Today, I was served the new Google homepage, the first that struck me out was how inconsistent it was. I started to look at all the inconsistencies and found many of them:
- 3 different arrows for the more links.
- mixed use of upper/lower case for the "M" in the more links.
- the position of "advanced search" between the home page and the results page.
- the position of the search button (kind of within the input field on the results page but below with space on the home page).
- you see "Everything" with an icon in front of it (why the icon?) and then you have a link with more, what is more than everything?
- etc.
It can be a game to find so many design errors, things totally wrong when looking at the whole page.
I asked myself, why? Then I found, it is simply A/B testing gone crazy. They have tested gazillions of independent small changes in their multivariate tests, found the optimal combination, but, forgot the big picture.
So maybe the new home page and results page are the optimal ones, but they are inconsistently optimal. For the first time in many years, the Google pages now "feel wrong".
This is annoying me a lot, for 2 things:
- I hate it when I search.
- It will spread like wild fire because if Google has done it, it must be good, so bad designers will just copy the design without thinking twice (so I will need to support that in many other websites).
And you, what do you think about it?
How are you designing your A/B tests not to fall in this trap?
Now they've gone overboard on the 'b(l)ing' factor, presumably to compete with other search engines that look 'spiffy'.
I'd rather have 10 text links (or even 30) per page without adornment than all the stuffy they've been adding lately.
Duckduckgo could easily capitalize on that, give us the very early google interface with better results.
That would make me switch, their scroll-down-to-get-more trick already is very elegant.