Quick Blogger Home Page Redesign

In this post I do a quick redesign of the Blogger home page to make it less confusing and more consistent.

Blogger home page

If I am signed into my Blogger account I can access my blogger home page by navigating to www.blogger.com.

My Blogger home page contains a list of all of my blogs and blogs on my reading list. Here is what the top of my blog home page looks like now:

Any designer could come up with ways of making this page more pretty, but I am more concerned about making quick changes that will improve the user experience and will not require significant time to fix.

 Here is another screenshot with some annotations (some irrelevant items removed for clarity):

Here is a screenshot without my notes:

Here is a screenshot with my notes:

This is my revised blog home page with notes

As a designer I would like more info about how often users click on "View blog" and "Posts" buttons to see if those are even necessary on this page. I would also like the screen that is opened when I click "Dashboard" to actually have a title ("Blog Dashboard" would work). I prefer "Dashboard" to "Options," because the dashboard allows you to view data such as page stats for your blog, not just change options. However, some usability testing might be helpful to know if this button is named correctly.

So, let me know what you think of this redesign.

Blogger, Pink means Pink!: Problem Solving Google Blogger Text Colors

Awesome, Inc. template

In this post I try to change the text colors on my Google Blogger blog, and found a world of trouble and frustration.

By the time I finished this post I had uncovered several bugs. This is really long post, so I have decided to try create an itemized list of bugs up front with links to the part of the post in which I identify that bug. This doesn't work perfectly because I don't want to change the narrative flow and divide the text into sections by bug, but hopefully it helps. You can use these bug numbers later when you tell me my bug is spot on, not universal, completely wrong, or later fixed (Yay!).

Bug List

Possible bug titles for the bugs I discovered:

• Sidebar and footer background color choices not set correctly (BloggerTemplateDesigner_Bug1)
• Gadgets on sidebar don't use background color option setting (BloggerTemplateDesigner_Bug2)
• Some UI elements not visually marked on the preview when selected in the list (BloggerTemplateDesigner_Bug3)
• UI element list in "Advanced" tab order is confusing order and should be grouped by location on layout (BloggerTemplateDesigner_Bug4)
• Default template designs should have minimum text contrast requirements (BloggerTemplateDesigner_Bug5)
• Can't edit text or background of date tab on posts (BloggerTemplateDesigner_Bug6)

Feature Requests

Besides the bugs listed above, my biggest complaint is that it took so long to figure out the correspondence between UI elements on the list and UI elements in the preview. If my BloggerTemplateDesigner_Bug4 is fixed that would help. As a feature request, I would like to be able to select items in the preview and have the relevant item in the UI list be selected.

Exploring Blogger Text Colors

I just started this blog and didn't want to spend a lot of initial time worrying about the layout, so I chose one of the default layouts based on the "Awesome Inc." template and figured I'd worry about the details later.

However, there were a few details I decided couldn't wait.