Google+ and Facebook with New Features

Google+ and Facebook are trying to make their design more visually appealing and user friendly. Recently they've introduced new features which give additional control to their users. Facebook’s new Timeline layout looks like a personal blog and lets people share and highlight their most memorable posts, photos and life events on their profile page.

Unlike other changes that Facebook has rolled out in the past, the changes that arrived with Timeline offer a feeling that Facebook really took the time to think about how users might want their pages to look, instead of how Facebook wanted them to look.

Google+ also made some improvements to its user interface. he Notifications system up in the top right corner was already pretty user friendly, but it’s the little tweaks here and there makes it that much better. You could already read and post comments, add people to circles and +1 something without leaving the stream. Now, you get a ”sneak preview” of the content behind that notification within the notifications window, eliminating a click.

The new look to the Photo Lightbox is focused around the user experience, too. It not only makes the image itself the center of the page but also introduces an in-experience way to tag people with a circle - of course - around faces. In a group photo, it’s a pretty effective way to highlighting who’s who, instead of relying on a name to pop up when you hover over a large area of a picture.

Finally, a new slider bar to adjust the frequency of a stream in the daily news feed is pretty nice in the sense that it gives users more control over the type of content that dominates the main feed.