Noted on contrast. We will look into it more -- that's exactly the kind of feedback we were hoping to get.
I've been mostly against flat design for a number of reasons but IMO, you've achieved a great design. I really like the minimalism of the hamburger button. Again, everything just gets out of your way.
Perhaps enlarging the font-size of the search result snippets might help with the contrast complaints - personally, I like your use of the grays. Again, it conveys a modern design.
I really hope that there will be an updated iOS app soon too :)
That's a terrible reason to pick a design. If you have no justification for a design other than 'lots of other new websites do this', then you have no justification at all... unless your purpose is to blend in and be forgotten.
Personally, I find the new design conveys a more relaxing experience although I'd like to see some of the fonts grow a bit. By modern, I refer to a different online world than #000 against #FFF and skeuo approaches. I'm not saying, those days are over completely, but fresher approaches are nice too.
Let's face it - design will continue to morph based upon different philosophies and whims, just as fashion does. Some visions are worse than others but some are implemented in pretty clever ways. I like the way DDG went with theirs.
For a modern web property or search engine competing against the likes of Google, what timdiggerm mentioned in a reply nails it. Sticking with an older design philosophy conveys a negative image for many users.
However, other properties going flat and subdued do not necessarily get my attention just because everyone else is doing it. This one does though because they did a lot of things right. The more I use next.duckduckgo.com the more I appreciate the small details that were thought out.
If anything should be questioned in hindsight, it should be why so many managers and executives allowed designers to seriously submit such bad ideas for consideration, never mind allowing such unusable designs to actually be implemented.
There are also some WCAG guidelines on contrast.
Here are some contrast checkers: http://snook.ca/technical/colour_contrast/colour.html http://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/ http://www.checkmycolours.com/
And the social widget is broken too.
Presumably these are the same designers who feel a "push" sign next to a nonfunctional handle is a good design for the hardware on a door.
It's kind of funny that we went from black on grey (netscape), via black on white (ie4) to grey on white (by design/via css) -- rather than simply back to black on grey or grey on black ("console" colors) -- as there's been some studies indicating that darker background leads to less power usage -- which actually has a usability benefit in longer battery life -- all the while maintaining a lower contrast.
Contrast has been mentioned, it's better on your "cards" (top toolbar that appears on some searches) than on the general results. Other than that, I'm not sure your choice of font is very good. It's not quite crisp enough to easily scan and read lots of text at once. I tried switching to Helvetica Neue instead of Proxima and things instantly looked more readable.
Overall a good step in the right direction though.
In the new version, it's taller, and makes it so I can only see 4 results at a time on my 1366x768 netbook. Makes me want to reach for my "fixedfixer" bookmarklet (sets all position:fixed styles to static), which is not really something I want to do every time I use my search engine. Still, that's more convenient than having to change a setting every time I clear my cookies.
Otherwise, I do like the clean and airy/breathing space in the new look.
Just be mindful of vertical screen estate, it's one of the most precious things to squander, and from a usability point of view, the only thing you can really argue that might need to be there is just the search box.
Personally, what I think is a better solution for that, is one of the older Google layouts, which had a search box at the bottom of a result page as well as at the top. Then you could just scan the first page of results and when you got to the bottom you probably had some ideas as how to refine the query, and there it was, ready for the next search! :)
PLEASE bring them back!
I actually don't mind the fixed header on the current version because it is much smaller and less obtrusive than the header on the redesign. I dislike fixed headers on news sites like the New York Times, because I want as much vertical space as possible to read the article. On a search engine, there is no issue of losing context, so a tastefully constructed fixed header is acceptable.
I understand why you wanted to add a second toolbar for more options and am not suggesting that you removed completely remove fixed headers for the default landing page. I just think that the second toolbar could easily fit on the same line as the search bar.
I see @tripzilch has commented below that he uses a bookmarklet that changes position:fixed elements to position:static. That's probably a better solution than my version which changes them to position:relative. I will have to try that method too.
And: thanks for listening to your users!
You realize HN comment pages scale pretty well, right? And everyone's happy.
There's no reason a site like DDG shouldn't make better use of larger windows. If someone wants to read long lines across a full-screen window on a 30" display (and I don't), they should be able to. In my case, I'd just like sites to make reasonably good use of a 1280-wide window (half a 30"), which DDG doesn't. That's not unreasonable.
Anyway, here's another good example of a page that scales well:
There are W3C standards for accessibility for a reason, and widely used sites should follow them.
When I see a site with such low contrast I think "the owner of this site doesn't really care if people actually read the contents" so I usually just close it. Unless I know from a reliable source that the contents is actually something very very interesting, that I would want to read then I'll take the extra effort and try to read it.
Keep up the great work!
And one more suggestion about this: When I click on the up arrow, focusing on the search bar would be nice. But that may be just me.
[0] Like this: http://cl.ly/VMql