Title: Today, I was served the new Google homepage, the first that struck me out was how inconsistent it was. I started to look at all the inconsistencies and found many of them:<p>- 3 different arrows for the more links.
- mixed use of upper/lower case for the "M" in the more links.
- the position of "advanced search" between the home page and the results page.
- the position of the search button (kind of within the input field on the results page but below with space on the home page).
- you see "Everything" with an icon in front of it (why the icon?) and then you have a link with more, what is more than everything?
- etc.<p>It can be a game to find so many design errors, things totally wrong when looking at the whole page.<p>I asked myself, why? Then I found, it is simply A/B testing gone crazy. They have tested gazillions of independent small changes in their multivariate tests, found the <i>optimal</i> combination, but, forgot the big picture.<p>So maybe the new home page and results page are the optimal ones, but they are inconsistently optimal. For the first time in many years, the Google pages now "feel wrong".<p>This is annoying me a lot, for 2 things:<p>- I hate it when I search.
- It will spread like wild fire because if Google has done it, it must be good, so bad designers will just copy the design without thinking twice (so I will need to support that in many other websites).<p>And you, what do you think about it?
How are you designing your A/B tests not to fall in this trap?
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