05.05
This morning I got out of bed, ate my cereal, took my shower. Everything was proceeding pretty predictably. But then I did a Google search — usually a pretty mundane task — but this morning, Google looked very different than it did yesterday.
Word on the street is that Google is rolling this new design out to everyone over the next 48 hours. As with any change, some people are bound to complain, but I think the redesign introduces many significant improvements.
What’s Changed
- The Google logo is about 30% larger.
- There is now a permanent sidebar left of the results that allows filtering by news, blogs, images, etc., as well as time range filters and options for changing how search results are displayed.
- The searchbox is now the full width of the results column, slightly taller, and has a slight drop shadow rather than the previous inner shadow.
- No more top vertical bar. The result count now sits just below the searchbox and is much smaller than before. The filter for searching locally moved from under the searchbox to the sidebar.
- Search results are now 55 pixels higher on the page and have have a higher density overall (there’s slightly less vertical space between results, and indented results have only one third of their previous margin).
- Cached, Similar, Show more, and Related links all changed from a muted purple to a brighter light blue and now only have an underline on hover.
- Pagination is about 30% larger, and there is still a searchbox below the pagination, though the blue background has been removed.
- Related searches are now displayed much more compactly.
Before
After
The Sidebar
The new sidebar provides an inviting mechanism for narrowing your search to a specific channel. In particular, blogs and books now have much greater emphasis than ever before. Hidden under the “more” button are updates and discussions, and lower down in the sidebar are “latest” and “past two days” time filters, so there is definitely a push towards recent and real-time search. What isn’t clear to me, however, is why the sidebar filters are in a different order than the top bar options, and why some items from the top bar (shopping, for instance), didn’t make it into the sidebar at all. It definitely seems like Google should ditch the topbar options completely and place all these channel filters in one consistent location.
Related Searches
The sidebar also provides an option for showing related searches. In the past, Google has placed a handful of these search suggestions at the bottom of the page. But in the redesign, when related searches is selected, Google now presents up to twenty different related searches.
Wonder Wheel
There is also an option to show the wonder wheel, which is another mechanism for presenting similar searches. Instead of showing a simple list, however, the wonder wheel groups related searches into clusters and allows the user to navigate from one node to another. While this visualisation seems useless for simple lookup — finding the population of Spain, for example — it could be useful for exploring broad topics (such as “UK Politics”). My biggest complaint is with its name. “Wonder wheel” is completely undiscoverable and has absolutely no information scent. It’s impossible to guess what it does without actually interacting with it.
In Conclusion
The Google redesign offers many improvements — the sidebar is a step in the right direction, the searchbar feels much more intentional. Not all of additional views, from the wonder wheel to the timeline, feel all that useful, and the top bar now seems redundant. But overall the design itself feels crisper and more concise. I like it.
Further Reading
- The Google Blog: “A spring metamorphosis”
- Google’s New Interface: Colorful and More Powerful
- Search Engine Land has just about every possible screenshot of the new interface
- Video interview with a Google VP, product manager, and, web designer talking about today’s redesign
- Google Redesign Actually Mimicks Bing (or does it?)
- The Google redesign is much more than just a Bing copy
Tyler Tate
Tyler is a user experience designer at TwigKit. He has been designing websites and web applications for 9 years and is the creator of The 1KB CSS Grid. You can keep up with Tyler on Twitter.
I noted this as well. Although I didn’t feel the need to blog about it. ;p
I really liked it, noticed it this morning and loved that I could drill down to searching only blogs or what not. Step in the right direction as you said.
What would be nice is if the sidebar showed extra options, such as; Shopping et cetera will only be showed IF there are enough or popular matches regarding the search. Might not please all but I’d find it good.
I had the test “bucket” for this design. People complained a lot, but I found it nice. I wrote a user script to hide the sidebar with a switch, but I could live with it if I had no choice.
Very good changes, especially the sidebar and the softer logo
Hmm, difficult to form an opinion…
On one hand, very good usability improvements but on the other hand I think it now becomes less usable for the ocasional internetter.
We as multimedie designers and developers will have no problem with it, but for poeple like housewives the switch to bing or yahoo is easily made I guess
Great summary, moving the results up 55 pixels I find particularly interesting, I wonder if they were trying to get more content above the fold.
From a nudging perspective I would imagine the wider search field is designed to encourage users to type longer searches, thus increasing the likely-hood of what they’re looking for to be found faster.
The Wonder Wheel has been around for a while (under “show options” in the old design). While it is interesting, you’re right the name is kinda useless and I doubt anyone except SEOs use it.
Good comments everyone. That’s a good point Peter about the wider search box probably nudging people to type longer queries, that hadn’t occurred to me but makes sense.
It makes you realize how big a part of daily life this little website is. Today’s update was super noticeable. It’s noticeable in the same way seeing a coworker with a recent haircut would be or walking into your bathroom to see the wife just painted it by surprise. I am proud of Google for being willing to change. Their new hairdo is cool.
Hey I cant see any of these! Is it country specific? I live in India.
I got a taste of the redesign several days ago, but then it went back to the old look when I refreshed the page. Weird.
Don’t get it in Romania either
I agree Guy, this redesign is much braver than the tiny, data-driven design decisions that Google usually makes. It is a big step for them.
Vijay and Stefan, all we know is that they are “beginning to roll out the new design globally across 37 languages.” I initially heard it would take about 48 hours (from sometime yesterday), but I don’t know how reliable that information is.
I like it. Interesting that they’ve largely cut down on underlined hyperlinks. Google were one of the few major players on the web to stick with almost every link being default-blue and underlined. From a usability perspective underlined links leave no question that they’re clickable, but they also add visual noise to the page so the net result of cutting down on these is a much cleaner looking page.
Also, I noticed that the google logo is now much more saturated and has more subtle different bevel / shadow styles. The tighter styles here appear to make the logo more scalable.
These updates are happening pretty much at random. I’ve managed to see the new “home page” only once and as soon as you see that you’ll notice the updated logo.
I saw the new logo yesterday, but the search results were as always. When I took a look at Google this morning, surprinsingly there was the old logo again.
This looks interesting. Still simple but as you surggest maybe they should reconsider the topbar. The new design is not available here in Denmark yet, looking forward – thanks for the review.
Hmm…does this concern availability? Because I’m using Google Chrome but there isn’t any sidebar
Sorry, I’m from Philippines by the way.
Why Google dont change the “iGoogle” design too?
Am I the only one here who thinks having this new sidebar a PERMANENT fixture is a BAD THING?
I have a low screen resolution, and this 160-or-so pixels seriously impedes on my screen space.
The related searches I could do without – but otherwise I’m cool with the changes!
That sidebar is stupid and ugly.
Sidebar is an unwanted waste of space.
I completely disagree that they “should ditch the topbar options completely and place all these channel filters in one consistent location.” The redundancy is ok. If I like the topbar, good for me. If you like the sidebar, good for you. If the sidebar can easily pop in or out, even better. The only thing I don’t like about the topbar is the delayed fade-in they implemented a while back.
I hope there is eventually be a way to turn this off??!!
I may even bother to greasemonkey it to oblivion …
Google has an excellent command based search interface.
They also have a nice learning tool called oddly … ‘advanced search’.
This stupid UI should be optional. Now I can see less information on each result, the left
third of my results window is empty, and I have to scroll to get to good results.
Utter crap.
The sidebar is useless. People won’t use it. It’s a big mistake. You’re a shameless self-promoter (i found your link because you spam other blogs) so you’re the type of person who buys into marketing bullshit. But it’s completely unneeded for 99% of searches.
You’re the first one i’ve seen touch on the “Wonder Wheel”. What is the point? If I wanted to search for “tories political party” i’d search for it, I don’t need to get there by some convoluted way! Especially not on my HOMEPAGE!
I’m intrigued why Google keep the query time so prominent in the results. In my opinion, this number is even more prominent in the redesign.
“About 174,000 results (0.34 seconds)”
Do you think this has a marketing purpose, or does some engineer have enough votes in the design process to keep it prominent?
I agree that the query time is completely useless. I have no idea why they’ve held onto it so long. We all know Google is fast because the page loads really quickly, giving us the sub-second time just adds clutter.