Month: July 2011

–Steve Tengler is Altia’s User Experience Director. This post is part of a series where he reviews Google’s new social network, “Google Plus”. This is the fourth and final installment.Click here for part 1, part 2, or part 3—

One of the Olympic Twins Knew It

In the movie, there’s a debate amongst the three Harvard students about when to sue Zuckerberg since they supposedly approached Mark with their intellectual property as a request to code their brainstormed website. As delineated in multiple scenes, one of the Winklevoss twins (sarcastically referred to as “Winklevi”) wanted to shutdown The Facebook immediately since the early bird gets the worm, and the greater momentum attained by the earlier website, the harder it would be to overcome. Eventually, during deposition proceedings, Zuckerberg’s character states, “If they had invented Facebook … well, they would’ve invented Facebook.” Those scenes were all I could imagine while examining Google+ — they didn’t invent Facebook, and their 10 million users are a far cry from 750 million users who, according to Facebook’s site, spend 700 billion combined minutes per month on Facebook. The momentum created by Facebook is real, so real that the French government has recently banned their hyperlinks from French websites to give other start-ups a chance.  (Author’s note — Obviously the French didn’t go to Harvard!) According to Facebook, 50% of all users log-in in a given day with a third of the users having a Facebook app on their mobile device. Moving that inertia shall be a Herculean effort for Google – and anyone else who attempts to reinvent this social networking wheel.

Perception is Everything

READ MORE >>

–Steve Tengler is Altia’s User Experience Director. This post is part three of a series where he reviews Google’s new social network, “Google Plus”. Click here for Part 1. And here for part 2–

(HANGOUTS CONTINUED)

Then after more blood, sweat and tears, I finally get it installed, and I’m unable to find the feature. Why? They violated a principle within usability called “Location Convention” (or “Expected Location”), i.e. the pre-conceived notion a control should be clustered with other like controls or in a traditional location (see http://www.usabilityfirst.com/glossary/convention/). The Hangout button was in a left-hand column squeezed between other unrelated features, whereas I was looking in the traditional web locations: top or left-hand menus. It literally took ten minutes and a co-worker’s assistance to find it. C’mon Google – if I can’t get off the start line, I’m not running the race. Despite your dominance in other areas, you should realize that making the early engagement easy is critical.

READ MORE >>

–Steve Tengler is Altia’s User Experience Director. This post is part two of a series where he reviews Google’s new social network, “Google Plus”. Click here for Part 1.—

STREAMS

This feature is associated with Circles.  Though not touted as highly by either the reviewers or Google+, in my expert-yet-humble opinion, this may be the best usability improvement amongst the new features. Streams allows you to use your pre-defined circles to separate the wheat from the chaff (*a metaphor I rarely use since I’m allergic to wheat J) – quickly filtering posts for only one Circle. For instance, you have less than a minute between activities and wish to quickly read any updates from your family. Boom! You click on one circle and you’re seeing only familial info.

READ MORE >>

–Steve Tengler is Altia’s User Experience Director. This post is part of a series where he reviews Google’s new social network, “Google Plus”. This is part one of the series.–

My wife is an avid reader — with a capital “A”. I, on the other hand, love an engaging movie. Ironically the most recent one I’ve seen is “The Social Network” (2010). In case you’ve lived in a cave the last year, the film provided some insight into the founding of Facebook and, in essence, made Mark Zuckerberg (CEO and founder) look brilliant, thieving and semi-heartless. But if you delve one level deeper than the personal attacks, you will find some lessons in that film, which would have been valuable for Google as they launched their newest competitor in the genre of social networking: “Google+.” Some of these lessons were heeded; some were not.

If you’ve read any of the techie blogs, most investigators think Google+ is the best thing since the iPad, but I’m not sure five years from now it’ll be anywhere beyond Buzz and Wave (Google’s two previous forays into the Land of Online Chatter) because of some of those missed cinematic lessons.

Make It User-Friendly Rather Than Sexy
READ MORE >>