Chrome’s new design — a UX perspective
Yesterday Chrome celebrated its 10th birthday and for this double-digits anniversary they made new design updates. Although Google says that they send updates every six weeks, right now they made bigger improvements and they are actually really good.
What we should take out as UX designers
Search improvement
When I say search improvement I don’t mean results but UX approach toward search.
Usually, in all browsers that we use, we have seen that there’s a search bar in top of the screen which we are used to it and it has logic because we search on the top and then show results below.
But Google design team went further with the improvements: they put the search icon into tab bar on the bottom of the screen that accesses search bar without stretching fingers on top of the screen, and this is huge improvement on UX side because according to the reachability area on mobile phones search bars in browsers are out of Reach zone.
Now, with this improvement the user just taps the search icon and starts writing because search bar is active without taping the “out of reach zone” of the screen. Big up Google design team!
Managing Tabs
New improvement in Chrome has made also a new experience on managing tabs.
Now you click on tab bar and you go inside tabs. There are three things to notice here:
- Moving between Incognito, tabs and history is easier than ever. You just swipe right/left everywhere on screen and you go from one tab to another.
2. Main functions inside tabs are on bottom too, like “Close All” , “New tab”, “Done” , so they are better on reachability for all kind of user hands.
3. Reorder tabs by holding them and moving around the others.
Now to close tabs you have a small “X” button on the top right corner of tab cards, to be honest I miss the swipe function to kill tabs but I will get used to this too.
See more while you scroll
One thing that I have always liked on Safari is that when you scroll you see a lot of information because most of the UI elements are hidden while scrolling. Now Google has done the same and it is great to have this experience on Chrome too.
Material design style
Last but not least; the app now has a flatter, rounder design more in line with Google’s Material Design principles. Website icons are now easier to see when you’ve overloaded a window with tabs, and menus and other design elements have been tweaked and simplified throughout various versions of the app.
Take-aways
Consider very well the solutions to make your apps more intuitive and easier to use for your users. Take for example the Chrome improvements that I mentioned above and especially the search icon on the tab bar that activates the search bar because many users will be very grateful.
Make sure your most frequently interacted with elements are the most reachable elements of your interface.
No matter what type of apps you are designing, you should make main or most frequently interacted elements easy to reach and not small so users can interact easy with them.
You learnt some tips on this article ? Hit that claps button as hard as you want and Follow me because I am writing for UX tips and great example of UX on mobile phones.
Apart from it being a job, making the user experience friendly and easy is what I love and feel accomplished while doing. I also like to write case studies and critiques on My Blog. My design works can be found on my Dribbble and Behance profiles.
Thank you.
