May 05, 2010

The Google Redesign

by Tyler Tate

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.

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.

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.