I remember when I was a lad, Google was the world leader in minimalist UI design. Mind blowingly, paradigm shiftingly, amazingly clean, elegant design, where every unnecessary pixel was carefully whittled away using Occam’s own razor, leaving nothing but perfection.
Looking at the new Google Reader, I can only hold my head in my hands and weep. What is going on with all the rollovers? It practically needs an epilepsy warning!
(The short clip above shows the new Google Reader on Chrome 0.4.154)
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
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…
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.
The yellow rollover highlight is a bit slow to react, there is a noticable delay.
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I would also say that something is too bright. I mean, I like it clean and simple, but this looks just bleached somehow.
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)
@Hanford, I must admit, I’ve got used to the new Reader UI now. Your comments are spot-on, though…