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
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.