Google’s Transparency Report tool is getting a facelift, effective immediately, and is now more consistently styled with a number of features tweaked or moved around in order to be easier to use. The new style not only conforms to Material Design standards more uniformly, but also brings popular features to the forefront, and organizes the reports and their source data in ways that make it easier for a user to download reports, fact check, and look for recent changes. The various reports have been brought together as much as possible, categorized for users to easily find what they’re looking for, and a Recent Updates section has been added in to help users keep track of new information flowing in more easily.
The front page of the Transparency Report now shows a number of different content reports, along with descriptions to help a user determine if a given report contains the data that they need to see. There are also three major categories for reports: security and privacy, content removal, and service disruptions. The first category concerns things like Right To Be Forgotten requests and government information requests, while the second concerns the removal of content from Google-hosted sites like YouTube, and the removal of search results. The third category shows reports of disruptions in access to Google services for any reason, including outages, ISPs blocking the services, and governments keeping citizens off of the services. Finally, the new Recent Updates section puts the newest data and changes in chronological order.
In addition to redesigning the way users access data, the reports themselves have been redesigned to be easier to read and more consistent across data sets. The new universal style sees the service disruption report turned into a line graph, and the outbound email encryption report is now a filled-in line graph. Both use a white and blue Material Design styling for high contrast, easy reading, and aesthetic appeal. As Google builds out the Transparency Report system, new additions will follow this consistent style, and will be fed into the same overarching data management system that Google has moved the full content of the reporting system into. This means that no matter how big or how complicated the Transparency Report gets, Google will be able to keep it organized and easy to read and search through, that way it’s never difficult for the report to fulfill its original core purpose; keeping users informed.
