Overnight Google released a revamped UI on their social network Google+. It’s abundantly clear that Google have made a big investment on designers, an area they’ve been heavily criticised for in the past. The Google+ Update brings a newly designed left hand navigation, along with Google+ Trends and a Facebook-esk chat on the right.
The who interface is amazingly responsive, showing off Google’s focus on engineering which not only shows off great page load times, but element load times. Clicking the ‘Share what’s new’ status update, results in the ability to immediately enter text, it’s a subtle change, but a great UX moment.
Almost every Google+ element can now kick off a Hangout, one of Google+’s unique features that Google are clearly going all in on. Video conferences generated around a piece of content is something that is still largely un-proven, so its strange Google are pushing this so hard, only time will tell if consumers are prepared to participate in these ad-hoc session.
Overall its a great direction for Google+ and now feels much more like a complete product that the initial disjointed implementation. As with all Google product releases and updates, there’s a brand new video to walk users through the new changes.
