Google Goes to Minimalist, Fade-in Style on Homepage
I have always been an advocate of focusing the design of a product on the user’s needs and removing distractions from the user’s main goal. Google is one such company that is always evolving the user experience of their products through very elegant solutions and the recent update to the Google homepage is no exception.
The new homepage look now loads with just the Google logo, elongated search box and search buttons. For users who are interested in using other Google services such as Gmail, Image Search, etc., those links fade-in a millisecond after the user moves their mouse.
Marissa Mayer, VP of Search Products and User Experience at Google had this to say about the new design: ”Google is all about getting you where you are going faster — how could we launch something that potentially slowed users down? Then, we realized: we want users to notice this change… and it does take time to notice something (though in this case, only milliseconds!).”
If you’ve ever wondered how Google goes about testing and re-designing a page layout, hit the link to read up on how 10 different designs, some of them almost practical jokes, led to their decision.