Google experiments with no navigation bar on all its sites | Hacker News Reader

Google experiments with no navigation bar on all its sites

thenextweb.com

48 pointsLightning38 comments

I actually think it would be better without the navbar.

Google is my homepage, but when I want to go to Google Drive or Gmail, I type "drive" or "mail" into Chrome's search bar. I think the Chrome-OS-like menu would be better than the navbar. If they do remove it, they should at least make a point to maintain a page with links to all their services.

I am not a big fan of the nav bar either but more so because the links that currently show up there are of no use to me. I think it would get a lot more use if they allowed it to be customized or if they updated it based on your usage patterns.

Frankly it does look way better without the navbar. I never understood this move by Google of making that bar black; I guess there was some discussion internally along the lines of "yes, it looks like crap, but we have the data here and it shows people are engaging with the navbar 240% more than before!".

Yeah. Aesthetically, the black bar with its fat Arial (I think) characters looks out of place. I know they're trying to keep things simple to make their page load time super fast, but if someone can make the Matrix in JS with like 700 bytes, I think Google could make a unique, attractive menu to replace what it has now.

CMD+T > "dri" > return is infinitely faster that using the nav bar, and I echo everyone that thinks it looks better without. Still, I wonder if a customizable bar would have been an even better option (for those locations that aren't nicely formatted to ____.google.com).

This makes sense to me. The black navbar is all links with no context. A link in-context is much more valuable: instead of a link to "play" on the top, they can put links to relevant app or media purchases in the search results. instead of a link to 'calendar' at the top when you're using gmail, calendar events can show up in the gmail UI. Instead of a link to +, they've got personal search results showing up.

the other thing i've been seeing lately is google-now style notifications in the top corner of many google properties showing my google+ contacts' birthdays. If they expand that from just birthdays to a full-on google now experience, that's a whole lot more in-context links to google properties.

Now is also getting built into Chrome.

https://plus.google.com/100132233764003563318/posts/idTrXBfo...

RSS should not be a core functionality of a web browser but guess what should? Google Now... I like Google Now but why can't it be implemented as an extension? Does it really make sense to have Google services entangled with the browser? With sync it is at least possible to deploy your own server even if the option is hidden behind a flag (and google refuses to add an option in the UI). And then there is the new tab page with another search bar just some hundred pixels below the omnibar that has the same functionality. And a new launcher... When applications start implementing their own launchers it's usually a sign they are becoming bloated. Remember Nero (not so) SmartStart?

This a team of amazingly smart people who reinvented the browser so probably there are good reasons supporting these decisions and I'm not smart enough to understand them.

it is being implemented as an extension...

This is a big deal.

I think both experiments are consistent with the idea of thinking of the different Google properties as individual apps, and with Chrome apps becoming first-class apps.

Thus on ChromeOS you would access gmail through the menu of applications (not by going to google.com and clicking on the mail link on top). If I click on the Gmail "app" on ChromeOS it's confusing if the top navbar appears, because then there are two ways to launch other apps.

The second experiment seems to be experimenting with exposing non-ChromeOS people to this notion (i.e. get everyone used to the app menu, so that it feels natural when they get ChromeOS).

It would be possible to do this by e.g. hiding the navbar only on ChromeOS; my guess is the idea is to have a consistent experience across all browsers. If you're stuck inside IE on Windows the app menu is embedded into the google page. If you're on the "brave new world" of ChromeOS the app menu is native. But if the navbar isn't there on ChromeOS, then it can't be there on IE.

I'm surprised that OP is so surprised.

I'd suspect that the vast majority of users never click on the top nav bar, have tuned it out completely ("banner blindness"), and will not even notice it's absence.

The banner bar also can get confusing when it has a menu item duplicating an 'inner' menu item but working somewhat different. I've at times had _two_ 'settings sprockets' icons on my page, one on the top navbar and one somewhere else, and leading to different pages. Also compare doing a google search and then clicking 'News' on the banner bar, vs clicking 'News' from the 'More' options in the menu below the searchbox (this second 'News' used to be avail without drilling down into 'More', which was either more or less confusing depending on which 'News' option you "really" wanted).

Apps for Business users do (when switching from Mail to Calendar to Drive to Sites to Groups to .... This change happened on my account last week (it has since switched back) and it was really disruptive while it lasted. I ended up installing the "Black Menu" Chrome Extension.

Personally, I like the navbar, I just don't like how it shortcuts services I don't use while hiding services I do use under the "More" option. For a company so bent in understanding my preferences and interests, this oversight has always puzzled me.

It started off as "shortcuts to services you use" and morphed gradually into "shortcuts to services we want you to use".

I can't tell you how many times I've clicked the "more" button looking for scholar to no avail. Its the only extra service (non search) I use regulary and its the one not in the navbar.

Google. Once the ultra-lean, to-the-point search site alternative (remember Yahoo, and the others, crammed with links and icons?). Now this once simple search page is becoming more and more unusable for those of us who still use perfectly good older hardware. The amount of "intelligence" now built into the search bar, the pre-fetching, the guessing what you're searching for before you even finish typing it... VERY frustrating.

Yes you can disable JavaScript and that helps some things but breaks a lot of other things.

I don't really care if gMail or their other "apps" are loaded down with bling and scripts that fire on every keystroke or mouse movement, because I don't use any of those things. But please, leave it off of the search page. I just want to find what I'm looking for.

I'm surprised that a person in your position would even bother to use the search page instead of your browser's search box.

I wonder how much of your problem is hardware vs network speed. How much bandwidth do you have? I typically use hardware for many years (~5), but in the last few years things have plateaued to the point where I don't see nearly as much difference between hardware from today compared to five years ago.

Interesting. I've been asking them to flatten the number of information bars sinc ebeing a Chromebook beta tester. When you start counting from the outside of the browser window, some Google services had 7 layers of toolbars - tabs, browser nav, bookmarks, Google Nav, Document, Menu, toolbar (this has changed since then).

I actually dislike the navbar.

I can't count how many times I've wanted to search for news about something, typed in my search, and hit "news" from the navbar rather than the results bar thus erasing my search term. Why do I have two ways to get news?

About time! I logged into Google+ the other week and was frustrated how much of the top header was "position:fixed;" as you scroll down. What a waste of screen real estate.

Example: https://www.dropbox.com/s/liv1rjcqojvblg8/Screen%20Shot%2020...

You should probably try the latest build of Chrome, Google is now integrated into the browser, and that navigation bar would break away from the seamless UI integration.

Not to mention it was ugly, and never contained the options I needed.

I guess that explains why this website UI change would depend on the user's browser version.

If they make the menu hoverable (at least on desktop) then their other products are still only a click away.

This makes more sense actually because it means more searches from Google's main homepage, because there are less options to navigate away.

It also makes the page less cluttered and gives the user 2 distinct set of actions: 1) Perform a search 2) Use a popup menu to navigate to a different product

I suspect google, like many of us, is either designing 'mobile first', or at least prioritizing mobile highly enough that they will never design a fundamental interaction that requires 'hover' to work.

It's easy enough to tap a menu to get it to open. As an iPad user, I don't think I would mind a well-designed hover-centric workflow, as long as it works okay on touch too.

It would have to be well-designed, though. Apparently it's really easy to wind up with a moronic hover-based menu, judging by the number of them I see around.

The trouble is that android doesn't support hover-events the way iOS does. On iOS taps automatically turn into hovers when there is a hover behaviour, on android a tap is always a click.

I've been saying it since 2005, navigation on websites is often counterproductive because the vast majority of people are using a search engine to find the pages/information they want. All you have to do is look at your stats to see this is true. People may say they want navigation but the metrics say otherwise.

Meanwhile, according to Matt Cutts, Google has been penalizing websites with "bad navigation" (which is totally subjective, but I digress) meanwhile I'm nudging Google, "You guys are in the search business, don't you want people SEARCHING for pages instead of navigating to them?"

People want to search for pages. So why is Google discouraging them from searching and encouraging them to navigate, when first and foremost they are a search engine?

And let me state the obvious: most of the time search is faster than navigation. Several clicks and realizing your information is not available or not where it should be or not comprehensive enough vs. search which takes you directly to the most relevant result.

Doesn't much matter to me. I'm addicted to the DuckDuckGo bang syntax anyway...

I had DDG with HTML5 voice recognition on my site for a while, but after consulting with Gabriel decided it was a data leak to Google. Can't wait for voice to be a seamless part of the real web stack. Still, a keyboard shortcut gets you to the searchbar and then you can bang on to anywhere else on the web. jkl.io if you want to try it. I will change the font in the search box soon. Keyboard shortcuts for the categories are underlined. I want to make it a suitable start page (like some kind of zen Yahoo I suppose). Feedback appreciated (although by Sunday the news thins out for Science and some others).

How about a large button labelled start.

https://encrypted.google.com has had that navbar-less format for several months now. Looks like they are trying to unify them. They've also changed who signs the SSL certs: https://www.google.com used to be signed by Thawte but is now signed by the Google Internet Authority (root GeoTrust), which encrypted.google.com has used for as long as I can remember.

Next they could maybe cut down on the UI of Google Books.

http://i.imgur.com/BXvRdwq.png

It is often convenient to have the browser window small when working at something else beside it.

I wonder if they tested that after logging in. Maybe it doesn't make sense to offer the other services if you are not logged in?

I just tried, signed out: no navbar, signed in: navbar.

On Chrome Canary, I get no navbar whether I'm signed in or not.

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