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Google's recently re-designed Google Docs & Spreadsheets failed to impress us the way other online office offerings have. But to learn more about the re-design and Google's thinking behind some of the design choices I recently spoke with Ken Norton, Product Manager at Google and Sam Schillace, Engineering Director and cofounder of Writely which Google acquired to create Google Docs & Spreadsheets.
While many of the the quibbles in [our review][2] were small points, they were also shared by many users as evidenced in this [Google Groups post][1].
But rest assured users, Google is listening.
In fact one of the primary critiques from many users was Google's decision to remove the handy "last edited by" function has been restored to its former function.
Here's a transcript of my conversation with Ken Norton and Sam Schillace:
**Wired News**: What brought about the re-design?
**Ken Norton**: We started to realize the limitations of the old user interface -- it was great and helpful when you had eight documents, but suddenly you have a hundred documents and you're collaborating with fifty people and it started to become unwieldy. People started asking for better organizational tools -- the ability to filter documents based on who it was shared with, the ability to organize them into folders.
And that prompted a discussion for us internally because while we felt folders were a familiar organizational metaphor, it was something people were used to, but there were many advantages to tags or labels. One of the biggest advantages of labels or tags was the ability to add multiple tags to each document as opposed to folders that kind of live in one place.
So what we did is introduced folders as the UI metaphor, but kept the advantages of tags behind the scenes. So a document can live in multiple folders, which something you normally don't get with folders.
**WN**: What about some of the other changes?
**Ken Norton**: We also added the ability to organize documents by type, the ability to filter by who they're shared with and we took away some of the behavior of the document list that was confusing to some people... we gave the user a lot more control over how their documents are organized. And most of this was a result of user feedback.
And this certainly isn't a point in the sand.... One of the advantages of web-based software is that we can be very responsive to the feedback that we're getting.
**WN**: Why not have both folders and labels?
We talked about it. I think the reason is to keep the UI simple. As people realize that folders have all the advantages of labels, their reason for wanting them goes away. It'll take a little while for people to understand what's going on, that it still works like labels.
But the advantage for new users who may not be familiar with labels or expecting folders is pretty substantial in this case. Especially in the Google Apps arena with business users may be more familiar with folders to start with.
**WN**: Why was the "last edited" functionality buried in the redesign?
**Sam Schillace**: We just felt that it wasn't as valuable in terms of UI and there's some problems with the way it works that need to get fixed -- if people just view the document, that field gets updated, which is bug in the spec.
But with that particular feature I think we just didn't think it was that useful and we thought it would be better if we took it so we did. And we were wrong. So we put it back.
**WN**: What about the look and feel -- many users have complained that interface lacks the traditional Google minimalism...
**Sam Schillace**: Any time you make a change people complain about it, but this is the result of a lot of UI usability research.... We felt that the UI design need to be stronger and a bit clearer. You can consider it an experiment, nothing is carved in stone, we just wanted it to be a better UI.
Both Sam and Ken also said that they've welcomed user feedback (both positive and negative) so if you've got something to say, [let them know][1].
[1]: http://groups.google.com/group/Suggestions-and-Ideas-Writely/browse_thread/thread/c0d1654371f61ed8/5f7c6db33f088703 "So...how do you like our new Docs list?"
[2]: http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/06/a-dissapointing.html "A Disappointing Redesign For Google Docs And Spreadsheets"
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