Perhaps the user experience is mostly there, but I would not describe it as fantastic.
For me the pain starts when you click in the "share what's new box". It's the first, most basic operation and it's bad.
For a start, I click on the left hand side of the screen the whole card jumps to the center of the screen. (at about 15 fps!) Why? Why does it move?
Not only am I forced to shift my attention from where I clicked, but everything on the screen reflows drawing my attention all over the screen.
Not only that, the icons all change size and shape, and a bunch of extra stuff is added. If you wanted a completely different dialog box, how about just a button that says "new post"
Next up lets have a look at "People I may know" box on the right side of the screen. I see a friend, and next to his icon is a button that says "Add". When I try to move my mouse over to click it, it's hidden behind a popup window that "rolls" into place (badly) and I have to check boxes to put them in specific circles.
Sure, as a developer I can see that this is an optimization of a two step process, but it breaking some basic rules about what a button is. To me its jarring and clunky. Is just weird.
I dont know what would be better, but how about some "circle" icons that I could drag my friends face onto? Too weird? How about a drop down at the top of the card that dictates what circle a new friend goes into.
I could go on and on and if anybody at Google is interested I will!
I'm not sure this makes sense for everyone. There are so many different uses for photos/social, that I don't think there's any single way that `makes sense`. All services have a slightly different way of sharing, but I'd say there are some specific themes here:
- photos as messages (like instagram)
- photos as art (like old flickr)
- photos as galleries (g+, new flickr)
- photos as... memories? current events? sharable stuff? (like facebook, twitter)
I think galleries are the ones that make the least sense with social. People share galleries with family / friends - many of who aren't even on the same platform and don't want to be.
They make very much sense with social as long as social doesn't have to mean "share publicly".
There are photos on G+ that I'd like to show my family. This is "public" from G+'s point of view, because I'm not going to make them log into G+.
Nothing goes wrong if other people see these photos too; however, I don't want people who have me in their G+ circles to get notified that I'm now "sharing" these photos that they have no interest in, and I don't want some boring photos to represent me on my "feed".
This use case worked on Picasa, but G+ broke it.
Right now I find the extremely concealed download link and e-mail them. This is not how a photo product should work.
What I meant isn't that any product gets it right ATM but rather that there isn't a good technical or, I guess, social reason for why galleries couldn't be a killer social feature. It seem there are a few economic/marketshare etc reasons though.
What's most frustrating for me with G+ and multimedia in general is that it keeps getting in my way.
When I'm looking for long-form text, I keep getting images.
When I'm looking for images, I keep getting long-form text.
Then there's video.
If I want to look at images I can go to a site that has images -- say, Imgur -- and browse those mindlessly. Or look at a curated set (say one of the subreddits, or an Imgur category). Imgur's even got a pretty decent image search.
Yes, if I had family and I wanted to specifically share certain images with them and all that, then G+ would be pretty cool. But quite honestly, the thought of using a third-party platform like that weirds me out and bothers me. I never cared for the "share everything personal out in public" mode, or even "on someoone's third-party service".
That said: image sharing is absolutely a killer social app, simply because the tools for users to do this themselves suck so badly (though this is increasingly less the case).
Add to all that: images and G+ are a pain in the ass. I cannot create a post with inline images. Creating an uploading albums is a pain (again, Imgur is hugely better at this). It does have autoawesome, which can create cool effects, but that's not something to pin a total system off of. There's copious free storage, which is cool, yes (and in general the underlying tech of Google / G+ has been both robust and exceptionally reliable).
But ... "fantastic user experience"? Please! From client bloat (even Yonatan complains) to ideosyncratic Markdown (dittos) to lost drafts (dittos) to hard-to-read small and low-contrast fonts and "cards" style presentation of long-form texts, it simply makes no sense. Imgur, reddit, and Ello are kicking ass and taking names in multiple categories regards G+.
Yes, it could have been good. But it isn't.
The good?
Notifications. "Subscribe by default" turns out to be pretty good (though there's a lot of stuff I'd prefer to turn off).
Search. Syntax sucks, but everything is indexed, and it's fast. Client bloat means you can't scroll back more than a few screens, but ...
Data liberation. Also useful.
The rest of it? Quite frankly, I'd scrap most of it and start over.
I'm downvoted every time I say so, but combining photos with social MAKES SENSE. There are exactly three things anyone wants to do with photos -- we want to hoard them, we want to organize/enhance them, and we want to share them. G+ addresses the photo question better than anyone else on the market. There are improvements to be made -- starting with deduplication and better integration with GDrive so I don't pay twice for the same storage -- but G+ is a fundamentally excellent idea.
Combining that photo/social experience with the newsfeed aspects of Facebook ALSO makes sense. In the absence of popular adoption, G+ is still a pretty excellent newsfeed if you follow publications with a G+ presence. It's also a fantastic place to tap into the personal musings of Silicon Valley's best and brightest, though tech is admittedly one of the only niches with a presence on G+. Tied in with the fantastic implementation of Circles, it's pretty easy to switch between newsfeeds and share posts with only those I want to see my thoughts.
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That said, G+ HAS failed so far despite technical excellence and fantastic user experience. The operative idea here is "so far"... there's no reason why G+ can't be the network of choice of the next generation, and given the ecosystem benefits, it's hard to imagine digital natives NOT choosing Google products to organize and share their lives.
Horowitz, if you read this, target young women. Give them a place to organize/enhance/share their photos in a safe, private environment. Instagram did this (at least to the extent of enhancing/sharing their photos), and as always, the men followed. Just make it dead simple to dump a disorganized mess of redundant photos into GDrive that will then be automatically sorted, tagged, and enhanced. Suggest Circles based on their frequent contacts in Gmail. Give Hangouts better, more intuitive sticker options and play up the videochat features (which very few people seem to know about). Run ads where young people publish an invitation on G+, split the dinner tab via GWallet, pick up German guys via GTranslate, share their photos in a group post on G+, and track their progress the night before on GMaps.
All the pieces are already in place, they just need one last shove to make life easy for the average user. Nobody wants to deduplicate and sort their photos by date or location. Nobody wants to juggle photos between hard drives or try to figure out how many photos their limited cloud storage can still handle. Just let users dump their photos on an unlimited, subsidized GDrive subscription with full confidence that they'll be sorted, organized, enhanced, and ready to share without any further work on their part.