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Google launched a new fade-in homepage that deliver a new experience to their users, users according to Marissa Mayer, VP of Search Products and User Experience are coming to Google either to search or to use one of their products like Gmail. The new fade-in experience remove distraction for the user intent on searching.

The most interesting part in the study that users who show interest in Google products will start move their mouse and then they will see the links, and for those who are interested in search they can only see the big search box.

Marissa Mayer,

All in all, we ran approximately 10 variants of the fade-in. Some of the experiments hindered the user experience: for example, the variants of the homepage that hid the search buttons until after the fade performed the worst in terms of user happiness metrics. Other variants of the experiment produced humorous outcomes when combined with our doodles — the barcode doodle combined with the fade was particularly ironic in its overstated minimalism. However, in the end, the variant of the homepage we are launching today was positive or neutral on all key metrics, except one: time to first action. At first, this worried us a bit: Google is all about getting you where you are going faster — how could we launch something that potentially slowed users down? Then, we realized: we want users to notice this change… and it does take time to notice something (though in this case, only milliseconds!). Our goal then became to understand whether or not over time the users began to use the homepage even more efficiently than the control group and, sure enough, that was the trend we observed.

How would you consider this change?