I really enjoy the design of web version of Google+, except for some little details and recently bleached top bar, it is a great example of Material Design.

On the left side you’ve got a clear navigation drawer that you can collapse. In the bottom right sits a FAB button, which as opposed to its mobile brother doesn’t have broken shadow. Its functionally is doubled by a card on top of the posts stream which I think it’s a good thing here. Why? When you visit a social media site you can have one of two goals — either post something or read other posts. When you’re reading through others’ stories and you want to write your own meanwhile you can still do that by using the FAB. But when you’re there to write something before browsing you probably have to move your mouse through basically the whole screen so the card presents you an easier-to-reach alternative. I accented ‘here’ because the same thing is being done on mobile which doesn’t have the problem of reachability and just makes a small screen more cluttered.

Back to the feed — it’s a really nice looking grid of cards. They adapt the number of columns depending on how wide your screen is (you can turn it off) and look like true Material Design cards, which Google seems to not be able to achieve in it’s more recent redesigns. As a web developer, I always feel impressed and inspired when I see that layout — it’s not easy to achieve something like that on the web.

The background is grey, not white and helps separate the content from the surroundings. The cards themselves provide everything you need — author, collection, content, comments, +1’s and a share button. They also have an indicator of when they were posted that on hover switches to a menu button which reveals a list that isn’t cluttered and presents useful functions.

The integrated image viewer has everything you might want in an image viewer: metadate living in side panel that you can hide, no duplicated elements, working zoom and nice animations make a hugely positive impression. It even reassembles the look of a image viewer that might be very familiar to you — Google Photos. And since uniform design is the best design I love it. I only miss the transition between images from Google Photos but most graphics here, on Google+ aren’t shared in more than one per post so this isn’t something you’ll notice everyday. And it has in-line video playback with all of YouTube’s controls — great!

There are a few things that aren’t so nice, tho:

Firstly, the cards expand on click to show more comments and longer texts, and that’s great but when one card is expanded, the one that was expanded before should collapse automatically, which doesn’t happen. It’s a small detail but if you’re viewing posts with many comments it may quickly clutter you stream.

And secondly: their recent change to move the comments on posts from a button to a short expandable list (which was a good change) also resulted in +1 button moving to the right. It wouldn’t be bad if it wouldn’t go in between the comments and share button when the post is opened in a new tab. It is a bit misguiding as I (and probably more people) got used to expect it on the first position.

Oh, animations, they are so well placed that it makes the whole app look so Material Design-ish. However, they could be smoother, because on mid-range devices they seem to lag, quite heavily.

Another thing that fits the Material Design spirit almost perfectly is the top bar. It adapts it’s colour to match the colour of current section and expands or collapses tab interface. It was even better when it was red, matching the Google+ brand but ehh… Google seems to love the overly-white UI 😩

Colours 😍

The web app scales really well too. On the phone side navigation changes to bottom bar which is one of the most reasonable uses for bottom bar I’ve seen so far. I also really enjoy the fact that it is visible only on home page — it makes it way more expectable and less buggy than e.g. YouTube which keeps the bottom navigation in almost every view. However, on mobile the notification duplicate that isn’t so bothering on desktop is more noticeable here. As is the lack of easy way to enter Collections view. But it’s details such as changing popup menus to full-screen dialogs are what make this a really pleasant experience.

However, I wouldn’t go with only the web app on my phone. Even tho it’s great, it doesn’t provide same performance, reliability and ease of use as it does on desktop. It’s especially unfortunate given how bad the Android app is, more on that in a second.

The search functionality has also improved a lot in recent months. Firstly, they changed annoying behaviour that swapped the page whenever you clicked on search bar to an expanding list of quick suggestions. Then, it also gained advanced search capabilities which can really help you save hours of scrolling when searching for something from the past.

One small detail that just won’t get out of my mind is how broken the Google+ logo in the top right corner looks. It’s out of place, it usually has different shade of grey than buttons next to it, it’s a low resolution JPEG (why not SVG?) and it’s damn not centered vertically! Why?!

Going on you can notice another duplicate feature, which I think isn’t that bad. It’s the notifications button. One lays where it does in every Google product, in the top right corner. It lets you read not only notifications from Google+ but also other services (more specifically one — Google Photos) and also a button in the drawer which leads you to a wiev with only Google+ notifications but also let’s you see the ones you saw earlier and provide much more detail.

Could it be better? Of course! In a perfect world we would see those two views merged together and only the bell in the app bar occupying space. But it’s not perfect and even tho it brings some confusion it isn’t really that bad, even inexperienced users should be able to get over it pretty quickly.

The thing I cannot get over is the lack of Collections section, or more specifically a button to enter it. When Google introduced Discover feature it took the place of Collections in the nav bar. Now if you want to see your collections you need to either find it disguised in Discover or type it in URL bar which is far from convenient.

An experience that gets amazingly annoying when you leave it — because of notifications. Those little beasts can keep you informed and encourage to come back to an app or website… when executed properly… And on Google+ they just aren’t. If you get a notification from the web version of Google+ you have either saw it earlier, unsubscribed from this kind of alerts, it’s late or it’s appearing for another time after you dismissed it just a millisecond ago. And the last one is especially annoying because it will keep reappearing until you open the website! That is enough to block notifications from specific source but if you do you will also probably miss stuff that you care about.

Google+ Settings on the right vs a developer tool on the left

The last thing that needs a redesign is the settings page. It is a weirdly formatted page that just looks bad. You might create something like this for a preview where you need settings to change something on the fly and then remove that page as soon as you stop playing with it — something like the Remixer tool by Material Design team… which has a better UI than the discussed settings page.