Back in October, we reported on a new design Google was testing out for its homepage. In short, the design takes Google’s minimalist approach to an extreme, removing everything from the homepage except for the Google logo, the search box, and the two buttons beneath it. Upon moving your mouse the rest of the site’s UI elements fade back into view. At the time I thought it was just one of Google’s many experiments that never get launched to the public, but it seems like they’re taking this one seriously: Google has just announced that they’re rolling out the fade-in design to everyone.
Google’s blog post details some of logic behind the decision to swap the design:
“For the vast majority of people who come to the Google homepage, they are coming in order to search, and this clean, minimalist approach gives them just what they are looking for first and foremost.”
More interesting is some of the data Google collected as it studied what impact this would have on users. Google writes that it tested out 10 different variations on the design, hiding different elements in each to see which performed best. Some of these included odd messages like “This space intentionally left blank”, which sort of killed the effect. Ultimately Google found that the optimal design actually slows users down at first. But as it turns out, they only get slower the first few times they see it — after getting used to it, users perform better than they used to.
At first, this worried us a bit: Google is all about getting you where you are going faster — how could we launch something that potentially slowed users down? Then, we realized: we want users to notice this change… and it does take time to notice something (though in this case, only milliseconds!). Our goal then became to understand whether or not over time the users began to use the homepage even more efficiently than the control group and, sure enough, that was the trend we observed.
Of course, the company hasn’t studied how much time will be lost as tech-savvy people have to field calls from their friends about how they accidentally “broke Google”.
Why?? This serves no purpose, and will only slow me down when using Google mail and such.
Just go to mail.google.com then? That’s what I do. And since I use Chrome I don’t even have to type it out.
even easier – gmail.com
Sometimes its really hard to understand Google (Did I say sometimes?).
I recently saw the new developing home page of Google with more rich colors and introducing this fade-in page now doesn’t make much sense, especially after citing research and study of users and stuff….
even easier (in firefox) just type gmail
In chrome you can create an application shortcut for any web page, Gmail in this example, and load it in seconds from your desktop or start menu.
@asdfg: That was already possible on firefox for ages using prism (and prism is older than both fluid and chrome.)
try gmail then ctrl+enter….even faster
or g+enter in chrome if you use gmail a lot
Yes, I have a bookmark for gmail.com, however, when I said “and such”, I was referring to the rest of the Google applications. I obviously don’t have bookmarks for every Google application I use.
Pointless feature..
Agreed. Maybe Mayer has OCD? Not like consumers were complaining that the original homepage wasn’t sparse enough.
Why do they even need the two buttons? Just have the search box and press enter
There are some folks in this world who don’t have keyboards.
Then how do they type their search terms? Even a virtual keyboard provides an Enter button?
Then they just select some text in Firefox, right-click then choose “Search Google for ”
agreed. how many actually click on those buttons anyway?
If I recall, a buttonless design is one of the ones they tried (I think I saw it a few times). Maybe it didn’t score as well as the final choice.
Who the heck even bothers going to Google.com. Just use the search bar built into the new IE,Firefox,Chrome, and probably every other commercial browser out there. Oh and still just hit enter instead of clicking ‘GO/Search/whatever’
But still, I welcome the change. I just wish they wouldn’t include the “Download Google Chrome” ad in the top right when you go to Google for the first time (or after clearing your cache).
Right, I never use the homepage either. I only looked at it because of a previous TC article. I know for a fact, however, that my parents still click the Search button
i never use the address bar and always go to the homepage and search from there. so i know it’s not the best practise but it’s my way and i am one of the people who go to google.com/google.wherever and search.
Wasn’t that the original design? I don’t think the buttons showed up until you moved the mouse (which makes sense) – maybe they changed it so regular users wouldn’t be as taken aback.
However, it just looks eerily creepy to me. I much prefer the regular page (and its simpler code, I presume).
“I don’t think the buttons showed up until you moved the mouse (which makes sense)”
That makes no sense old bean. I nearly always TAB to buttons. Having to take your hands off the keys to move the mouse and play hide & seek would be a bit crazy.
Well you would think so but (if I were designing it at least) , with some quite obvious optimizations you could use this change to make the page a lot faster. Just think, now on load only 1 gif, 2 buttons and the search field need be displayed – the rest can just be included at the end e.g. after the page is loaded and the user is already typing. Infact now the entire page could be static…
Tom, that’s not true–the other elements on the page are still loaded. Their display property is set to none, so they aren’t visible. JavaScript code catches the mouse movement, which triggers the fade-in and makes the elements visible.
The I’m feeling lucky button is almost never used. However, Google’s study showed that removing that button reduces the number of searches they get.
I read that somewhere in some interview, can’t recall where.
I used the JavaScript that enabled the fade-in page back in October, and when it stopped working a couple weeks ago (don’t know if it’s related to cookies or what – I never understood how those JavaScript snippets worked) I was kind of glad.
This is really a dumb design, especially compared to the new “blue button” design from late November, which I now use and love.
(but hey, the only time I see Google is when I hit home. Real men use the address bar)
@Naiive Melody – if real men use the address bar, then why do you have google.com as your homepage?
lol…
Is it wrong that I’m having fun with this?
*refresh* *swwwooo* *refresh* *swwooo*
Guess who copied the fade in from Bing!!
This is very cool actually.
it underlines why Google will soon dominate in many markets. They continue to innovate and have a core philosophy around invention and creativity.
Look at other large companies….do they constantly innovate?
In the correct view this is a very good feature. I think it should make stock holders feel “happy”.
thanks for spamming. now go away.
Stock holders should be happy about a CSS fade in affect? Techcrunch has all the loonies.
kinda gotta think whats the point? I’ve never been confused when I have done a google search and inadvertently clicked “business solutions” in attempt to do a search!
+1
They wouldn’t close html and body tags because they want to save that extra bit of download, but its alright to add a few hundred bytes of Javascript?
Wouldn’t something fading in, make users look at those new links, rather than keeping the ‘getting distracted’ from the search bar? Oh well, they did conduct studies, so they should know better.
All good javascript is asynchronous and loaded at the end of the page so it would not add anything to load time. Actually if google are smart and only add the bits which fade in via the javascript, this could be a LOT faster as it brings forwards the start of page render which with something as lightweight as google is one of the longest components of load time.
I actually quite like it, however i’m not sure on the usefulness. I mean the Google homepage was already minimal. Guess there is no harm in it been even more minimal. Only thing they will lose is people seeing the other links and wondering “hey, what’s that? Google do Mail?”.
I like it alright, I would prefer it to be a more of a rollover design.
I don’t see the use of it just not being there for 1 second.
So Google removes the top menu bar (oh well, causes it to fade) and that becomes news??? :rolleyes:
Maybe next time when they change the Android logo, it will be seen as another “innovation”.
Back in October I remember refreshing my homepage (which is google btw) and I somehow got that fade in feature. I thought it was a glitch at the time since I refreshed the page again and it went away. From what I remember, it’s not very helpful. Minimalism is supposed to enhance the users experience, not take away from it.
How horrible must it be to work as a Product Manager under Marissa Mayer.
I can totally see someone having spent months ‘working’ on this ‘major change’. Sad…
Wow! Amazing stuff…
soooo blanddddd
OK this is outrageous. Google should not be allowed to change anything on their home page. In fact, there should be a law for it, the UN should intervene or sth. I mean think of the trees that will be killed to generate the power for the javascript fade effect. i protest.
i like it. thanks google. at first i was like oh what the hell, but i tried it out almost everyday for a month and i really liked it. i’m not used to it being back to normal. oh well.
hmm… I appreciate the minimalist approach, but this is a little pointless and maybe taking it to far.
Cool stuff. but now i’m gunna have to run linux on my face
I’ve been seeing the fade in for months now. It gets rather annoying.
I’d like to assume they did it also to save money. Think of all the people that go to google.com and immediately start typing for a search and hit enter. Or the amount of people that eventually will once they get used to the change.
When you load the page it only loads the portion for the search. When you move your mouse it loads the rest of the page with javascript. If you you don’t move your mouse, you’re using less bandwidth, and for something as large as Google, it will probably save them a lot of money.
I want all the links back on the main page!!
I love it, I wish there were a setting to permanently disable the links.
I love it. The spare design is what I loved about Google to start with. I want it to stay that simple and not fade into all the links when I move the mouse. You can simply go directly to the other services via URL or a master list such as http://www.google.com/intl/en/options if you want to explore. The minimal interface and best of breed search is what made me a Google fan to start with.
Me gusta. Pero tal vez podría deshacerse de todas esas cartas que ocupan un espacio demasiado.
try the new Google Search! Thats really cool!
http://www.zjtechlive.com/try-the-new-google-search/
Where is opt-out?