The fading homepage design tested a few weeks ago is now official

Dec 3, 2009 10:10 GMT  ·  By

If you thought that Google's homepage couldn't possibly be more stripped down, think again. Google is now making its fade-in homepage official and most users should start to see the ultra-minimalistic homepage from now on. The page features just the Google logo, the search button and the I'm feeling lucky button and nothing else unless you move the mouse. The company says this change allows users to focus on the thing they most likely came for, searching.

“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,” Marissa Mayer, VP of Search Products and User Experience, Kris Hom, software engineer, and Jon Wiley, User Experience designer, wrote.

There isn't that much to tell about the new homepage that isn't obvious from the first time you visit it. If you don't move the mouse and start typing your query the page will stay clear of any links with just the suggestion box popping out to spoil the fun. If you want to do something else, form the homepage except search you'll have to move your mouse which you'd do anyway.

In both cases though there are better, and faster, ways of doing it. If you just want to search, you type in the search box that virtually any browser today has and avoid the homepage altogether. And if you want to go to Gmail you'll just type in gmail.com and be done with it. On the other hand, there are millions of people googling Google, so maybe just because something is faster and simpler doesn't mean people will actually do it.

In usual Google fashion, especially for its most prized possession, the homepage, the company spent a lot of time testing the design and mulling over the details. In fact, it ran 10 different variations of the fading homepage before the designers reached a consensus and even then it took a while. In the end, Google believes it found the best solution. “[T]he 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!),” Google explained. What's more, further testing found that after a while users would actually be faster with the new homepage despite the time delay.

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The Google homepage with all the links removed
The Google homepage after fading in
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