I admit that Google’s new “fade in” feature is pleasant in a bland sort of way, and seems to be a good move from a branding point of view – but what interests me is that they claim their Multivariate testing research has actually shown measurable improvements in user behaviour “efficiency” over the old UI. It’s not entirely clear what they mean by efficiency, but this seems to be rather questionable. How is this going to improve my time-to-action if I want to check my gmail? How will it help me if I want to view maps, news, or visit any of the items that are initially hidden? By “efficiency” do they mean “time to start a search” at the expense of other actions? I can’t help wondering whether this is simply a move to enhance branding that’s been dressed up as the output of behavioural research. To look at it another way, perhaps this is actually evidence that the old school “data driven decision” mindset is starting to change at Google?
To quote Marissa Mayer on the official Google blog (emphasis added):
[…] in the end, the variant of the homepage we are launching today was positive or neutral on all key metrics, except one: time to first action. At first, this worried us a bit: 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!). Our goal then became to understand whether or not over time the users began to use the homepage even more efficiently than the control group and, sure enough, that was the trend we observed.
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I very rarely see the Google home page as I usually use the search box in Firefox/Safari to go straight to the results page.
As a techie, I don’t think I’m unusual in this behaviour, so I’m a little suspicious of the note in Marissa Mayer’s post that they’ve been using the fade in within Google and their people have really come to like it. Really? How many Google staff look at their home page unless they’re involved in it?
Hmm, perhaps it’s one of those companies that sets everyone’s browser home page to be the company site and won’t let them change it ;-)
It does feel a bit pointless, reminiscent of what Bill Scott calls “needless fanfare” (or maybe “animation gone wild”).
For me, it’s telling that Marissa Meyer writes that they “want users to notice this change”; they’re drawing attention to Google rather than making search more effective, which feels more like a marketing approach.
But I think the main point is that “efficiency” isn’t the same for Google as for a user – for Google it’s probably the amount of searches done over time, which isn’t usually an ordinary user’s goal.
Seems like it fades in when you move your mouse.
Will this extra content that suddenly fades in distract users from the search for a few seconds.
Obviously the question here is how Google defines efficiency, however, given that peripheral links such as those revealed here are frequently missed by users, it does not seem surprising that this fade effect could increase their visibility, and therefore navigational efficiency, without compromising the primary task.
So you thing hiding-then-revealing the peripheral links (images / videos / etc) is more eye catching than just showing them? Hmmm, sounds questionable to me.
From reading their blog post, it seems they’re measuring efficiency of these peripheral links ( Marissa Meyer says this design “represents our focus on great search yet helps searchers efficiently access all of Google’s products”). Wouldn’t this effect have the same effect as the ‘one-second spotlight’ pattern seen on so many ajax based sites? It’s the same idea, just a little more on brand than the usual yellow box.
The problem with this fade in feature is it gives the impression to seasoned Googlers that something is wrong with their browser or even worse, their computer may be acting strange because of some malware infection. The skeptic in me also says that the whole thing is intended to raise the awareness level of Google by getting us talking about this new fade in feature. In other words, branding.
Today I actually found myself irritated by the fade in. I wanted to go to the advanced search page, and instead of being able to click there immediately, I had to wave the cursor around, watch the fade in and only after that I could click the link.
Google might gain some increased brand awareness, but having to wait for a pointless animation feels strange for the normally efficiency-obsessed Google. I’m not against animations per se, but had it been faster I think it wouldn’t have minded so much, but now it’s a couple of hundred ms too long.
That said, Google might be experimenting with using their start page for more advertising and branding – there’s a Chrome ad there now (I’m using Safari), and they’ve been showing Android and/or Droid ads as well.
Isn’t this a classic case of teams trying to get budget status within a very big organisation during a financial squeeze.
The home-page UI team need to be seen to be doing something to justify their budget, but the google box is sacred. Hey, let’s do something ajaxy! Where? Ah, anywhere, everywhere, who cares. Now, lets think of a reason why we did it…
I think it will blow over.
Not to say it won’t be a great opportunity to see how the effects impact usability, maybe even open up a new UI design trend. I’m just suspicious of the stated flow here – did user research really drive this decision, or is it a convenient way to flog the changes?
I think the efficiency boost is that more people used the search tool as opposed to getting distracted by those other hidden actions.