Official Google Blog

Gmail’s new look

November 1, 2011

preview of Gmail's new lookSwitch to the new lookGmailStreamlined conversations

Elastic density

New HD themesiStockphoto

Smarter navigation

Better search

Switch to the new look linkGmailPosted by Jason Cornwell, User Experience Designer(Cross-posted from the Gmail Blog)

Google News highlights unique content with Editors’ Picks

August 4, 2011

(Cross-posted on the Google News Blog)recent improvementsnews preferences

as an experiment last yearHelp CenterPosted by Yogita Mehta, Software Engineer, Google News Team

Calling from Gmail now in 38 languages, with lower rates to over 150 destinations

August 2, 2011

call any mobile phone or landlineon our rates pagevoice and video plug-in

Posted by Pierre Lebeau, Product Manager, Gmail Team

Evolving the Google design and experience

June 28, 2011

New Google homepage with a smaller logo and links moved to the top and bottom edges of the browser for a cleaner look

Focus: Whether you’re searching, emailing or looking for a map, the only thing you should be concerned about is getting what you want. Our job is to provide the tools and features that will get you there quickly and easily. With the design changes in the coming weeks and months, we’re bringing forward the stuff that matters to you and getting all the other clutter out of your way. Even simple changes, like using bolder colors for actionable buttons or hiding navigation buttons until they’re actually needed, can help you better focus on only what you need at the moment.

Elasticity: In the early days, there was pretty much just one way to use Google: on a desktop computer with an average-sized monitor. Over a decade later, all it takes is a look around one’s home or office at the various mobile devices, tablets, high-resolution monitors and TVs to see a plethora of ways to access the web. The new design will soon allow you to seamlessly transition from one device to another and have a consistent visual experience. We aim to bring you this flexibility without sacrificing style or usefulness.

Effortlessness: Our design philosophy is to combine power with simplicity. We want to keep our look simple and clean, but behind the seemingly simple design, use new technologies like HTML5, WebGL and the latest, fastest browsers to make sure you have all the power of the web behind you.

updated look and feel

Original Google homepage in 1997Google SearchGoogle MapsPosted by Chris Wiggins, Creative Director, Digital

Beefing up goo.gl with new features

April 13, 2011

(Cross-posted on the Social Web Blog)launchedgoo.glCopy to clipboardforums

Remove from dashboard

Spam reportinggoo.glgoo.gl/spam-reportOngoing speed and stability improvementsgoo.glone of the fastest and most reliable feedbackPosted by Devin Mullins, Software Engineer

Fresh new perspectives for your blog

March 31, 2011

(Cross-posted from Blogger Buzz)

Infinite scrolling: read more posts without having to reload or click to a second page

New layouts: different views suited to different types of blogs

Speed: download images as you view them, not all at once in advance

Interactivity: there are now more ways to experience and engage with blog content

FlipcardMosaicSidebarSnapshotTimeslide

Flipcard

Snapshot

Mosaichttp://buzz.blogspot.com/viewhelp center articlelet us know what you thinkPosted by Antin Harasymiv, Software Engineer, Blogger

The Google design, turned up a notch

May 6, 2010

introducedas far back as 2006Search Options panel

We knew that adding a left-hand panel would inevitably add some weight to the results page, so we took a number of steps to lighten other aspects of the design. The overall visual redesign started with the Google logo. Here’s an image comparing the old logo (top) and the new logo (bottom):

The new logo is lighter, brighter and simpler. We took the very best qualities of our design — personality and playfulness — and distilled them. The logo was the foundation for new icons and hundreds of tiny alterations designed to accommodate and seamlessly integrate the expanded functionality of the left-hand panel. For example, we lightened up the footer at the bottom of the page by removing the blue shading and the underlines on the links, lightening the color and expanding the search box. Here’s a picture of the old footer (top) compared with the new (bottom):

While I’m very happy about our latest improvements, a designer's work is never done. We’re already testing additional refinements and we'll continue to listen to all of you as we work to continue making search better.

If you’re curious, here are some of the other design prototypes we tried (you might have to click to magnify some of these images):

Blue homepage: We’ve always had a strong affinity for blue — after all, blue is usually the color of web links, so it binds the web together. It became the basis for many designs.
Blue button: The big blue button made it all the way to our first external experiment, where it was promptly rejected by users. We heard you loud and clear and changed the button in the next round.
Universal bars: This design emphasizes different types of results with labeled blocks in the main results pane, such as books, news and shopping.
Blue results: This is one of the final blue designs we created and marks the point when we renamed the "Web" link to "Everything" — a label that gets closer to the intent of our mission to organize all the world’s information.

Posted by Jon Wiley, Senior User Experience Designer

Google’s coming to Austin for SXSW

March 11, 2010

SXSW Interactive Festival

Representatives from Google and YouTube will be speaking on more than 20 panels on a variety of subjects, including open source, mobile, real-time communication and user experience design.

At the Google booth, we’ll be doing demos on a wide range of products, including Google Maps, Blogger, Wave, Reader and YouTube, and sessions on building apps for App Engine, extensions on Chrome and accessibility APIs and hacks for Android.

On Sunday, our all-day Hackathon will give you the chance to get your hands dirty and build applications using a variety of Google technologies. At the end of the day, we’ll award prizes, including Android phones, for the best apps.

We’re sponsoring the festival’s first Mothers’ Room, where nursing moms can go for comfort and privacy.

Bikehugger’s Mobile Socialbuilt bike directionsBlogger/Reader partynewfeaturesSXSW Film Closing/Music OpeningSXSW website@googlesxswPosted by Emily Wood, Editor, Google Blog and Twitter team

Understanding the web to make search more relevant

January 22, 2010

announcedAnswer highlighting in search resultsGoogle Squaredprogressmeet john doe directorjohn lennon diedwhat was the political party of president fordempire state height

Rich Snippets for eventsRich Snippetsirving plaza

Webmaster CentralPosted by Kavi Goel and Noah Weiss, Product Managers

Go thataway: Google Maps India learns to navigate like a local

December 17, 2009

launchedGoogle Maps India

easier to seeeasier to rememberorientdescribe a turnconfirm

design

Posted by Olga Khroustaleva, User Experience Researcher, Google Maps

Transliteration goes global

December 17, 2009

Google Transliteration
Using Google Transliteration you can convert Roman characters to their phonetic equivalent in your language. Note that this is not the same as translation — it's the sound of the words that are converted from one alphabet to the other. For example, typing "hamesha" transliterates into Hindi as: Hindi transliteration example

, typing "salaam" transliterates into Persian as: Farsi transliteration example

and typing "spasibo" transliterates into Russian as

. Since our initial launch for a single Indian language, we've been hard at work on improving quality, adding more languages and new features.

Today we are pleased to introduce a new and improved version of Google Transliteration, available in Google Labs or at http://www.google.com/transliterate.

In this new version, you can select from one of seventeen supported languages: Arabic, Bengali, Greek, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Persian, Punjabi, Russian, Sanskrit, Serbian, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu. You can also compose richly formatted text and look up word definitions with our dictionary integration. If the default transliteration is not the word you wanted, you can highlight it to see a list of alternatives. For even finer-grained control, we provide a unicode character picker to allow character-by-character composition.

Google Transliteration is integrated into several Google properties and we have an API and bookmarklets to extend this capability to other websites. A solution we initially built to solve a problem we saw here in India is now being used in many other parts of the world as well - one small example of the scale and leverage that technology can bring in today's increasingly globalized environment. As with all labs products, we will continue to improve the technology and try out new features. We would love to hear from you, so do let us know what you think.

Posted by Nilesh Tathawadekar and Mohammed Aslam, Software Engineers

New site hierarchies display in search results

November 17, 2009

searchspidersapien reviews

The URL of this result is "www.productwiki.com/spidersapien," which doesn't provide much additional information about the site or this result. Now take a look at the result with the new site hierarchy display:

The new text provides useful information about the page. You can tell that the ProductWiki site has information about many different products, organized in different categories, and you can even tell that Spidersapien is a robot toy. In addition, each phrase in the green line is actually a link. For example, clicking on "Toys & Games" takes you to ProductWiki's listing page for all toys, and clicking on "Robots" takes you to a list of their robot toys. This way if you realize that you're interested in a more general category than this specific product (there are a lot of cool robot toys out there) you can easily access information on broader topics.

The host and domain for the site (in this case www.productwiki.com) will always be shown, so you always know what website you're going to before you click. There's not always enough room to show the complete hierarchy, so sometimes we use ellipses to replace some of the intermediate levels, like in this result for [how to make granola]:

The information in these new hierarchies come from analyzing destination web pages. For example, if you visit the ProductWiki Spidersapien page, you'll see a series of similar links at the top, "Home> Toys & Games> Robots." These are standard navigational tools used throughout the web called "breadcrumbs," which webmasters frequently show on their sites to help users navigate. By analyzing site breadcrumbs, we've been able to improve the search snippet for a small percentage of search results, and we hope to expand in the future.

When we design the way results appear on google.com, our goal is to get you to the information you're looking for as quickly as possible. Sometimes that means improving how we represent websites, and other times that means giving you new ways to explore content. We're always happy when we can introduce a feature, like site hierarchies, that does both!

Posted by Harvey Jones and Daniel Rocha, Software Engineers, Result UI Team

Now S-U-P-E-R-sized!

September 9, 2009

Searchchanges to our homepage

Before and after on Windows XP, running Google Chrome. Click on the image for a larger view.

Designing useful mobile services for Africa

July 8, 2009

SMS services in UgandaGoogle.orgGrameen ApplabMTN

Trying mobile search for the first time

Posted by Sian Townsend, Mobile User Experience Researcher, and Charles Warren, Mobile User Experience Design Manager

The evolution of Gmail labels

July 1, 2009

labelsfiltersanynew features today

We also learned that if we made labels sound too much like folders, people got confused. For instance, while "Copy to" and "Add to" were easy to use, these terms made people think they were creating multiple copies of a message. "Move to" was familiar but didn't lead people to think they were creating copies. And people seem to have picked it up fast! Since the launch of the new menu buttons in March, we're seeing a 50% increase in new Gmail users trying labels in their first 2 weeks. And overall usage of the "Move to" menu surpassed that of the "Labels" menu within 7 weeks of launching:

For our latest set of changes, we looked at how you access labels on the left side. In other email applications, folders get the royal treatment and are given a seat at the top near your inbox. But in Gmail, labels were stuck in a box below Chat — almost like we were telling people, "you don't want to use these." In testing, we discovered that it worked best to remove the terminology altogether and just place custom labels right under the system labels (e.g. "Inbox"):

The last step was to add drag-and-drop. Now, you can drag mail into a label, or even drag a label directly onto a message:

Making it easier to process and organize your mail requires more than just labels, but we hope these changes start to improve the process. We have much more in store, so stay tuned and keep the feedback coming.

Posted by Michael Leggett, Gmail User Experience Designer

New logo look

May 21, 2009

Google LabsGoogle ModeratorGoogle Code

Posted by Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Search Products and User Experience, and Jamie Divine, Senior Visual Designer

Eye-tracking studies: more than meets the eye

February 6, 2009

Universal Search

Click the images to view them larger.

...and the thumbnails also seemed to make it easy for people to skip over the results with thumbnails when those results were not relevant to their search (page with the thumbnail on the right).

For the Universal Search team, this was a successful outcome. It showed that we had managed to design a subtle user interface that gives people helpful information without getting in the way of their primary task: finding relevant information.

In addition to search research, we also use eye-tracking to study the usability of other products, such as Google News and Image Search. For these products, eye-tracking helps us answer questions, such as "Is the 'Top Stories' link discoverable on the left of the Google News page?" or "How do the users typically scan the image results — in rows, in columns or in some other way?"

Eye-tracking gives us valuable information about our users' focus of attention — information that would be very hard to come by any other way and that we can use to improve the design of our products. However, in our ongoing quest to make our products more useful, usable, and enjoyable, we always complement our eye-tracking studies with other methods, such as interviews, field studies and live experiments.

Posted by Anne Aula and Kerry Rodden, User Experience Researchers