If Google switched to anything like that, I'd be tempted to GreaseMonkey it back to how it was. It looks a bit like Bing. Just to start: Not every result has the domain showing (unless you mouseover) which makes it hard to filter the crud at first sight and results are spread too far apart. When you do mouseover, the URL is in a realllly bright, hard to read green. I thought fades, pastel colors, and stupid mouseover effects went out in 2008.
I take back what I said about Google not having enough creatives on the other Google story today. At least the engineers have made something that's usable..
I don't get the feeling that this design saw much user testing. As you describe, the domain plays an important part in helping mentally filter results and thus doesn't really merit relegation to rollover visibility.
What I think would qualify for that is the rest of the URL path.
Overall, as nice as it all looks, there are some serious discoverability issues. "Show options" doesn't need to be shown in as much detail as Google has it, but the plus-sign itself isn't enough to go on. The rollover visibility for the other Google products just makes it hard to find them; the header isn't that noisy with them visible. The single gear for settings/sign in is a little better than the lone plus sign, but still, such condensation is extreme, especially for the importance Google places on getting users to use accounts.
I agree with everything you've said. Plus, the page is so javascript-heavy, it probably crawls in IE6. It already makes my scrolling a little less smooth. Interface responsiveness and discoverability trump flashiness and visual minimalism.
Other nitpicks: the slightly grey (cream?) background is a weird, subtle annoyance, and the lack of any underlined links would definitely get Nielsen's panties in a bunch.
One thing I think the (re)designer did get right: The AJAX-loading down arrow at the bottom of the page. I wonder if there's any reason Google hasn't tried something like this over their more traditional pagination model. I'm guessing it has something to do with advertising and/or existing SEO conventions of referring to result ranking by Google page #.
It's interesting to read the comments here, because I was involved in the design of a lot of these features, and many of the elements of "Air" have been considered and rejected for exactly the reasons that HN readers point out.
Agreed. Design is not simply a matter of appearance. Google's design is clear and useful. This Air theme is arty for the sake of being arty, and it's not even particularly attractive.
Google spends a lot of time tweaking their front page when they really should be working on their results page, which has stayed the same for about a decade now.
Actually they spend a ton of time tweaking the results page, and there have been a lot of changes in the past decade. Most of them are fairly subtle: fonts, spacing, colors. Some of them are quite obvious: the Comment, Promote, and Remove links, for example.
They've also integrated other forms of search into the results page (maps, shopping, twitter), and put a lot of work into optimizing the load time. There is at least one (fairly large) team working basically full-time on the results page. They do a lot of A/B testing; only design changes that "work" are released to everyone.
Does Google personalize the design of the search page in any way? A/B testing to find the best design on average won't give you the optimal design for each individual.
I would have warned if I thought it was an issue at all. Do others also think the small thumbnail of the Go Ogle design is NSFW? I doubt I would have warned even with a larger thumbnail but maybe I'm miscalibrated...
I generally go by the "how would I feel if my boss walked by and saw my screen" test. While it's not huge, it is fairly obvious, even from a distance, exactly what it is. To be fair, I didn't really understand the subtitle, particularly where it mentioned "risque".
Uptight Bible-thumpers that are only afraid of the fact that seeing a nude woman makes them feel uncomfortable so the only logical reaction is, "Hulk Smash!"
{edit} I should add, "and the bureaucrats that are afraid of litigation/boycotts/bad publicity from the Bible-thumpers"
{edit2} I could include Quran-thumpers too, but they don't have huge representation in the US. Maybe moreso in Europe though?
Winning an argument with your boss or HR person over whether it is art or not is pointless when you're being fired. Nudity in the workplace is generally frowned upon. Whether that is right or wrong is another point entirely.
While the winning design is nice and quite devoid of visual noise, I did find the mouseovers that display the "Cached" and "Similar" links along with the green URL to be distracting precisely because they would appear during mouseover and catch my eye more than if they were just there to begin with.
Also, there are probably millions or billions of other web pages in greater need of a redesign than Google's results page. This contest feels like trying to come up with a more exotic flavor of vanilla: Tahitian, Indonesian, Madagascar, etc.
I was able to get these running on the latest dev-channel Google Chrome on Mac (or regular Chrome Windows) with the Personalized Web extension (which lets you inject HTML, CSS, and JS, the latter two being the important ones): https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/plcnnpdmhobdfbpo...
Personally, I find this incredibly unpleasant to use. The URLs and other hidden information is actually quite useful to me. Rollover just isn't fast enough.
Agreed - Just providing a direct link - The absence of the URLs really bothered me. It hides an extremely important piece of info (until you mouseover). More than that, the green URL breaks up each result. Without it the results blur together.
This is a "less-is-more" approach and any designer worth their salt could come up with a similar design (if not 100 more).
The page feels like a page from a contemporary kitchen in architect digest - where you see a huge glass table with maybe one vase in the center. It looks great but it misses out on some of the "roll-up-your-sleeves" and get thing done feel, which is what Google does best.
I take back what I said about Google not having enough creatives on the other Google story today. At least the engineers have made something that's usable..