The new Docs UI
Google announced a redesign of the main Google Docs dashboard that gives you quick access to all of your documents and spreadsheets that you have on Google Docs. In many ways this new interface is much better than the old one – except that Google has seemingly taken tags, or labels (see this post for more about labels), and turned them into folders?
I am of the firm belief that tagging is far superior to folders. Even though in Google’s use on Docs they seem to be handled as being one in the same, it is that the interface leads users to adding folders instead of using tags. What does this mean? This means that people will begin to constrain their tagging into a rigid set of folders instead of having the freedom that tagging offers. I think we’ll start to see folder structures like Business, Personal, Family, etc. begin to emerge where before we may have seen tags that were much more miscellaneous than that.
In my opinion this is a leap backwards. Or, perhaps – one step forward and two steps back.
11 Comments
I honestly don’t think it’s that bad. The majority of the interface is much welcomed in my opinion as I’ve been frustrated in the past with it lacking quite a bit of the new interface.
You criticize it for using “folders” now. I don’t think this is such a bad thing either. I love tags and all but tags arent always the be all end all solution. Sometimes folders work great. When I create documents on my desktop I’m constrained to folders and forever that has worked out perfectly well. Text documents are normally focused and, at least for me, most of the time work great for me. I can’t say that folders work best for a great deal of types of information – because they dont – but for these documents I think they work fine.
Either way, you can still use them however you would like but this change in interface and metaphor helps new users who are used to contstrained desktop systems to use their product and I think it will work for them.
Anyways, time will tell.
Zach: Perhaps I should update this post a little. I want to be very clear. I like the updates, and I do agree with you that for new users – this may make it easier for them to organize their docs. However, I’m not happy that tags became folders. I would have liked to have seen both remain.
I’m with you…i’m not thrilled about this. I don’t like the folder-usage on google reader either. It makes a feed with multiple tags show up in more than one place, which is confusing, and removes the relevance of the tags.
The ability to switch between tags and folders, IMO, is the killer feature. Let the user decide. that way, the people stuck in folders can have their folders and people who “get” tags, can tag.
Alex: Re: Google Reader – that is one of the reasons I do not use it. Well, that and latency (probably not Google’s fault).
Being able to organize documents in folders is great, and I think it was something that Docs was definitely missing. But not being able to tag documents with relevant keywords, that may or may not appear in the document or folder name it is in, is a huge thing to lose.
For instance, I may have a document that refers to you as Alex throughout, and I may put it into a Folder called “Friends” or something. But, when I do a search for Hillman, I’d get 0 results returned. Being able to tag the document with the keyword of ‘Alex Hillman’ would eliminate this problem.
Ugh, I could go on about this stuff forever! Google! Buy Viddler, and make YouTube / Google Video much more valuable, so that I can come work for you and help you not make such mistakes. Call me on Friday, after 6pm, on my iPhone.
Agreed on the tagging – quite annoying.
Can’t seem to get it to work in Omniweb at all? Anyone else have issues with Webkit browsers?
Matt Harwood: One of the many reasons I’ve now switched to Camino is because I’m able to use all of Google’s Web services without running into the issues I do with Safari or Omniweb (or any Webkit powered browser).
Colin: I guess a lot depends on how you use Google Docs and it doesn’t seem to affect me much. We’ll see if I turn around.
Zach: Excellent point. And perhaps Google wasn’t seeing a lot of Docs users that were using tags to begin with, and that is why they are switching to, the much more familiar, folder structure? Perhaps I can find someone at Google that can let me know.
/me looks up Veen’s phone number.
As an aside: I do not believe that either Jeff nor Greg Veen had anything to do with Google Docs – it is just that I don’t have too many contacts inside of Google at the moment – oh, maybe Dustin Diaz? Anyone else have any contacts we could ask to see why they made this switch?
I agree with you on the feature change… Tags are the future and this new folder dealio is a step backward. :\
I agree it’s clunky, but folders have not replaced tags. You can put the same document in multiple folders, just like you could tag them with multiple tags. Try it.