Google Fades In Its Homepage
03 Dec, 2009, 3:43 pm IST | by
tech2 News Staff
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Google's released a new version of their homepage - that has a "fades in" feature. When the hompage loads it only shows the Google Logo, the search box and the buttons. Once the mouse is moved all the other links appear. Google justifies this by saying, "For the vast majority of people who come to the Google homepage, they are coming in order to search, and this clean, minimalist approach gives them just what they are looking for first and foremost. For those users who are interested in using a different application like Gmail, Google Image Search or our advertising programs, the additional links on the homepage only reveal themselves when the user moves the mouse. Since most users who are interested in clicking over to a different application generally do move the mouse when they arrive, the "fade in" is an elegant solution that provides options to those who want them, but removes distractions for the user intent on searching." Google conducted a approximately 10 variants of the fade-in. Some of the experiments hindered the user experience: for example, the variants of the homepage that hid the search buttons until after the fade performed the worst in terms of user happiness metrics. Other variants of the experiment produced humorous outcomes when combined with the doodles — the barcode doodle combined with the fade was particularly ironic in its overstated minimalism. However, in the end, the variant of the homepage launched today was positive or neutral on all key metrics, except one: time to first action. This worried them a bit until they realised that it would only take users milliseconds to figure out what to do to get the other links on the page. We personally think it's a pretty pointless feature and a waste of man hours. It just doesn't make sense to fix what isn't broken. What do you think? Let us know in the comments section below. |
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