The new Blogger GUI (2011) has been in full availability for a week, and we're seeing various questions about it, in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken.
Like all Blogger features, newly launched, it's got flaws and design omissions. However, it's got a few improvements too. Right now, it's available in Draft Blogger, with the familiar Classic GUI available in Production Blogger.
You're under no obligation to start using it immediately. Like all Blogger upgrades though, it will become the production version eventually. Right now, as it's in Draft Blogger, everybody is asked for feedback - and what you report, now, will help Blogger make a better product.
This is the best time for identifying, and reporting problems. If
For more detail about this major step forward in Blogger blogging, see Roberto's Report: The New GUI - Blogger in Draft - An Overview.
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Like all Blogger features, newly launched, it's got flaws and design omissions. However, it's got a few improvements too. Right now, it's available in Draft Blogger, with the familiar Classic GUI available in Production Blogger.
You're under no obligation to start using it immediately. Like all Blogger upgrades though, it will become the production version eventually. Right now, as it's in Draft Blogger, everybody is asked for feedback - and what you report, now, will help Blogger make a better product.
This is the best time for identifying, and reporting problems. If
- You don't at least try the New GUI out, while it is in Draft status.
- Some key detail requiring improvement, that you might observe, goes unobserved and un reported by you.
- The New GUI goes into production unimproved, because you didn't report the improvement needed.
- You later find that the new GUI is not to your liking.
For more detail about this major step forward in Blogger blogging, see Roberto's Report: The New GUI - Blogger in Draft - An Overview.
>> Top
Comments
I agree that it would be good to have users involved in the beta testing phase of software development. Getting free software testers and product reviewers is a great business model. But we are the vehicles for their ads, and it would be nice if they treated us with a little less contempt. It would be nice to know that Blogger actually gave a shit about what we think - and my sense is that they don't. Which is why I read this blog, yeah?
Some of us just want a simple product that works, we have neither the time nor the skill to wrestle with a defective beta product. We just want to blog, we don't want to be unpaid software testers for the largest and most profitable computer giant on the planet.
We used to have an interface that worked very well, with access to the HTML for the advanced students. I'd happily go back to the original, pre-Google, interface which to the best of my knowledge did not have bugs.
Why do they not implement incremental changes, rather than these lurches which leave us puzzled at what we've lost and what doesn't work, and struggling to work out how to do what we've done for years?
My model would be the Google home page which adds functionality from time to time, but has only had one major redesign since it launched, and that was simple enough. Do it well enough and you don't need to completely redesign it every 2 years.
I've no sense that making comments on the Google notice boards makes any difference to what Google does to Blogger. Which again, is why I read this blog.
Where I'd like to get involved is right at the beginning. With a statement of what they were trying to achieve with these improvements. That's where I'd like my voice to be heard, because these beta product roll-outs, just seem like tinkering for the hell of it - the great plague of all websites. Web designers have to keep redesigning websites, because that is all they do. But web users don't seem to be clamouring for a new interface, even when they would like new functionality.
When they still have not fixed the bugs in the last releases why do they feel confident to redesign the interface?
I could go on. But you're not interested, and they're not interested... so what's the point?
I'm still trying to find a list of these 'improvements'. Even now, I haven't found anything in the flashy new UI that is actually new -- at least, nothing useful. Forcing me to follow a blog I don't want to follow, just because Google runs it is not an improvement in my book.