Will Google Play’s New Image-Centric UI Ruin Users’ Experience?
Google has finally revealed an updated Google Play store which begins rolling out today.
The new Google Play for Android smartphones and tablets features a new interface that is image focused to help users find content faster as well as continuously offer new recommendations when you scroll down.
On top of the screen of your Android smartphone or tablet, you’ll see categories for Apps, Games, Movies and TV, Music, Books and Magazines. Additionally there are more specific categories featured, such as Gangster Movie Classics.
“The new design focuses on bigger images that jump off the page,” Michael Siliski, group product manager for Google Play, posted on Android’s Official Blog. “Similarly themed content is grouped together so you can hone in on a magazine to read or an app to try. As you move down the page, new recommendations continue to appear so there is always more to see and explore. We’ve also simplified purchasing so you can breeze through checkout and get to enjoying your movie rental or other content.”
The new Google Play will roll out to devices with Android 2.2 (a.k.a. Froyo) and higher today, though it will be several weeks before every Android user worldwide has access to the revised marketplace.
Big pictures, bad experience?
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Who wouldn’t want to look at bigger, crisper images of movie posters, book and album covers, and app images? The extra real estate now dedicated to imagery in Google Play certainly improves the aesthetics, but could it ruin the user experience all the same? Bigger images could slow down loading time for Google Play pages, which could result in irrate customers.
But how could images cause slow loading pages? First off, if the images used on an app’s Play page aren’t optimized, or the wrong image files are used, the page could load more slowly. If Google wants to Play to remain speedy, either it takes over the job of figuring out what type of images should be used on apps or album and book covers, or specify what type of image files should be used by developers and app publishers. GIF is ideal for images with few colors like logos, JPEG for images with lots of colors and details like photographs, and PNG is used for high quality transparent images.
But there still may be hope for the nes Google Play, even if load time becomes unbearable.
Siliski mentioned that a new simplified purchasing method will be implemented on the revamped Google Play store. This change will bring Google Play up to par with Amazon’s Appstore for Android, which offers 1-Click payment settings. So even if Google Play users would be bugged with slow loading pages at least they could quickly enjoy their purchases.
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