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Google Bar: The next stage in Google redesign
- cmgarcia 15y agoThey sure are putting lots of eggs in the Google+ basket.
- cleverjake 15y agoI don't think this would change if google+ was ripped out. its a navigation change, not google+ integration.
- r00fus 15y agoI'm not sure you get it... Google+ is [the future of] Google.
- gujk 15y agoThat's what s/he said.
- estel 15y agoThis seems pretty Start Menu-esque, but I'm interested to see if the need to rollover will impact my workflow when moving between Mail/Reader/Calendar. I think I like the look though.
- Qz 15y agoI always have to click the current More link anyway since all I ever need is Documents and it's always hidden in there for some reason.
- Timothee 15y agoThat's interesting because it sounds like not everybody has the same stuff in the bar, but yet, the order doesn't match what people are actually using the most, which they know. (in my case, I use Reader a lot, but it's under "more")
- rafamvc 15y agoIt is terrible. Why one more click? Why change something that works? Google keep changing things... That don't really matter.
- j_baker 15y agoFor the record, it's not one more click. If you hover over the dropdown, it brings the menu up.
- jacktoole1 15y agoI think it would be fair to say it's two mouse actions though. Clicking takes no time; moving the mouse to the link in the first place takes some. Moving first to the Google logo, then to the app, would take longer. Sort of like eliminating the task bar in favor of the start menu - personally I use the task bar far more frequently, and keep often launched programs pinned so I can avoid the second mouse action cost.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- yanw 15y agoOne click still actually it expands onhover.
- estel 15y agoIf it doesn't really matter... why is it terrible?
- eiji 15y agoThe 'new' toolbar is higher than the black one, taking up more space, every site seems to transition to those sticking toolbars that do not go away when I scroll down. It's not about content anymore, it's about navigation and sharing. The toolbars from 10 years ago you could actually deinstall, this one unavoidable. And this 'save a click' argument is just silly. Hover still means you have to target two points. What's is funny though, the Google-bar at the bottom would at least make sense on a chromebook, but at the top they always suck, because contrary to an OS taskbar, they don't provide an invinite mouse target because of the Tab-bar.
- yanw 15y agoI approve, the new design makes more sense like that, the black nav-bar seemed out of place. I still don't have it yet and wonder how the homepage looks like? (Google.com)
- ErikHuisman 15y agohttp://www.google.com/help/hc/images/accounts/accounts_1714464_gbar_home_en.png http://www.google.com/help/hc/images/accounts/accounts_17144...
- yanw 15y agoThanks. I think they should have taken more liberality with the space there.
- ErikHuisman 15y agoThat menu isn't expanded by default. This is a mouseover example.
- jganetsk 15y agoIt is expanded by default on the Search page.
- notatoad 15y agoew. they should have just gotten rid of it, reverted to the classic look without any bar at all on the homepage.
- austingulati 15y agoWhen exactly does this go live? Or is it different for different locations/people? I still have a black bar.
- ward 15y agoI would assume that, as with most Google things, it gets rolled out in a 24-48 hour time span. Disclaimer: No source for this, but that's how it tends to go, if memory serves me right. Edit: Maybe comments on the post by [+Eddie Kessler](https://plus.google.com/111742562190411471360/posts/eGL4JeDMfdT https://plus.google.com/111742562190411471360/posts/eGL4JeDM...) will reveal more (they do not at the time of writing).
- estel 15y agoThat looks accurate per https://plus.google.com/100535338638690515335/posts/YqWNc9uDFXA https://plus.google.com/100535338638690515335/posts/YqWNc9uD...
- zyb09 15y agoAre they gonna redesign Google now every 2 month? I mean the new Google Bar looks ok, but the "old" black one is stylish too, so why just throw it out after such short period of time?
- yanw 15y agoAccording to this: http://vimeo.com/29965463 http://vimeo.com/29965463 it's just an iteration on the new design.
- snprbob86 15y agoI don't think this is a new redesign every two months... this incremental iteration at work. They wanted the launch the new design, but the existing bar was probably deeply intertwined with all of the existing sites. It takes a while to get all the teams on the same page.
- marssaxman 15y agoI'm surprised the existing bar got itself intertwined with existing sites - didn't they just launch it a few months ago? I don't understand why they need to change it so soon.
- notatoad 15y agothe bar has been around for a long time. it being black is a fairly new thing.
- polshaw 15y agoChanging it to a much more prominent black doesn't fit with the idea that they were planning to ditch it at that time, to me.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- toyg 15y ago
- gms 15y agoThese people are obsessed with social.
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- unalone 15y agoWhere you see a personality crisis, I see an impressive commitment to growth on Google's part. While their social efforts have been largely failures in past years, it's been clear for a long time that Google is now committed to a unified social experience with their products. And while they're still making a lot of mistakes – the recent Reader controversy, some of the recent Blogger weirdness – I think that with Google+ they've found an impressive hub that might serve as a central destination more appealing than Facebook's for a number of users. And for the first time in what seems like a while, they're iterating at a shocking speed that used to be synonymous with new Google products. Changing once every 6 months isn't a bad thing if the changes are all in one direction. What impresses me with this redesign is it shows how committed Google is to change – the social reworkings in June weren't a one-time thrust, they were merely an opening to these coming extensive changes.
- deadcyclo 15y agoI must admit that I preferred the "old" new one. Really can't put my finger on why. I'm interested in the impact on users when one changes things several times quickly like this. Anybody here that has knowledge/experience that would like to say a few words about it. Personally I always am annoyed by change, more so when things seem to change "all the time". Anybody have some actual statistics on how people reacted to this type of design changes?
- melling 15y agoThere's a certain percentage of the population that always prefers the "old one." People don't like change.
- idealform01 15y agobingo
- joebadmo 15y agoI agree with other commenters that it looks sort of like a start menu. Which indicates Google's commitment to replacing traditional OSs. I wonder when we'll see the Google bar integrated into Chrome.
- DougBTX 15y agoI thought along similar lines when I saw the video - there is already a search bar in the same place on every page, the address bar!
- int3rnaut 15y agoHere's an interesting question, how much have load times changed since the introduction of these bars (I know they've been present for a while) including this new iteration? Wasn't it always one of the major points of concern for Google to provide users with the quickest possible experience ? If I recall they used to have it down to a science. I don't think such changes can be noticed by the human brain but one would think it has risen and it would be interesting to know if it makes a difference and if they've abandoned that thought process in favour of the social sphere.
- ianstormtaylor 15y agoIt might have, but it doesn't really matter because page load times were never the end goal anyways—engagement was. More people searched, emailed, whatever with faster page loads. Now more people will see and use all of the things Google has to offer. Cross-pollination. Their services have been silo'ed for too long. I'm sure this is the kind of advice Steve Jobs gave Sergey Brin a couple months ago.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- Karunamon 15y agoAs usual, apps users don't get it straight off :(
- pdenya 15y agoInteresting changes. I can't say one way or another without using it how it will effect my experience but if they're trying to lower the bar for use the best thing they could do is make it easier for people to deal with multiple accounts. My google+ account is linked to my personal email which I'm never logged into during the day since we use google apps at work.
- ashcairo 15y agoI don't think rollover UI is a good idea for touch screen devices..
- martingordon 15y agoI just realized that every page linked to in the current (black) bar (aside from Google+ and Photos, which both go to Plus) has search bars with different heights, widths and logo placement. This new bar will be a nice change.
- jebblue 15y agoI don't care what they do as long as they go back to white or light colors. Black is cool if it's an Acura, on a web page it's hideous.
- haydenchambers 15y agowith millions of hits I'm assuming that black saves quite a bit of power
- Timothee 15y agoAnd Reader is pushed further and further away… It was in the black bar initially, between Photos and Web, but for whatever reason, was pushed down the "more" menu to be replaced by "Sites", which I'm pretty sure nobody has ever ever used. From the video (which by the way, sometimes has Reader in the black bar, sometimes not), it looks like Reader is relegated to the second column of the "more" menu. So went from one mouse movement and one click from Gmail, to two mouse movements and two clicks to, now, three fairly wide mouse movements and one click. Fantastic. They should just be more straightforward and just write a blogpost titled "We don't want you to use Reader, but why don't you make a webpage instead?".
- joshwa 15y agoOne of the effects of this design is to disadvantage frequent users of any non-core Google Products. For instance, if you visit Docs or Reader every day, multiple times a day, you're going to spend a lot of time hovering and cursing. Solution: let logged-in users star their frequently-used apps, and surface them at the root level menu (or even better, on the bar itself... almost like a Dock?). Alternative: like the Chrome New Tab page, automatically surface a user's most-used apps.
- joebadmo 15y agoThe reason I never noticed the increasing subordination of google reader (a product I use daily, or even hourly), is because I have other shortcuts for products I use that frequently. In fact, it's a little strange to me that someone would go to the google homepage in order to navigate to reader through the nav menu. That would never even occur to me. If I was already in the location bar, I would simply type in the url for google reader. Why would you type in the url for google homepage instead?
- nuclear_eclipse 15y agoI think there are more people who have their browser's home page set to google.com, where every new window or tab opens that page automatically. When that's the case, why have bookmarks for other Google properties when they're already available on your default page? Granted, I'm in the minority of users who set their homepage to "about:blank" so that it's up and ready as fast as possible and focuses the location/search bar by default. I use bookmarks to open new tabs for just about anything I visit on a regular basis.
- lpolovets 15y agoWhat's interesting to me is that if I had not seen the video, I would not have immediately guessed that hovering over the Google logo displays a drop-down menu. The tiny gray triangle next to the logo seems like a very poor affordance.
- nkoren 15y agoOh no. Oh HELL no. In keeping with the new look of Google Docs, Reader etc., they've added an extra 40px of useless, un-necessary vertical padding to the bar. While their intro video criticises the old bar for wasting precious screen real estate, this new bar wastes more than twice as much of it. I hope that some day soon they wake up and realise that screen real-estate shouldn't be wasted the way they're doing. As it stands, the only way I can now use Reader is by Greasemonkeying the hell out of its stylesheets; on my small laptop screen, many of the rest of Google's services are now all but unusable for me. This "stylistic cohesion" that they're aiming for is driving me away from every Google product out there.
- Zaim2 15y agoNot really. Currently there's the black navbar AND the product specific search. This change is making the current product specific search the universal navbar, so at the end of it you've stilled gained the space occupied by the black nav bar.
- blankenship 15y agoIf this solves the horrendous, inconsistent multiple account login issue from the last major rollout, then I'm willing to suffer wasted space and more clicks.
- grandalf 15y agoThe red indicator is a bit of a tax on attention considering the low importance things it typically signals. UI designers should be careful about attracting the eye this way w/o good reason.
- snowwrestler 15y agoThe hover nav is a usability abomination. It's not discoverable--the only clue it's there is a tiny arrow. On the old bar it was totally obvious where the links were to jump to other properties. It presents an inconsistent user interface. If you move the pointer in from the bottom, you're on the left nav. If you move the pointer in from the top, you're on the hover nav. It would be like getting two totally different neighborhoods depending on whether you drove in from the north or south. It requires precise mouse choreography. It's not enough to aim for the target, you have to follow a specific path to get there (especially true with the extra fly-out submenu). If you don't, you have to go back to the beginning and start over. The old bar was a fixed set of targets--easy to hit from wherever.
- gustaf 15y agoI'm glad Google have programmers that know metrics that can look at the results of this. Usability mess.
- gujk 15y agoMetrics and A/B testing were replaced by HiPPO and Facebook freakout/brain-drain at Google a year or two ago.
- sneak 15y agoFood for thought - would we have the PocketProtectorPlex fucking up usability across half the web now if it wasn't for Zuckerberg's "everything's going great, let's start a land war in Russia!" mentality and drive to own identity across the entire internet?
- gujk 15y agoGoogle has been trying to take over the web since Zuck was in high school. Look at when OpenID/OAuth came out.
- bodegajed 15y agoI quit using Gmail, Google Reader and GCal this year. I didn't like how Google bullies me into using G+.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- figital 15y agoCheckout a recent build of chromium ... (especially the profile/alias switcher with "Slice", "Agent X", and "Fluffy") I'm using rev 111735. I'm guessing anything now in the Google+ toolbar is quickly headed up a level into the "jetpack'ish" plumbing ... this latest redesign news seems like a fast-track'd gateway to that.
- azadder 15y agoI welcome the removal of the black bar for one simple reason: the valuable screen space it had taken on my netbook has been restored to some degree.
- jigs_up 15y agoI'm really quite sick of Google nowadays. I don't want any of this new stuff they have been introducing.
- SonicSoul 15y agoscreens and resolutions are getting larger. unless it's for mobile screen, i don't see the need to get rid of it. perhaps they based that on some UX statistics, but doesn't make much sense to me.
- gcb 15y agoand google lost focus. not because is has too many products. heck no! but because it's wasting more time trying to be a ... for a lack of a new term let's use the old one: "portal" name all companies that lost focus and became "portals" in the past. all of them wasted a lot of time on the top-$sitename-bar right before it reached the point of no return.
- ryan_s 15y agoWhile I don't hate it... it does look familiar... http://i.imgur.com/fEHbB.jpg http://i.imgur.com/fEHbB.jpg I just hope they make every page consistent. What annoyed me about the current navigation is that the links move around, and Reader is tucked far away under More.
- ashcairo 15y agoHonestly, this is how uninnovative Google has become.. They get excited over introducing a drop down menu! I know Apple are known for overhyping basic functionality. But, seriously? A DROP DOWN MENU THAT breaks UI for touch screen devices.. Sigh.
- natrius 15y agoHow presumptuous. Have you tried the new interface on a touch screen device?
- tarellel 15y agoWhat the heck! Can't they just make up their minds already?
- mparr4 15y agoNot at all a fan of the fixed bar. I'm on a 13" macbook. That window space is precious, and this bar is bigger than the last, non-fixed one. If you're using chrome the search box is redundant anyway. Using Chrome the browser takes up 100px between tabs before the window starts, this bar looks like another 100px on top of that. That's 1/4 of my monitor before content begins.
- richardw 15y agoI'm not one who hates on new things just because they're change, but I hate this already. Windows 95 brought us the Start Menu. This is a Google Start Menu. It's based on hierarchical menus that are fiddly to navigate, especially if any terms are long and you have to stay in a narrow row to not have it undo your last movement. You have to move to the top, select something, move down, then if there's a sub-menu, move right. Why not make it e.g. a 3x3 grid so I have to move less with fewer errors and the blocks can be bigger, and you can add more default icons without it scrolling halfway down the screen? Besides, everyone knows clicking the logo takes you to the root page. Why are Google retraining all future users to expect an X-bar on our websites? Now, they can't trust what will happen when clicking that. It could be a menu, it could take you off the page, what will it do? And it still chooses the dumbest things as my defaults. Youtube? I've never, ever clicked on Youtube from there. Ever. Why show it to me? Give me Calendar, which is now on the sub-menu. Don't show me Search because I've never clicked on that, I just hit ctrl-t and type a phrase in a new window. [edit] and Reader is hidden but + is everywhere? Someone isn't measuring clicks, I'm thinking. Win95, I blame you. [edit2] at least let me drag and drop stuff like I could in 1995, so I can rearrange the defaults.
- leak 15y agoI'm with you on every point. I'll even go as far as to say that they don't want you to use the menu. I'm just throwing this out there, but I think they want people to stay on the search screen. They want you to search for everything to get to something. Reader? Search for Reader. Gmail? Search for Gmail. If you use search more, they have more opportunity to make money from ads. I'm not sure how much they care about any other product so this could be why every other product is now harder to get to.
- wahnfrieden 15y agoIt's not a terrible idea. How many of us use Alfred or Quicksilver or the like?
- leak 15y agoExactly
- albertsun 15y agoThis is a great illustration of the difference between designing to help your users do what they want to do, and designing to make your users do what you want them to do. I think most of the design changes we've been seeing on Facebook and Google fall into the latter category. People designing for the latter category probably also broadly explains why there are so many terribly and professionally designed sites out there.
- worldimperator 15y agoGreat news. I already dedicated a key on my keyboard to open that menu.
- hessenwolf 15y agoThey're trying to gradually put me onto GoogleBook instead of being on the search homepage.
- lambada 15y agoSomething that the demo video has made me think of, is how their new UI style seem like it would be easy to use on a tablet. The large whitespace, oversized icons and 'clickable' areas.
- gujk 15y agoYes. Instead of responsive design, Google is throwing PC users under the bus to push for and invest in Android and tablets.
- ehthere 15y agoHow does this work on a touch interface?
- now 15y agoOK, so everyone agrees that it’s less discoverable, but how many actually used the old bar? I have only clicked an item in that bar once. When I realized that it opened a new tab I never clicked any of the items again. I’m not clear on how this new selection will work, but if it lets me switch between GMail and Google Reader from one menu and remain in one browser tab, I’m happy, even if a bar would have been a little quicker for switching.
- askar_yu 15y agoOne of the things I liked most about Google search was that there was no garbage on the page. Just a simple search field on a white background. But then came the black bar at the top (which I could not figure out how to get rid of), now this... One step at a time, they're getting closer to other garbage sites.
- tomwalsham 15y agoWhen searching, if Google doesn't detect my query as a potential Image search, it's always been convenient to just click 'Images' on the top and get your current query in image form. This used to work for other services - News in particular being one I used frequently - until the past few weeks in which they broke this 'transfer your search' functionality. This appears to be the endgame. I don't know if this dropdown will preserve search terms when switching to Images, but even if it does, the additional UI fiddling is going to be a big net loss for my Google workflow.
- trevorstrohman 15y agoTry clicking on "Images" or "News" on the left side of the search results page. (disclaimer: I work for Google)
- gujk 15y agoWhy doesn't this work on https://encrypted.google.com https://encrypted.google.com?
- DanBC 15y agoThe article makes no mention of using this with just a keyboard. I wish writers were required (by company culture, not law![1]) to include accessibility options when talking about new features or software. Even if they had to say "Turn this feature off if you're using an on-screen keyboard, because the combination sucks." [1] Although I'm not averse to anti-discrimination laws being used a bit more vigorously.