

RedesignGoogle: clarity wins, with risque and rebuilt not far behind (NSFW) - amirnathoo
http://blog.webmynd.com/2010/02/01/clarity-wins-with-risque-and-completely-rebuilt-not-far-behind/

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petercooper
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..

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mortenjorck
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.

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dandelany
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 #.

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mrshoe
_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.

~~~
amirnathoo
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.

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thechangelog
Not sure how seriously to take a contest where the second place entry includes
a naked woman.

~~~
benofsky
I have to agree, second place looks exactly like google but different colours
+ naked woman.

~~~
amirnathoo
Did you try the design? There's a lot more to it than the background.

~~~
benofsky
Oh, no sorry. Using Chrome which isn't supported. Apologies if I was wrong!!

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ryanelkins
NSFW - you've been warned, albeit, probably like me, belatedly.

For anyone wondering why - the second redesign down features a nude woman as
the background.

~~~
amirnathoo
Really?!

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...

~~~
lmkg
The fact that it's tasteful art doesn't change that it's nudity. If 1% of the
population will get offended, it's best to at least put up a warning.

~~~
joubert
Who is offended by nude art? The world's museums are _packed_ with nude art.

Porn is a different matter.

~~~
ryanelkins
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.

~~~
joubert
I never argued that nudity in the workplace is appropriate.

It is, however, pathetic to be _offended_ by nudity in and of itself. There's
a distinction between pornography and nudity.

Think breast-feeding.

~~~
scott_s
From the under-appreciated movie Copland, "Being right isn't a bullet-proof
vest."

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gr366
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.

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markbao
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...](https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/plcnnpdmhobdfbponjpedobekiogmbco)

~~~
Raphael
Here's the required CSS:
[http://www.injectiondesign.com/google/designs/air2/2/clarity...](http://www.injectiondesign.com/google/designs/air2/2/clarity.css)

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jsm386
Link to a demo of the winner: <http://www.injectiondesign.com/google/>

~~~
snprbob86
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.

~~~
jsm386
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.

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fexl
I like the <http://duckduckgo.com/> design. I use duckduckgo for search now
instead of Google.

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proee
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.

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toisanji
That is a really slick looking interface, good job!

