1's), I actually wouldn't be surprised if they are already doing something like that.
This is all just part of the master plan. If/When Facebook implodes, there is already a place set up for everyone to go. Google has the staying power to weather a long lull in usership; there are other properties to support them. Facebook has 1 angle and history shows that to be a dangerous position--one bad decision can bring the whole thing crashing down a-la Digg.
I'm surprised no one seems to see this.
What does it take for someone to switch to another social network? Actually quite a bit. One, I want my friends to be there too. That alone is pretty difficult, and a common complaint with G+.
But I think the real roadblock is probably photos. People love their photos. Can you imagine the work some people would have to do just to move that all to a new network? Some people I know have thousands of photos of themselves, and have posted thousands of photos. That is no small task. It helps keep people tied to Facebook, in my opinion.
Certainly I think Facebook could be usurped, but I don't think it's trivial and it is probably going to require some competitor finding a good way to help someone move their social life (i.e. photos and friends) trivially.
I wouldn't be surprised if the EU would introduce laws for that at one point. Also, it would be cool if a social news site could parse the ZIP dump of your data you can request from FB.
I think it would be very difficult for it to happen any other way. Indeed, the points you make reinforce this idea.
Apparently, NoScript disables local storage in such a way that even testing for it (using if(window.localStorage)) throws a NS_ERROR_DOM_SECURITY_ERR and terminates the script. This is obviously problematic, and seems a bug in NS instead of Blogspot, although it can be a deliberate decision by the NoScript devs, I don't know.
Following the instructions in the NoScript forums[1] works by making it return "null" instead of an error, thus letting the script run.
I'd still prefer if Blogspot didn't need Javascript to display a simple post, but alas, the trend seems to be unstoppable.
[1]: http://forums.informaction.com/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=5208
You're making just the exact same mistake my comment referred to. The 'joke' is that it's just Google employees, but guess what? Reality doesn't mirror that. My circles are full of people who aren't Google employees. If yours are, then either you work at Google or you have a weird selection of friends and associates.
If you have proof that the 170million odd members are predominantly Google employees (which seems unlikely, unless they've spent their 20% time developing AI to be used as social networking bots), then I'll be pleased to see it.
The biggest barrier for me is the inability to login in with whatever I want and then hook in whatever networks I want.
http://facebook.com (Lucida Grande is a fab choice)
http://readability.com - one of the key things this app changes is typography.
Check out default typography on thesis theme - http://64notes.com/thesis
Examples of bad typography:
google groups, Google Plus
http://wierd.com
I've many more if you want.
[1] http://www.google.com/intl/en/+/learnmore/
The main nav bar on the side reminds me of Unity. And yes I know that many people don't have wide screens and many also despise Unity (for that or other reasons) but this feller here sure likes it.
I find it hard to tell if this is going to be a step in the right direction or not. There are some red flags that go up for me, but it's obviously hard to judge based on descriptions and videos alone.
One of the biggest UX problems with G+ today is the way it handles notifications and conversations. Every event gets a notification, to the point that I rarely see a Google page without some red number in the top right, usually indicating nothing more interesting than "{random user} has added you to their Circles." The signal-to-noise ratio for the notifications is so poor that I've developed notification blindness. I've subconsciously tuned it out, so if someone actually does have something to say to me, I miss it.
Conversations on G+ are also poorly handled today. Because so many things are handled in the notification overlay, they all have to live in a narrow band on the right that is very hard to process visually. Whether in an overlay or on Plus itself, conversations are difficult to follow with their collapsed views and lack of adequate visual cues for the reader's attention.
I'm intrigued by the "Conversation Cards" that are mentioned on the redesign announcement, but the fact that they don't warrant their own demo video leads me to suspect that Google hasn't considered the usability of their conversations to be a top priority.
One last red flag for me is the customizable "navigation ribbon." It's an adage in UX that when you see an interface that asks the user to customize the layout, it means the designers gave up trying to find the right solution themselves. I'm not saying it can never work, but it is a red flag for me here.
I hope the new G+ is a big step forward. I've been wanting to love Google Plus since it first arrived. At least they're devoted to G+, and they're staying hungry.
It's always depends on the app. If you have a tool where you primarily have heavy users e.g. a programmer's IDE - then customization makes sense. But in the case of Google+ I don't see the point either - it just adds extra complexity.
I ended up deleting my Google+ account because that was the only way to avoid this constant badge spam.
The navigation ribbon reminds me of the OSX dock in how it works. I don't think they gave up on the right solution, but rather the right solution is to allow people to decide what's important to them.
I hope they will add anchor with target to images (and content posts in general, I guess). You can't middle click to open image in background and you can't do anything at all with javascript disabled. I really, really hate that (the former). Especially because they change the cursor on hover which makes you think it's an clickable anchor.
Double middle-click used to work (seriously, what?) but it doesn't for some time now.