A company doing beta testing for its product is nothing new, however, there are some protocols that are followed so that the users don’t get affected by these tests. The most common and widely accepted rule is to ask users to voluntarily sign up to be beta testers and then roll out the changes only to those sets of users. However, this rule book has long been thrown away in the bin by Google, or a much better statement would be to say that it didn’t even exist in the first place!
The term beta testing never existed in their dictionary. It simply rolls out an unfinished change for testing to a randomly selected bunch of users. However, since the number of users using a Google product is sustainably large at any given point in time, so even if Google ends up selecting 5% of users of testing, it tends to spell out doom for a plethora of users. And the worse part is the fact that the affected users didn’t even sign up for any A/B testing in the first place.
Google Search Results Changes to Two Column Layout and gets ruined!
The latest one to make its way is the UI/UX change of Google Search, wherein all the results will now appear in two columns layout as opposed to scrollable results. And there are a plethora of issues with that. The biggest among them is the fact that you would now get less information at a given point in time on your screen. Moroever, the details that appear is half baked, as the other half of the information gets cut off.
This happens because the Silicon Valley giant tends to give a higher preference to the UI/UX aspect as opposed to the stability front. So what if you searched for something and aren’t getting complete information about that query, at least the UI search results are being displayed in nicely rounded corners. After all, an aesthetically pleasing GUI would be preferred by users instead of getting a high search result relevancy, right Google?
Well, this rant could go on and on, but it wouldn’t result in any applicability as such. This is because the same has happened countless times in the past, and let alone us, many major tech blogs have raised concerns over these unwanted changes, but only to fall on deaf ears. What Google decides will be implemented sooner than later, whether users like it or not doesn’t really matter. Things would be much better if Google adheres to the phrase- “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.
Rounding off, what are your views on this Google Search results changing to two column layout? Is it not much of an issue and we have instead blown it out of proportion or does this UI tweak tends to ruin the search results? Let your voices be heard in the comments section below.
Charlotte
Way too small font size. And changing font size doesn’t fix it. I really haþe. It makes hoogle unusable on my phkne without constantly zooming in and out. How do I turn it back?