Google Plus: Is Responsive Design the Key to a Successful Social Platform?
There has been plenty of talk and pomp surrounding Google Plus, yet despite faster initial growth than Facebook, visits to the site have dwindled in the last few weeks. There could be a number of reasons for this: people prefer to stay with Facebook rather than migrate to a new platform; their friends aren’t there and are all on Facebook; or perhaps Facebook is just the better platform?
Google software engineer Steve Yegge has his own ideas about why Google Plus hasn’t been the success that Google envisioned and intended to share them internally with his colleagues. Unfortunately for him and fortunately for the rest of us, he accidentally published this publicly.
Yegge criticised Google for not understanding platforms and described Google Plus as “a pathetic afterthought.” He compared the platform with Facebook and argued that Google Plus was “a study in short-term thinking, predicted on the incorrect notion that Facebook is successful because they built a great product.”
He argued that this is not the reason Facebook is successful, “Facebook is successful because they built an entire constellation of products by allowing other people to do the work.” A quote from Vice President of Product at Facebook, Christopher Cox, backs this up: “We have a rogue, emergent, generative culture. We show people that when they come to Facebook, they start creating.”
Frog Design, in their critique of Facebook’s design, point out that the company approaches the development of new features and products based on people and their online behaviour, an approach that they have dubbed ‘social design.’ Perhaps this is something that Google Plus has not done so well.
Yegge also argued that the reason Google Plus has been comparatively unsuccessful is that they are trying to predict what people want and deliver it for them. “You can’t do that. Not really. Not reliably.” He says. Although he credited Steve Jobs as being one of those “few people” who had successfully been able to do this, perhaps Facebook are a company who have also been able to achieve this to a certain extent. Both have applied responsive design to their products.
Cox has defined Facebook’s design concept as improving how people build human-to-human, versus human-to-interface, connections online. It is this overall vision and ethos of the company that has aided it in its design and functionality, creating a user experience that is constantly changing and evolving in response to the user’s needs and wants, creating an online social experience specifically tailored for the user.
Yegge decided to remove the post at his own discretion. “I contacted our internal PR folks and asked what to do, and they were also nice and supportive. But they didn’t want me to think that they were even hinting at censoring me – they went out of their way to help me understand that we’re an opinionated company, and not one of the kinds of companies that censors their employees.”
If Google can replicate their ethic of listening to and actively encouraging their employees’ opinions and apply this to their target audience as Facebook has done, basing their site on a responsive design, they’re undoubtedly on to a good thing.