How to Navigate the new Google+

10:11 PM May 17, 2013

Well people Google did it, they made a major update to the Google+ social media pages. In the post I show you some tips and tricks on how to navigate the new Google+. I’m not a big fan of significant site changes, especially ones of the UX and UI nature. As a somewhat anal and organized person I tend to like to know where things are all the time. My car keys, sun glasses, wallet and just about everything else in my house has a place and purpose. Yup I’m one of those. But Google has actually done quite a good job and everything they’ve changed has been pretty easy to figure out, heck they even simplified things. So I’ve decided to write a quick and short blog post about how to navigate your way around and even show you a few tricks to hidden clicks. See the images below for more.

Tricky Clicks

As you can see by the above image, there’s a few places to click on either side of the navigation that will scroll you up to reveal the entire monstrous image Google seems to like. Overkill in my opinion, but lets see what some people come up with with these large images. In fact, if you’ve seen some really cool ones some creative types have created, please comment and leave me the links.

After you’ve been scrolled up by the page to reveal the huge image, the easiest way to get the image back under control, so you only see a small portion of it, is to select the “Posts” link in the navigation. This will return the page to a more viewable perspective.

Like Facebook, Google+ has a red notifications alert box in the upper right. This is all the activity that others are performing on your page, posts, images or events.

Upper left you have a collapsed navigation panel. To access it all you have to do is roll your mouse over it and it will reveal all the important navigational areas of your Google+ account.

Something cool Google has added is the new view and edit image area. Simply click the huge header image and you’ll get a cleanly designed pop-out with more features.

Google+ Photo Viewer window

Looking at the images above you can see all the actions you can perform inside the image viewer panel. Select the “More” drop down in the upper navigation to reveal more cool features, such as “download photo”

Next comes the really part, the “Edit” photo link. Click this and you get a full host of cool image editing options to play with. I made a screen shot of it for you below.

Google+ Photo Editor window

Finishing up, if you’re a business page owner such as myself +Full Impact Studios (please +1 and follow), then once you’ve navigated to your business page and switched control to the page, it can be hard to get your way back to your personal profile. To do this you have to scroll to the very top and in the upper right corner, select the drop down arrow next to your image. This will open a pop-out window where you can select which account you would like to navigate to. See image below for example.

Google+ Navigate pages window

Well that’s all I wanted to point out for this article, I hope you found it helpful in navigating around Google+. If you did or you have some tips and tricks of your own, I’d love to hear about them, please add a comment below.

If you would like to share this with others, please Tweet and Like. I can be added to Google+ here and if you’d like to follow my articles and posts you can add our business +Full Impact Studios or select the RSS feed in our blog.

Full Impact Studios is a Los Angeles web design and Digital Agency serving startups and small to medium sized businesses in Southern California and around the Country.