I use Google Reader for my RSS feeds. (Yes, I know Twitter killed RSS, and I’m just dragging its corpse around.) In fact, I love it. Between the web interface and Byline for iPhone, I still depend on gReader for a lot of my information consumption.
That aside, Google sucks at designing intelligent and accessible user interfaces. I ran into one such example of suckage tonight.
The User Input
I have twenty-three RSS subscriptions on my gReader right now. That fluctuates as I add feeds I think may be interesting, and get rid of ones that are junk—like the News & Advance’s RSS feed, which often gives me the same stories half a dozen times a day.
Tonight, I wanted to add a new feed to gReader—Dustin Curtis’ site. I wanted to put it in a new folder called “Fun Reading,” because I wanted to try more reading, for, you know, fun.
The Misleading of the User
After adding the feed, it appeared in the feed panel under no folder, so I needed to create my “Fun Reading” folder. Solid enough. Folder time. After clicking on that tiny “Manage subscriptions” in the lower-left panel, I clicked “Folders and Tags,” where my mind intuitively told me to click after reading the menu options at the top.
Here I’m presented with a list of my folders. I can change privacy permissions and I can delete folders. Yep. That’s about it. Oh, I can partake in some sharing options with that annoying Your shared items folder. But I cannot create a folder from here. Why not?
Because, silly user, to create a folder you have to go to Subscriptions, click any of the drop-down boxes in the list of subscriptions, and choose the “New folder…” option. That’s how you add a folder—tucked away in a spot most people probably don’t look for first.
The Deceived Asks for Penance
It’s not a severe problem, and one that probably hasn’t come up a terrible lot, but gReader’s interface is relatively simple enough that something so simple shouldn’t be hidden like it is. I’m not going to stop using gReader (even if this corpse-of-an-information-spreader continues to rot while Twitter blossoms more), but little things like fixing this folder issue would be a nice and sweet gesture for us imbecilic users.
Fix it, Google.
Shane, I too really like gReader to quickly scan news sources. I may not have fully understood your complaint, but there is an easier way to move a feed to a folder or even to create a new folder. Simply select the feed, at the top of the feed click on “Feed settings…” drop down and you can select the folder where you want to put the feed or create a new folder for that feed.
Thx, for your post on Safari/Microformats!
Ryan
Thanks for that tidbit, Ryan. I never really paid attention to that option up there. Guess I should inspect it a little better next time.
There’s a Firefox plugin called ‘Google Redesigned’ that cleans up the interface for Gmail, GReader, and GCal. I’ve found it helps.
Andrew, I’m aware of Google Redesigned plugin for Firefox, but I use Safari for 90% of my browsing. I did use FF 3.5 before Safari 4, but I’ve since switched.
30 minutes later since I typed the above, I’ve set up Google Reader in Mozilla’s Prism and enabled the Google Redesigned plugin. Now I have gReader as its own app and looking much sharper. Thanks for the kind reminder.