Compelling Displays

NE google • Comments (0)

Mar 24

When Google released Buzz last month (thereby inviting a flood of bad press on themselves), it also shifted something on my public Google profile. If you look at my public Google profile here [ http://www.google.com/profiles/jillmwo ], you will see a tab labelled "Buzz". If you click on that tab, you will see all of my shared items that you would previously have seen at http://www.google.com/reader/shared/jillmwo. The display of the content is entirely different and I'm sure the Google engineers would suggest that the more recent design is more efficient while still preserving the value of shared items. The functionality of this Buzz display competes successfully against the functionality and display of Friendfeed.

Entries are truncated so that more fit on a page as one scrolls down. The Buzz display of shared items is more detailed than the same set of items displayed to my subscribers on Friendfeed [ http://friendfeed.com/jillmwo ] but displays less than the full text displayed on the older Google design.

Friendfeed also strips out the images from specific entries; the redesign of my shared items via Buzz leaves them as thumbnails. In the full text view, frequently the graphics would overwhelm the page view.

The avatar photo from my profile appears beside every item in the Buzz stream whereas on Friendfeed and on the older shared items display, my photo appears only at the top of the pages. This facial recognition clue, one hopes, lends credibility to the items I'm sharing when mixed in with content from other human sources.

There seems (to me, at least) to be a better use of white space in the newest interface which gives the page a cleaner look without sacrificing the occasional splash of color in the graphic elements.

Google's interfaces are frequently the reason users return. Why should the information platforms found in libraries frequently be so far behind?