Posted on May 20, 2021

Google unveils Material You

Along with Android 12, Google debuted their new design language Material You this week at their annual I/O conference. They are going extremely heavy on dynamic colors and on end user personalization of the user interface and the results are pretty striking.

It certainly is different.

While my first impression is not exactly positive, I’ll reserve final judgement until more details are out and it is actually on phones. It is good to see Google trying something interesting and new, and it’ll be interesting if they pull back from the monochrome app icons or anything else before the final release.

Posted on February 28, 2014

A better infinite scroll?

Google has a new blog post up with their recommendations for implementing infinite scrolling. Also be sure to check out the demo page.

Google’s tips and examples address SEO concerns with this feature, but don’t really address the possible user experience issues it introduces. As someone who is lucky enough to observe and work with actual users during usability testing, I’m not sure there is such a thing as a “good” infinite scrolling technique right now.

At least with this example the back button works as expected but I’m still not sure the positives outweigh the confusion infinite scrolling always seems to introduce. As with pretty much every UX issue, this of course depends depends on your audience and content. Like any other feature, get it in front of real users and test, test, test.

This great looking Google Maps-driven bakery site was making the Twitter rounds today. Give it several minutes to load but its an extremely interesting idea. Not sure I’ve seen a site powered by Google Maps before. Cute illustration and animations too.

Posted on October 31, 2011

Google SSL Search Will Block Search Referrers

Your website stats are getting a little less valuable thanks to new search feature Google is rolling out to its users. SSL encrypted search will now automatically be turned on for all logged in users, resulting in improved security and privacy for web searches.

This improved privacy will result in less available data for site owners in analytics tools, including Google Analytics. Specifically, for users with SSL search enabled it will no longer pass along the search keywords that brought them to your website. From Google’s blog post announcing the change:

What does this mean for sites that receive clicks from Google search results? When you search from https://www.google.com, websites you visit from our organic search listings will still know that you came from Google, but won’t receive information about each individual query. They can also receive an aggregated list of the top 1,000 search queries that drove traffic to their site for each of the past 30 days through Google Webmaster Tools.

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