Comments on: New Google Reader: Rollovertastic

By: Harry Brignull

Harry Brignull — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 06:08:01 +0000

@Hanford, I must admit, I’ve got used to the new Reader UI now. Your comments are spot-on, though…

By: Hanford

Hanford — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 00:22:49 +0000

Since I started using Reader, I always suspected that the UX team got a fresh twenty dollar bill for every time they incorporated bold fonts into the design. I wonder if they’ve changed that to rollovers.

Seriously though; I didn’t like the new UI when they rolled it out, but I quickly adjusted to it.

But I still hate how they use bold to denote “unread stuff”. When there’s a lot of unread stuff on the screen (which in my reader is all the time) it feels amateurish; like someone forgot a closing tag.

Or it feels like it was designed for Windows 3.1 :) http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/vpc/images/win311.gif

(Full disclosure: I used to work for Google)

By: Julian

Julian — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 06:51:27 +0000

I would also say that something is too bright. I mean, I like it clean and simple, but this looks just bleached somehow.

By: Google Reader update | Wizard's Blog

Google Reader update | Wizard's Blog — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 22:36:21 +0000

[…] New Google Reader: Rollovertastic […]

By: Jimmy Gunawan

Jimmy Gunawan — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 11:23:12 +0000

The yellow rollover highlight is a bit slow to react, there is a noticable delay.

By: Aaron

Aaron — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 08:56:35 +0000

The rollover effects are not what I would complain about. I think they're fairly clean / elegant: they only appear when you move over interactive elements, and they show you the extent of the interactive element so you don't feel you have to aim exactly for the left-pointing arrow to hide the side bar, or the subscription name's text to switch to it.

My gripe is the brightness. I'm not even sure exactly what it is, yet, but something about the overall appearance feels too bright. Or perhaps too high-contrast. It might be the all the bold subscription names on the left side (I leave a lot unread) in stark black and white.

By: Jen

Jen — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 05:17:35 +0000

It definitely needs some fine tuning. The typography, layout and spatial grouping is a bit developery. Within a week you'll be able to get a greasemonkey theme for it anyway…

By: Mihai Parparita

Mihai Parparita — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 04:19:19 +0000

Sorry to hear that Reader's new UI isn't to your liking. For what it's worth, while the yellow hover is intentional, the red "New" blinking in and out is a bug that we should be fixing soon.

Mihai Parparita
Google Reader Engineer