The response to the new iGoogle features that were released last week has been mixed at best, with a fair amount of funny, over the top flaming going on.
“ITS FUCKING TERRIBLE. 99.8% of the people on the “test phase” VEHEMENTLY agreed that all the changes are unwelcome. Google politely responded by saying “fuck you we’re doing it anyway, and we wont let you change it back.”
Um, nice stat. Sounds a bit dubious. Lifehacker polled over 4000 users, who gave the new features an overall 42% positive /58% negative rating. Users have responded to the changes with lots of angry threads, and have even expressed their disapproval by commenting on random gadget pages that obviously have nothing to do with the redesign. Such anger! Fortunately at least one group of users has started a thread dedicated to constructive criticism. Comments boil down to the following (according to these users):
- Left hand nav bar takes up too much space
- The “+” button next to stories in RSS feeds should be returned
- Drag and dropping gadgets from one tab to another should be returned
- Switching from canvas to dashboard mode is actually harder than switching between tabs in Firefox
- “Back” button doesn’t work to move between dashboard and canvas mode
- Gmail gadget doesn’t go straight through to Gmail as it used to
- Having full message previews in Gmail and potentially introducing chat causes problems for people at work who are restricted from using these features
- All new features should have been optional rather than mandatory
- Left hand nav link text can be confusing if user has similar gadgets
- Left hand nav reduces space and thus pushes more content below the fold, undermining the “at a glance” functionality of the product
- No one was notified of the upcoming changes
- There are cross-browser compatibility issues with the new design
- Some gadgets are now broken
Looks like the iGoogle team has their work cut out for them. That said, does anyone remember the backlash when the new Facebook design came out, or the activity stream? That makes me think most of this will blow over fairly quickly.
