Google Explored New Safari-like Redesign for Chrome in 2016 -- But Decided Against It (read.cv) 26
Chris Lee, a former staff interaction designer at Google, writes in a blog post: Chrome Home was an ambitious redesign of mobile Chrome's main UI. It brought Chrome's toolbar to the bottom of the screen and turned in into a peeking panel that could be swiped to expose additional controls. I created the original concept and pitch for Chrome Home in 2016. It was based off two insights:
1. Phones were growing in size, and we had opportunity to innovate in creating a gestural, spatial interface that would still be usable with one hand.
2. Mobile Chrome was also growing in features - but because its minimalist interface kept everything behind a "three dot" menu, these features were underutilized and hard to access.
The idea caught traction internally, eventually becoming a Chrome org priority. I then led a team to execute and iterate on the concept. Executing on Chrome Home required rethinking not just the toolbar, but almost all of Chrome's UI: search, bookmarks, tabs, prompts, etc. To inform our decisions, we used a variety of prototyping and testing approaches of increasing fidelity. Ultimately, such a fundamental change to a web browser required nothing short of building it into the product and testing it in longitudinal studies and live beta experiments. We heard a mixture of reactions. The feature gained a cult following among the tech community. But for some mainstream users, the change felt disorienting. Chrome serves billions of users around the globe with varying tech literacy. I became increasingly convinced that launching Chrome Home would not serve all our users well. So just as I strongly as I had pitched the original concept, I advocated for us to stop the launch -- which took not a small amount of debate. Lee adds, "oh, and Safari in iOS 15 picked up some similar ideas and criticisms."
1. Phones were growing in size, and we had opportunity to innovate in creating a gestural, spatial interface that would still be usable with one hand.
2. Mobile Chrome was also growing in features - but because its minimalist interface kept everything behind a "three dot" menu, these features were underutilized and hard to access.
The idea caught traction internally, eventually becoming a Chrome org priority. I then led a team to execute and iterate on the concept. Executing on Chrome Home required rethinking not just the toolbar, but almost all of Chrome's UI: search, bookmarks, tabs, prompts, etc. To inform our decisions, we used a variety of prototyping and testing approaches of increasing fidelity. Ultimately, such a fundamental change to a web browser required nothing short of building it into the product and testing it in longitudinal studies and live beta experiments. We heard a mixture of reactions. The feature gained a cult following among the tech community. But for some mainstream users, the change felt disorienting. Chrome serves billions of users around the globe with varying tech literacy. I became increasingly convinced that launching Chrome Home would not serve all our users well. So just as I strongly as I had pitched the original concept, I advocated for us to stop the launch -- which took not a small amount of debate. Lee adds, "oh, and Safari in iOS 15 picked up some similar ideas and criticisms."
New Coke! (Score:5, Insightful)
UI designs are needed when there are major deficiencies. Changing a UI because the new generation of UI designer wants to, is a terrible idea.
If you change the UI on me, you may as well give me a new product to use. Learning a new UI is probably the last thing I ever want to do when I just want things to work like they did yesterday.
--
It is easily overlooked that what is now called vintage was once brand new. - Tony Visconti
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Yes.
Would Chris Lee please pop over to Mozilla and whack their mobile UI team on the back of their collective heads NCIS style.
The FIrefox interface has been made over and is a bit of a mess now. I understand the desire to "improve" but often all the change does is shuffle the problematic pieces around. The majority of the dedicated user base will have learned how to deal efficiently with the current UI and do not need nor desire significant changes. I recognize in myself the reluctance to embrace chan
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Remember new Coke tasted better (Score:2)
There's a part of the story Arzaboa didn't mention, though they may know. Some people don't know that before launch, Coca-Cola did a bunch of blind taste tests and New Coke was a better product. People liked the taste of the new formula significantly better.
*Even though* the new taste was a significant improvement, changing a product people use every day is risky business. Change itself is a high cost.
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If you change the UI on me, you may as well give me a new product to use.
For a given long-lived product, I guess that 10% of users are ones who are already familiar with it, and 90% are future users, some not even yet born, who don't know how it currently works. If there's a change which makes the product 2% faster for new users, and unusable for existing users, then they should make the change.
(I don't have a clue what the numbers really are, by the way.)
I agree with what you say. But if my ballpark estimate is right, then UI designers should treat your opinions as vastly less
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do your pathetic boomer rants somewhere else. The problem lies in the bathroom mirror, you're screwed yourself. your boomer rants are half the reason those places tossed your worthless ass.
API let me design it. (Score:2)
Wish the web evolved the way it should have...
People provide APIs, and it's my decision how things look. They feed data.
So sad it didn't go that way.
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Except when browsers had a lot of API such as plugins, extensions, etc... Most of the content became unusable, as well opened the door for a lot more security issues and spyware.
Also those content sites would shortly require particular API to be installed and run so you can properly access their content.
Back in the early days of the Web of the mid-late 1990's we seemed to have forgotten the requirements to install such and such plugin, Java Applets, ActiveX, Flash, Shockwave, VRML... As well most sites wou
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I feel like it did pretty much go that way.
You can, if you so felt like it, build a browser out of either Blink/V8 or Gecko/SpiderMonkey. The reality is that people largely don't care enough to bother for a general purpose browser (plenty of folks are using it to make desktop applications that are pretty much browsers hardcoded to run a specific webapp).
One-handed UIs. (Score:3)
1. Phones were growing in size, and we had opportunity to innovate in creating a gestural, spatial interface that would still be usable with one hand.
The pornhub generation appreciates the thought.
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Would it be great (Score:2)
If there we some way users could switch and change the UI and use the current UI by default and the new totally different UI if they want to?
Not every product and feature needs to be distilled down to the greyest, blandest, version of itself. For fucks sake provide some OPTIONs!!!
Re: Would it be great (Score:3)
Winamp did this. And it really whooped the llama's ass. The word you are looking for is "skin".
Chris Lee is awesome (Score:4, Insightful)
> So just as I strongly as I had pitched the original concept, I advocated for us to stop the launch -- which took not a small amount of debate.
The world would be a much better place if we would all vigorously argue "I was wrong", when we get new information.
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Meh. Power user-only features impose a lot of engineering cost for little user value. If features aren't being used by at least a significant minority of the user population, either they're not useful enough to keep, or they're too hard for users to find.
Sounds like Opera Touch (Score:2)
New iOS Safari has a couple good things (Score:2)
Good things:
1. URL bar/swipe control at the bottom
2. Tab groups that sync, ungrouped tabs that don't
Bad things:
1. Moving tabs between groups happens one at a time. If you have several hundred tabs open, you're SOL
2. Hidden controls are stupid. Stop it. Why are reload and share hidden now? They're used ALL THE TIME. If you want to hide things, only hide things that are used rarely.
3. The URL bar is implemented as floating over the page, which makes it hard to tap things at the bottom of the page. Don't block
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I have been using a web browser (since Mosaic / Arena) for over 30 years. Never in that time have I wanted the URL bar (and by extension the tabs bar since they're intimately linked) to be any other place than right there at the top of the window in plain view. The URL-bar/swipe-control is a heinous change that ruins literal decades of muscle memory and expectation.
It is not a "good thing", from my perspective.
For similar reasons, I loathe tab groups as well. I like the way tabs worked *anyway*. I have yet
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Given the size of phones, I'm pretty on-board with the URL bar being at the bottom. I just can't conveniently reach the URL bar when I'm working with one hand, and moving it to the bottom gives me lots of functionality while my other hand is busy or I'm drinking a coffee or something. Leaving aside the muscle-memory issue for a moment, it's simply a better place for the URL to go on a mobile device. If they defaulted it to the bottom but let people toggle it to the top, I think that would allay a lot of neg
Why does Google do that? (Score:2)
Obviously not. Beta is feature complete, and fixing bugs. What's described in the summary is obviously playing around with features/UI. What Google calls beta (for Android, too), is alpha - they're playing with features more than fixing bugs.