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Managing a document from a mobile phone can be a clunky experience but Google has developed and released an interface for its Google Docs platform that attempts to solve that problem with an Android app released today. And it appears that Google understands that user interface with an app like this is key to its success.
The app brings organization to an experience that had been unruly using a mobile browser. The company is using strategically placed icons - rather than just text links - to take users to the main dashboard, search documents or create new documents. It also added an “edit” button that protects the document from accidentally being altered when someone is simply reading it.
The company also added a new feature that allows users to upload a photo of a document and have it turned into editable text, via Optical Character Recognition technology. My test experience wasn’t all that great and left the photo as a photo, instead of converting it to a document - but I’m not going to give Google too much grief for this yet.
In a blog post announcing the new app, the company acknowledged that OCR does a “pretty good job” but that it’s still not perfect - but it will get better over time.
And that’s what this latest app is - something that’s getting better over time. The ability to view and edit documents in Google Docs has been available through the mobile browser for some time, but it wasn’t very user friendly.
Already, this app is better.
Sam has been a technology and business blogger for more than 18 years.
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