Stunning iPhone app of the new Google

Vic Gundotra has been running engineering teams at Google since 2006 but he's never been more bullish about what Google is building than he is today and there's one simple reason: Design. "We care more about design than we ever have in our history," Gundotra said the day after his pet project, Google+, launched a groundbreaking new redesign for its iPhone app. The new app design is a stunning departure from the previous Google+ app and from the Google+ site interface itself. Released on May 9, it turns the act of scanning social media updates into a highly visual experience by combining a slick rendering of your avatar with the signature image of whatever you're posting and then overlaying the first two lines of your text. The effect is quite appealing, and addicting. I immediately found myself spending a lot more time in the app. In fact, within the first 24 hours I found myself going to the Google+ app before opening my Twitter app just because it's a lot more pleasant to flip through. That's never happened before. Twitter has long been my social network of choice, and even more so on mobile. I was so struck by this that I got in touch with Google+ chief Gundotra to ask him if this little app was as really as significant to him and Google as it appeared it was to me. "This redesign was a very, very big deal for us," he said. He also confirmed that the data from the first 24 hours showed the same experience that I had: Users were spending a lot more time in the app. For Gundotra and his team the goal with the new smartphone app was simple: Make sharing less intimidating and more attractive. "Sharing is one of the most stressful things people do," Gundotra said, referring to the fact that when sharing, most people worry about whether anyone will notice and what they will say if they do notice. "When they share, they want to be really proud of what they share," he said. "So we asked ourselves, 'How can we put them in the best light possible?' We want to make you look good when you share." To accomplish that, Gundotra's team completely blew up their existing mobile app -- which had debuted with the launch of Google+ last summer -- and started over. They wanted to come up with something that truly took advantage of the strengths of today's smartphones. "We don't believe mobile is a small version of the desktop," said Gundotra. "We are optimizing the experience for the device... The intimacy of touch allows us to do things you wouldn't do on the desktop." As a result, the Google+ design team broke away from the straight reader app like social competitors Twitter and Facebook have. That format works for Twitter because of the 140-character limit, which means readers can quickly scan lots of updates to stay on top of what's happening in the world. But, Facebook and Google+ have no character limit and so posts are longer and sharing photos is a lot more common. The result is a mobile experience that's clunky to navigate and feels like a crippled subset of the desktop experience. That's why Google+ decided to change the game and go visual. The result is a social app that is a lot closer to Flipboard or Pinterest than the Twitter or Facebook apps. It feels more like a visual bookmarking or photo app, and it works because the lion's share of online articles now include a big horizontal image that ends up serving as a thumbnail when shared on social services and in various apps. And, even when there is no text, Google+ makes the update look good with some nice font smoothing and scaling. All in all, I actually prefer using the Google+ mobile app to the desktop browser experience, which is another first for me.