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by yaliceme 4776 days ago
Why do designers keep thinking that splitting a feed into two staggered columns is a good idea? It makes it much harder to skim down a feed to find a particular post, because your eye naturally wants to skim in straight lines, not zig-zag back and forth.

This seems to me like a classic case of designers thinking of visual "prettiness" first and actual utility second.

Facebook did this for a while with Timeline, until they fixed it with the newer Timeline which keeps the posts to one column. It really looks like Google+ is just ape-ing Facebook design, even when the design has implicitly been admitted to have been a bad idea.

I am willing to be persuaded otherwise, though, if someone wants to make the case.

2 comments

Personally, I like it because it limits column width which makes it easier for me to read text.

You actually can switch to a single-column layout in Plus under the "More" menu. It still limits column width, however, and when I've pointed that out to people that complain about multi-column, the response has generally been "but then you have so much wasted space!"

Seems like a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation to me.

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