nickbaum.com

I was the Product Manager for Google Reader's 2006 redesign, and worked at Google until January 2011. Given the controversy around the latest redesign, I wanted to share a couple of thoughts.

The new design

Yes, there are problems with the new design. The header takes up too much space, the navigation blends in with the content, the subscribe button is too prominent, and so forth.

But this is a company-wide redesign. Pushing such a major change out across all Google products is incredibly difficult, especially given how decentralized the culture is. They are choosing to push out the design quickly and to polish the rough edges afterwards.

And polish they will. Many of the same criticisms were raised when Gmail announced it's redesign, and they are already addressing several of them. I expect we will see similar improvements in Google Reader in the coming weeks.

Whether you like it or not, I think it's exciting that Google is taking bold steps with their visual design. Rather than decrying the change, why don't we focus on suggesting improvements?

The sharing features

The second big change is the removal of Google Reader's sharing features. As Mihai chronicles, social sharing was part of Google Reader from the very start. As interest in social sharing grew within Google, Reader became the testing ground for new sharing models.

However, this role is no longer necessary. Google is investing a ton of effort into Google+, and in the long run Google Reader will benefit from adopting the same sharing features. Could the transition have been handled smoother? Sure, but I suspect the engineering work required outweighed the benefits.

At the end of the day, I'm excited to see the team focus on new challenges.

The future

In the last few months, there's been a real burst of innovation in the reading space. Instapaper and Spool offer an uncluttered reading experience that's perfect on mobile. Flipboard and Pulse use the iPad for gorgeous, magazine-like layouts. Percolate and Storify are experimenting with new ways to aggregate and share content. And of course, Twitter and Facebook provide a great way to bootstrap content (something Reader is weak on). There's a very real opportunity to expose millions of users to a better reading experience.

Google Reader has always been a scrappy, understaffed team (it's hard for any product to be measured against Gmail). In these days of cutting products left and right, it remains to be seen whether Larry will give it a chance to aim big. If not, I look forward to a great startup taking over the title of best reader on the planet.