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.