It seems that Google is always trying to improve. But sometimes the improvement is not really an improvement. The search engine recently changed its home page to “fade in”, which means that all you’ll see upon landing on the page is the search box. Then, after a few seconds you’ll start to see all the navigational links at the top of the page. Is this good?
From the Google blog:
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.
Trust me, I noticed. But I also noticed that if I want to click one of those navigational links then I’ve got to wait. That didn’t make me all that happy…
