Latest Google+ redesign comes to the mobile Web: Cover photos, larger tap targets, and card-based posts
Google on Tuesday announced a redesign of its Google+ social network for the mobile Web. The revamp is meant to bring the mobile version of Google+ in line with the last redesign of the service.
Context & Ripple Effects
This redesign is the third beat in a year-long mobile push for Google+. In June 2012 Google opened the platform to phones with Android and iOS SDKs and social plugins for the mobile Web, and in December it followed with 18 new features aimed at mobile, photos, events and Hangouts. Today's update closes the loop on the interface side, carrying the card-based layout, cover photos and larger tap targets from the last desktop redesign onto the mobile Web.
The pickup was unusually broad for an interface change — CNET, Engadget, The Verge, Android Police and Pocket-lint all ran the same announcement on the day — which says less about the redesign itself than about how closely the tech press was tracking Google+ product momentum heading into Google I/O week.
First-order effects
- Mobile Web users stop getting a stripped-down fallback: cards, cover photos and bigger tap targets bring the phone experience to parity with the desktop redesign Google already shipped.
- Brands and publishers maintaining Google+ pages get a single visual template across form factors instead of designing separately for the mobile site.
Second-order effects
- Sites that embedded Google+ through the SDKs and social plugins from June 2012 inherit the card aesthetic wherever their pages are viewed on the mobile Web, making design consistency a property of the embed rather than the host site.
- A December feature drop of 18 items followed by a May redesign shows Google sustaining a roughly six-month shipping cadence on Google+ mobile — a pace competing social apps' mobile teams have to answer on their own clients.
Third-order effects
- If the cadence holds, Google+ functions less as a standalone destination and more as a consistent social-and-design layer across Google's properties, with interface parity between desktop and mobile as the visible evidence.
The trend: Google is converging Google+'s desktop and mobile experiences around card-based design, extending the mobile-first platform push it began with its 2012 SDK releases.