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Google’s UX staff take a vacation, return to horror and destruction

So Google made an RSS reader.

Wait, let me back up: what is it about RSS readers which make people’s frontal lobes turn off?

An RSS reader is a way for people like me to manage our infOCD tendancies by–y’know–aggregating information to reduce the amount of time needed to monitor a wide variety of sources. Your RSS reader is the thumbnail view of your daily web readings.

So why the hell make one which forces you to cycle through each story, one by one? Well? Yeah, I can’t think of a good reason, either. It’s like trying to scan a hundred newspapers through a microscope. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Backwards, even.

I try to keep track of the various postings on Craig’s List SF in the bicycles section. The information for each post on RSS is the title–that’s it. There’s probably a thousand posts a day, and the vast majority of them are crap crappity crap crap. Now Google would have me blipping through each one, one at a time, looking at a single line of text and about 250,000 blank-ass pixels.

What an amazing user experience that would be.

Focus on functionality–from the user’s perspective–instead of buzzword compliance. Bloglines, despite their clunky Web 1.0 look, works. It lets me choose how each feed is displayed. Boing Boing shows the full story, and the BBC and Craig’s List just show the titles. It helps me work, it doesn’t try to wow me with its Web 2.0-y goodness. Not everything needs tags, not everything needs Ajax, and frames can be useful.

RSS readers need to make a visual gestalt of the user’s feeds. They should be able to look at their feeds and know, at a glance, which ones have been updated. They should be able to choose how much of each feed they see, because not all feeds have the same importance. Don’t try to out-think the user; help them think.

So, uh, yeah: a Jabber client and a myopic RSS reader. Google’s supposed to be the future, right? Yikes.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 7th, 2005 at 9:59pm and is filed under Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

7th Oct 2005 9:59pm Web Design
 

3 Responses to “Google’s UX staff take a vacation, return to horror and destruction”

  1. connecting*the*dots Says:
    October 8th, 2005 at 12:04am

    Google Reader: Okay, So Where’s The Magic?

    So I tried out Google Reader today after reading of its demo at the Web 2.0 conference (another event where I refuse to drop $3,000). If Google truly believes that Reader is 2.0 because it has a bunch of superfluous

  2. The Newest Industry Says:
    October 8th, 2005 at 3:00am

    Google Feed Reader: YUCK!

    Ok, I thought I was missing something about the Google Feed Reader. I thought it was clumsy and flashy and mostly usefless for the way I read blogs.

    Chris Selland makes me feel less alone. [here]

    Paul Kedrosky is not amused. [here]

    Brad Hill s…

  3. Google Reader Review: Okay, So Where’s The Magic? at connecting*the*dots Says:
    December 21st, 2005 at 8:27pm

    [...] UPDATE: It looks like at least a few other people agree with this review. I think the rest have imbibed the "forever beta" Kool-Aid. [...]