The new Groups experience

Posted by Brett Lider, User Experience Designer, Google Groups

Today, the Google Groups team launched a new beta version, available to anyone at groups-beta.google.com. It may have been awhile since you thought of Groups as cool or sexy — if you ever did — but I couldn’t have been more excited to work on the team responsible for making the current Google Groups better. As a designer, I really relished the opportunity to make a Google product that’s been around for years more compelling and easier to use.

One of the things I'm happiest with in the beta version is the new design for individual groups. It’s cleaner and simpler, and yet manages to integrate a lot more features. Group owners can now create a welcome message, upload a group logo and customize your fonts and colors. You can make your group your own, in other words — something you had been telling us you really wanted.

Another thing I'm particularly proud of is the Pages feature, which lets you create web pages inside your group, and work on them with others. Instead of only offering rigid templates, we integrated many of the functions of Google Page Creator right into Groups, so you can create exactly what your group needs: an essay for school, the history your family, a web page with photos, a list of links, and so on.

Some of the other improvements to Groups include:

• Using Gmail's message cards for discussions, which makes them easier to follow
• Adding a Files section so users can share and collaborate on documents
• Helping groups have a better sense of their members with the Member area

Of course, the current non-beta version of Google Groups is still around and you can still use it (although without the cool new features). But we are going to change all of Groups to this new look soon enough — we’re even trying to (gasp!) take it out of beta reasonably quickly. So try out the new version for yourself. And let us know what else we can do to make the experience even better.