Google adds awful home page backgrounds, parties like it’s 1996
So I just went to Google’s home page, to see what all the fuss was about. Here’s what I saw:
After checking my surroundings to make sure that I hadn’t abruptly time-travelled to 1996, my web designer side kicked in and wondered what possessed Google to utterly destroy the basic fundamental usability of its search engine’s home page.
One of the core benefits of Google’s search engine has always been its simplicity. It gained marketshare by avoiding all the crud rivals added to ‘expand’ the search experience for users. With Google, you got a plain white page with a search box—simple and efficient.
Having used other Google products, I always had the nagging doubt that the Google home page aesthetic was more down to the company’s lack of design skills than anything else, and this new update pretty much confirms that. The current page has a background that makes it extremely difficult to read any of the on-screen text. It’s the kind of abomination that would have gotten a junior web designer fired from any self-respecting agency in 1996, let alone in 2010.
In an added nail to the coffin, the ‘change background image’ link that you can just about make out at the bottom-left of the page (that is if your eyes haven’t already exploded) doesn’t actually enable you to remove the background. Instead, you have to sign in to your Google account, assuming you have one. From a user-experience standpoint, this is crazy, but maybe Google just doesn’t care—after all, there are no ads on its home page.
Too many people at Google twiddling their thumbs, focusing on one-upmanship ideas for new homepage banners. Then someone, somewhere goes one further and suggests this.
Probably.
Isn’t the problem with Google products (other than search of course) is that non-tech people don’t know they exist. So isn’t this just a way to tell everyone “Look, you can do this!”.
These forced backgrounds will only be active for 24 hours (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/art-of-homepage.html) so is obviously being done for promotional reasons.
Therefore, using my crazy logic, it will go like this; people will see the different backgrounds, look to see if they can personalise it, see that they can uploaded their own picture to Picasa web albums, which then opens them up to other Google services.
Oh dear Google, that’s a major own goal. I always liked the simplicity of your home page and seeing the text links clearly. Do you really want to force people to use other search engines?
From the looks of things you made a fool of yourself with this moaning. Score one for Google.
I’m not sure Google gets ‘score one’ by ending its ‘experiment’ ten hours early and making spurious claims about having done so because of a ‘bug’. Pretty clear that the decision was at least in part due to the hugely negative response.