Am I the only one who's been seeing the new interface for several months now?
I only saw it in one of my browsers, so I figured they were doing a slow rollout, but it sounds like everyone else has been taken by surprise by the new interface, while I figured it was public knowledge long ago.
Nope, me too. I've had it for a few weeks. Don't like it much, wastes space, but it's not the end of the world. Oddly enough, the old look is showing up for me now- I'd been using the new look in this browser for weeks.
I don't think that covers it. Imagine you're living in a house for years, one day some guy comes in and changes everything subtly.
The walls are just a different shade, everything gets moved around a fraction. Nothing dramatic, just a lot of small changes.
You'd walk in and feel like you are in an unfamiliar place.
Unfamiliar ties right in with 'danger' on the reptilian brain level and that manifests itself as a feeling of being uncomfortable. Give it four weeks, change it back and people will be arguing the exact same thing.
Change always leads to resistance of this sort, even change for the better.
I've been working on software design for a long time and I'm pretty sure the problem with the Google redesign is not merely that users are unfamiliar with it. They've made classic design errors.
That's very well possible. But in my experience, running a roughly million-member website for over 12 years any change we ever made led to the exact same pattern:
- initial bitching
- gradual acceptance
- the new is much better than the old
This usually over a period of 3 months or so. And that's for improvements and mistakes alike. There seems to be an automatic component to all this that is 'conservative', as in 'opposed to any change'.
Time will tell on this one, if google reverts to the old lay-out then the conclusion is that they also thought that it was better before. But it is very well possible that this 'worse' lay-out is actually better for google, even if it is worse for the users, for instance because it increases their bottom line.
MySpace's lack of AJAX-based functionality resulted in a massive number of "extra" page views, which meant significantly higher ad revenue. Better for their revenue, worse for users. That was not a good business decision.
I think it's like the MS Office redesign. The new UI is supposedly better, especially for newbies. But the amount of bitching among experienced Office users was remarkable.
That is so very true. Great companies know this and have the guts to go ahead and make the needed changes anyway.
Your point also hints at the fact that asking users isn't always the right thing to do - often they don't know exactly what they want. Either because they can't imagine it or because of the friction you describe.
I am reminded of the idea of doing this, except subtly enough they can't actually prove anything's changed, over and over again, as a way to bend somebody's mind quite badly.
Of course said idea was presented as a Malkavian prank in a Vampire: the Masquerade sourcebook I was reading, so it's hardly a serious suggestion.
I do occasionally wonder if you could make sweeping changes in a gradual enough way for regular users to not so much not mind as largely not notice, under the frog/frying pan principle. Sadly for this wondering, Shadowcat's a consultancy so the sites I work on with enough traffic for it to be interesting all belong to other people :)
Exactly what I was thinking when I heard the complaints about the new interface.
Objectively I think it is a change for the better - but it does feel just a bit off.
Many websites have these issues. People cried foul to Fark when they did a redesign. An employee was fired for saying 'You will get over it'. People did.
Putting more information in the same space, makes it harder to consume. The minimalist approach that Google has always had to UX, is part of what made them good.
Google has been slowly putting more information in to that same space over the years and hardly anybody noticed. The reason why people noticed this is because google bit the bullet and changed a lot of stuff in one go because these changes are tied in to each other at a level that if they did it gradual the site would not look consistent.
It was a very brave thing of them to do this because they must have realized it would lead to some backlash, but I really can't see how they could have done so differently anyway.
They needed to 'get with the times' again in a way that gives them room enough to get back to small changes, think of it as a spring housecleaning. Give it four weeks and everybody will be used to the new site and this problem will go away.
As things come on the web google is still minimalist, only a little less so than last week.
A bigger issue with google is the creeping pollution of the search results for 'web' searches with more and more non-relevant links to googles own sites and/or paid links.
It depends a bit on what iteration they are on, it's been changing like mad for me over the past couple of days. At some point during all of that I had the knee jerk reaction of landing on a spam site and to overcome the instinct of navigating away, which was awkward.
I'd be happy with new design if it either hides the sidebar by default or gives me all the options by default. On most of searches, I see only 'Everything' and 'More' options. I'm already seeing 'Everything' on my search, what's the point of always showing the bar when I have to click once to see all options, making it entirely pointless.
I just use Keyboard Shortcuts experiment (http://www.google.com/experimental/), which hasn't been updated to a new version. I can't image searching without it.
Give it some time. The keyboard shortcuts experiment was disabled because it didn't work with the new interface and there wasn't time to fix it, but there's some attention being put into updating it now.
I'm not trying to generate an ordinary Google search. I'm trying to generate one with the clean search results pages Google had before the redesign, which you can get from the search page linked to in the OP:
I like having the option of seeing more recent results, particularly the past year. The new layout requires more clicking to get that, and I keep forgetting which of the ambiguously names side menus I need to click to get it.
And I see that clicking on the posted link has now changed the default appearance of Google every time I use it. :(
Honestly as long as I get my relevant, quick search results I don't really care that much. Obviously it is also important to have a reasonable UI that stays out of your search result; none of the design changes that Google have been through is disruptive enough for me to complain. There might be minor annoyances, but its still much much better than the second and third best options out there.
I find the left sidebar annoying and very rarely use it. I wish there was a feature do enable/disable the sidebar like in the old interface. Other than this, I love the new visual tweaks.
I like the design. So let me complain about something else: mailing-list/forum/newsgroup archivers. For instance, search on a certain type of error message, which as a developer I frequently do, and the first couple pages of results are littered with these.
1. Make sure the original message -- say from the original mailing list, newsgroup, or forum -- is listed first. Not necessarily #1, but above all the scrapers.
2. Consolidate the archivers (mail-archive.com, derkeiler.com, pubbs.net, etc.) into a single entry, perhaps with sublistings or something.
I think the one good thing about the google design change is that it may open the door a little bit for other search engines with different interfaces. The fact that we all like the old google design so much show how much everyone has gotten used to it.
I don't know if it says something about me or Google's corporate culture, but I have absolute faith that any change Google make is for the better. After reading all the "41 shades of blue" type stories, I struggle to believe that they would implement a change of any significance without very strong data, let alone a complete redesign of their core product. On an instinctual level, I feel that if Google's design clashes with my assumptions then my assumptions are probably wrong.
I think I agree with you for the most part. I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt until about 3 months have passed. If after three months I still feel that they've done something wrong then I'll start to believe it. The reason why I've listed elsewhere in this thread, when change to something familiar happens we will have a 'knee jerk' response that is conservative, even if in the long term we'll change our minds.
Google has a good track record. In most cases Google is actually too conservative for my tastes. Some of these new defaults have been in Google Labs for years. The changes to GMail when Buzz was launched is the only big screw-up I can remember and they addressed that quickly enough.
I have my homepage set to http://google.com/advanced_search?num=100. The num=100 makes the select box default to 100 results per page. I've been using this for years; I loathe pagination. In the past (let's say the Geocities era), it wasn't rare for me to click through to pages 2 and 3, even when showing 100 results per page.
Aside: I swear there used to be an option on the Google home page for a (possibly very brief) time circa 1999–2000 that allowed you to select the number of results per page. But the Wayback Machine makes it appear otherwise, because a cursory glance at the archives shows that the select box only appeared pre-2000 on google.stanford.edu. But I don't think I ever googled from that domain. I might be wrong on the last point, though. There's absolutely no way I'm wrong about the select box appearing on the home page, though, because the removal of it was the entire reason I began clicking through to "Advanced Search", so that I could change the value to 100.
I don't understand why Google, and many other companies, change things that aren't broken. First they did it with Youtube, and now with their SERPS. Can someone explain the point of that? All it does is piss off users.
This sort of reminds me of the quote by Henry Ford, "If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have said a faster horse."
Sure the "If it aint broke, don't fix it" mentality makes a lot of sense, but at the same time if companies aren't innovating, changing things and pushing the limits, we'll never know what else is possible!
I'm not a big fan of that quote. If you can't read into it and figure out that what your customers actually want is a faster, weather-proofed way of getting around, you have larger problems than "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."
Using it to justify not listening to customers would make more sense if Henry Ford made his business successful by selling horsewagons.
It's consistent, but consistently plastic. I feel like I have no hope of figuring out how the site works except by trial-and-error, because everything looks encapsulated in white plastic that might cover what's just underneath.
My main problem with it is that it's hard to gauge what the community thinks of a video at a glance. Instead of the 5-star system, the likes vs don't-likes are hidden away and you have to find the right button to click to show them.
I see it like this: No single person (or specific group of people) can definitively decide if the old Google design is broken or not (which in this case probably means, being worse or better than the new one).
The (arguably!) best measure if the new design is an improvement is how many people perceive it as such. My guess is Google itself has the best understanding if that is the case and wouldn't have changed it if it didn't think it was better (based on the data they gathered).
And there was me thinking I wonder if Google has done enough. The competition that search is facing now is fierce. Google was in danger of looking tired against other offerings and a user base can turn against a service quickly.
My gmail address is shown on the top right. Thank you to remind me that I am tracked, I don't see the connection between the search interface and my gmail account I created just to pin down my name.
