Google Play Hide And Seek With The Home Page

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Left Before the fade. Right After the fade.
Although Halloween is over, Google is still in the ghostly mood. Ask why? That’s because the giant has planned to release minimalist homepage that removes many of elements, such as Gmail, Orkut, Books, etc and get them back when you move your mouse over it. As you visit google.com you would find only the logo and the search box.

The Official Blog Exposes -

All in all, we ran 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 our doodles — the barcode doodle combined with the fade was particularly ironic in its overstated minimalism. However, 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.

Google thinks the “fade in” is an elegant solution that offers options to those who want them, but removes distractions for the user intent on searching.

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