I think the dark grey bar across the top is a big problem for a few UX & psychological reasons.
First, it's mentally oppressive. The black bar at the top is like working in a room with a low ceiling painted black all day. It makes you feel boxed in.
Next, lighter colors that exist in the sky (blues, greys) tend to work better at the top of interfaces. If you consider the screen to be your full field of vision and relate it to what your eyes normally see when outside, the top-most area of the screen is "the sky". Making the absolute top part of a webpage black makes me think about a black sky which is ominous and indicates a storm is coming.
Finally, it just looks unfriendly and robotic. Blue is a more humanistic color and is more pleasing. I can't think of a worse choice for this newly-redesigned top bar than the dark grey/black they decided on.
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or these are genuine concerns. Black is not my favorite design color but I think it works well for Google and contrasts well in this case.
The black bar at the top is like working at night time, Google (the content) being the light that guides the way. Blue bars work well on the bottom, giving the feeling of floating peacefully in the ocean, yet at the top cause distress - as if the user is drowning. Yes, I'm making this shit up and trying to sound as ridiculous as OP.
> lighter colors that exist in the sky (blues, greys) tend to work better at the top of interfaces
Yep. The old blue on white background strip was easy to look at. The new color never looked good on Blogspot. Sometimes a single bad design choice can tip the balance between making something pleasant to use, or not.
An example: I upgraded my version of Open Office a month ago, for the first time in 3 years. There was one single change they made with the margin color in the word processor so when the left cursor is sitting at the left margin, I can't see it very easily. Because I move around documents a lot, and let the cursor sit while rereading, this is quite irritating. After a month, I've started pasting OO document text into Wordpad for editing, and repasting them into Open Office when complete. I sometimes wonder if a spy for Microsoft was behind that margin color change.
Another example: I only started using Open Office because Wordpad was similarly crippled by Microsoft a few years ago (starting with XP service pack 2, I think). Whenever you save a document, the page view changes so the cursor's at the top, also irritating after no problems with versions up to then. But I'm using it again because it seems a little less irritating than that Open Office change, which I can't find any way to fix in the menus. I suspect in that case Microsoft deliberately crippled it to force users to fork out for MS Office.
So perhaps this change will tip the balance for some users who want a new search engine. Perhaps a spy for Baidu was behind the change, or someone who's "family back home" has been influenced by Baidu.
After 10 minutes of searching, I found that turning off Text Boundaries in the View menu solves that particular problem. I couldn't find any way to change either the margin or cursor color.
I stand by my comment about the little things, e.g a non-changeable bad menu bar color in Google, prodding users over to Bing or Baidu.
Finally, it just looks unfriendly and robotic. Blue is a more humanistic color
You nailed it with this one. This is how Google rolls.
They prefer generic screens to ones that are designed by humans, because they want to convey the idea that Google is not a curated source of information, but a machine generated unbiased view of the world.
I'm generalizing a bit, but this is almost verbatim what was written in In the Plex.
I was replying to the idea that they chose a more 'robotic' design than a 'humanistic' one. And used a piece from a book in which a Googler pretty much said the same thing.
Me too. The other day I was looking across the room at a box with a dark-colored top flap and I felt deeply claustrophobic and acutely oppressed. I shed a single tear in mere contemplation.
> "I can't think of a worse choice for this newly-redesigned top bar than the dark grey/black they decided on."
Really? Did you try much, because... danger red, hot pink, puke green... that took like three seconds to think up. Ergo, I think you are engaging in at least quite a bit of hyperbole here, leading me to consider dubious pretty much everything else you said.
Personally, I like dark bars, since they contrast with the webpage, so I use a dark Firefox theme. Now Google's bar seems just another Firefox toolbar here, it almost seems customized ;)
It's the other way around, unless it's still the 90s.
Can't go any deeper, so here goes:
LCDs are clear by default with a big light behind them. You can see this on any Apple laptop, the glowing logo is just the backlight (watch it fade as you lower brightness or try shining a flashlight through it). White (clear) is the default state, so it takes power to make a color. Think of an LCD watch, all of the text is black because LCDs can't create light (those are LEDs).
Now there are LCD TVs with local dimming (using arrays of LEDs as backlight) so dark images can indeed use less energy, but no computer monitor uses such technology, so it's irrelevant for websites.
There are probably three or four orders of magnitude fewer OLED displays in the world than LCDs. Pretty much the only place you'll currently find an OLED screen is on a Samsung phone.
When a site that I love and use a lot makes a change, I always try to reserve judgement. If in a month I still don't like it, we'll see. But most times I realize that after I get used to it, it's fine. Google has probably done a fair bit of testing on this...
This. Also it's inconsistent with the bar at the top of the Gmail interface. Perhaps this will be rectified/consolidated going forward. Overall it seems like a strange choice for the company that popularized the clean white interface.
If there are things you don't like, the thing to do is send feedback. I can't stress this enough. As it says in the blog post, the changes are coming across months, not days, so there is always time to change course on something given enough feedback.
Would a blue bar across the top have been too similar to the chrome used in Windows (since windows 95 it's been a light blue bar across the top, XP 'Luna' had a darker blue bar)? It was only in Vista/Win7 that the blue bar across the top went away from window chrome, but perhaps they wanted to avoid that comparison?
funnily enough, apple.com has a dark grey bar across the top but i've never heard you open your mouth about it, and you're quite known to open your mouth about anything. your opinion is pointless and useless because you are such a fanboi
Google is criticized for never updating their style and never taking design risks. They are now updating their style and taking design risks. Some people will never be happy.
Obviously the people who criticise the lack of updates are not the same people who are criticising the update.
This observation can only make sense if you aggregate the public into a single person represented by the loudest complaining minority's opinion at any given time. Well, yes, then that person would be wildly inconsistent. But it doesn't actually exist.
I'm surprised Google kept the I'm Feeling Lucky button. When was the last time someone used it on purpose? The rumor I heard last week was that the button was on the chopping block.
If you click the I'm Feeling Lucky button before typing something in the search bar, it takes you to the Google Logos history page. I'm not sure if this feature is indeed new, or if the button already did that before the UI update.
In the suggestions of the instant search results page if you hover a suggestion there you have the 'Im feeling lucky' as a link. Not like before but they didnt remove it
I don't think it's fair to say they never take design risks considering the redesign of their homepage a while back where they made everything but the search interface invisible unless you moved the mouse.
This is the same bad UI decision Google made with Gingerbread. Somewhere deep inside Google is a UI person who thinks that medium grey on a black background is easy to read. They got their opinion into Gingerbread making the status bar very difficult to see... not to mention making all the icons much smaller. (my girlfriend who has some vision problems downgraded back to Froyo just because she couldn't see the status bar in 2.3.x). Now the same designer has got their opinion into the main Google UI. I have good eyesight and I'm even finding the new top bar to be difficult to scan. IMO this was not a wise decision at all.
I am wondering if this is more a move to unify design elements from Andriod with the Google web presence...A way to bridge the gap between the mobile UI (andriod) experience, and the google-web-at-large UI experience. I imagine as part of branding and customer imprinting.
Even if that is not the base reason, it is interesting to consider.
I find the black top bar to be too stark a contrast against the mostly white results page. It makes it seem as though something extremely important is up there.
How is this supposed to be an improvement? I feel like they changed it just for the sake of change without any actual focus on usability.
Google Instant. Now this. Is google just bored so much so that they are trying to fix things that were never broken?
This is a company that cared so, so much about every pixel of their homepage. And yet, they've just introduced a whole new set of colors and styles in one go.
I won't go as far as calling this the start of goog decline. But it's def headed to bloatland IMO.
A unified bar at the top could be absolutely amazing for people that use a lot of google products. My biggest beef with google right now is that even with a unified login, there doesn't seem to be any sort of common interaction between the various google components that I use.
Also, you don't like google instant? I thought that was one of the best features they've implemented in any of their products since... well, for a really long time.
I had this exact problem (multiple gmail/gapps accounts that I'm in all day) and the experience got a lot better a few days ago when this consistently colored bar across the top was rolled out to me.
I like the new navbar. I think it will draw more attention to google's other products. It also doesn't disturb me from the rest of the page, since it just seems like the window has been reduced vertically.
I think they did this to promote the menu bar to all non-tech or non-internet people. I can think of a lot of people who might see the bar for the first time because it itches their eye (my mum for example). It's kind of a meta-element made for browsing the googlesphere (aka internet?). I like it.
But they still have this _blank opening new tabs for mail, cal and everything. That's just bad.
Though not mentioned here, you can look forward to some substantial changes in News soon as well, if the tests I have seen are any guide (as a user; I don't speak for Google in any way).
From what I know of Google (knowing more every day as I'm reading In the plex), they certainly did a whole lot of A/B testing before choosing this black bar. It nonetheless sticks out unpleasantly. I really dislike it. Yahoo News has a dark blue bar which is a lot more pleasant.
When using a personalized background image, it also is somewhat better. But on the standard Google page, meh.
People like you for who you are, not for what you're trying to be. This departure from minimalism is pretty un-Googly. I thought their philosophy was ‘functionality over usability over design’ and latency being the "prized family jewel".
I hope the new guy on top didn't start thinking "Let's be more like Steve's company". :)
The grey on black text works better on good monitors than on my laptop. I lose contrast when the viewing angle changes, so if my laptop screen tilts a little to much, the text becomes unreadable. I wonder if the designers tested on a non high-end laptop.
I really can't stand the black bar at the top of the screen. After so many years of low contrast it feels way too distracting. But the redesign isn't going to bother me that much since I've been using DuckDuckGo exclusively for months.
Edit: If you can't stand the black bar either, just switch to the secure version of Google: https://encrypted.google.com/ They haven't changed it yet and it usually lags behind on updates.
This is the sort of thing that seems hugely distracting for a day or two, and in a week or two you'll be so used to it that, if someone were to take it away, going back to the way it was would seem like a huge distraction. For about two days.
Obviously, the nav bar has been internal for a while. I was not a big fan when I first saw it either, but now I've grown to quite like it. It's across all the products, and it sort of stamps the page as "you're at Google", much in the same way that you feel when you see the orange at the top of HN, or the blue at the top of Facebook. Even if you're tuned out, its in your peripheral vision and you get that sense of place.
That is true, eventually our brains will readjust and we will tune it out as usual. I suppose for the meantime the huge contrast will draw more attention to Google+ when they release its full features for everyone.
Hmm, that's strange... I'm not seeing it. The way Google rolls out tests and betas though there is never any way of knowing if you might be in a test group seeing something different from other people. Many times I've seen random features pop up and then disappear. (I assume because Google was testing something with a subset of people.) In one case I even received an email from Google telling me I was in a private beta of a new feature that I was not supposed to tell other people about it. I'm still pretty proud of that actually.
Google's old utilitarian aesthetic is finally evolving into a credible counter to Apple's design hegemony. I particularly like the clean, open design of the new Honeycomb interface, with less of a dependence on explicit box sections.
On my 13 inch MacBook the map itself only takes 50% of the actual screen real-estate, the rest is filled up with garbage (big search buttons, this toolbar which is not map-related, the left side-bar which is a giant, white, empty rectangle the first time when I open the page, the "change map-type" buttons which have gotten unnecessary bigger and bigger over time etc.). Compare this to Wikimapia's "here's the map on 98% of your screen, do what you want with it". Anyway, maybe it's just me, going to Google Maps because I love looking at maps and not clicking on stupid adds.
scary: if you visit google.com with Google Chrome, you can search by voice, even from your desktop computer (if you have a microphone and many laptops do). The idea is cool, but this seems like a huge security/privacy problem!
Not really; websites may ask for speech input (using the 'speech' attribute[1] in certain HTML tags), but the browser keeps full control of the feature, so they can't enable it themselves without your intervention.
Of course, since Google controls Chrome, they can control that too, but on the other hand, they already could - any native app can record sound. The solution for that is simply not installing applications you don't trust.
First, it's mentally oppressive. The black bar at the top is like working in a room with a low ceiling painted black all day. It makes you feel boxed in.
Next, lighter colors that exist in the sky (blues, greys) tend to work better at the top of interfaces. If you consider the screen to be your full field of vision and relate it to what your eyes normally see when outside, the top-most area of the screen is "the sky". Making the absolute top part of a webpage black makes me think about a black sky which is ominous and indicates a storm is coming.
Finally, it just looks unfriendly and robotic. Blue is a more humanistic color and is more pleasing. I can't think of a worse choice for this newly-redesigned top bar than the dark grey/black they decided on.