Recently, I’ve begun messing about with Google Profiles. It’s a different take on the whole social. It’s very clean and simple, yet it’s far too easy to leave it empty and unused. I feel that far too much is left to the user to add information, and is not interactive enough – more as a shop front with which to view people.
Instead, I was thinking that as people already use Google services, Google profiles could be an aggregator which pulls of all the many Google services people are already actively using. Sort of as a central home for all their activity.
One of the design oddities of the current profile style is the massive empty space underneath the profile picture and forcing the user to go back to ‘About’ each time they want to see their other links. To combat this, I feel that an automatically generated list of tabs of all the Google services a user actively uses is better placed underneath the profile picture. These tabs lead the user to a summary preview of the activity related to the service, with a link to the full respective site.
First tab: Feed
Something which I think Facebook does really well, is push people towards a feed which aggregates friends’ activity shared with the user. This is activity such as the albums they have shared with you or YouTube videos etc. I think Google has an amazing plethora of services which people already use and love, but I just feel that it’s too hidden and disjointed. Having a feed on the profiles page would pull together all their friends’ activity on the existing Google services.
For privacy’s sake, something which I think Google Profiles does a great job of advertising already, a little padlock symbol (editable) below the ‘edit profile’ button sits there to let the user know that this page is private view only, only the user can see this. The user can comment on the activity in question below the information, as with Facebook.
Buzz
One of the other things which has confused me over the years, is the placement of Google Buzz inside Gmail. I don’t feel it works. People access their Gmail for their mail. Buzz works best in an environment where people are actively seeking to broadcast to a wide audience.
Ideally, I’d like to see a Google Profiles which not only automatically pulls content from services already being used (with high privacy as the automatic setting), but one which acts as a gateway to all the other Google services, one that is interactive and acts as a world voice to the user, not just a shop front.