[Sigia-l] Google Search Results UI Has Changed?

[cwodtke at eleganthack.com]

*warning* personal view, not endorsed by yahoo or anyone else on the
planet, perhaps.

I always thought google's tabs were a shame-- the wrong metaphor.

from a post in my preyahoo days. Still more or less how I think.
http://www.eleganthack.com/archives/002711.html

"Google's tabs make me crazy. I know they shouldn't, but they do. Tabs
have proliferated across the web as a navigation device. From Amazon to
PCWorld, they behave as the files in our file cabinet would. They classify
and contain different stuff.

However, on Google, they act as lenses. Let me explain what I mean by
"lenses." Once you have done a search, you can see the information
differently by applying a tab/lens to it. "See images", "see groups", "see
directory listings". If you click the tabs from the front page, it seems
like they are behaving like proper tabs and take you to a whole new place
where you can search a theorectically exclusive collection of stuff. But
if you search first, it appears they more like night goggles, telescopes
and microscopes-- lenses that let you see very different things, yet,
still the same matter.

I have had folks tell me that tabs-as-lenses is the proper software widget
behavior. Research suggests otherwise: looking through windows, and at
About Face (my favorite for best widget practices), I see tabs-as-folders
-- they hold mutually exclusive stuff (though typically the tabs are part
of a family, parent being the dialog box.)

In About Face, Alan Cooper writes, "I believe the tabbed dialog box is
having such success because it follows the user's mental model of how
things are normally stored: in a monocline grouping"

It's a subtle difference, tabs-as-lenses and tabs-as-folders, and looking
at software standards is still less relevant than the question: "What is
the prevailing experience and expectations of the web surfer? Tabs that
behave as they do on Amazon, or as they do on the windows control panel,
three levels deep into the TCP/IP settings?"

Then again, like the microscope/telescope analogy using the Google
tab/lenses on my search shows me something so completely different that it
might as well be classified separately. Too subtle a difference to fuss
over? Then again, does a user really expect a tab to modify their existing
search? or do they expect to be taken to a completely different collection
of stuff, like every other tab on the web will do?

Would it be worth using a completely different widget for separating the
concepts "these are different ways of seeing the same idea/item" and
"these are different things altogether"? For a short while, Amazon
experimented with using tabs within tabs to allow people to look at
different aspects of book data: the reviews, the product metadata, the
pictures from inside the book. The design is gone now, but it was a
perfect example of tabs being used as lenses."

And if it is worth separating lens behavior from tab behavior, what would
such a widget look like?





> Regarding Donna Maurer's remarks:
>
> "I wonder whether people will miss/not see 'images', 'news' hiding
> up the top there."
>
> Google's tabs are so unlike real-world tabs and so visually indistinctive
> that it took me forever to notice them (well, I believe, at least many
> months--it was difficult to ascertain by asking around), even though I use
> Google daily. So, in my view, these options were always pretty well
> hidden.
> ;-)
>
> "It does look like the google directory is gone from the example - this I
> would miss as I use it a bit."
>
> Once I finally did notice the tabs, I also enjoyed using the Directory, so
> I
> hope it isn't going away.
>
> Pabini Gabriel-Petit
> Spirit Softworks
> www.spiritsoftworks.com
>
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