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The next version of DuckDuckGo

next.duckduckgo.com

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Re: The next version of DuckDuckGo

#311

Post by terminado »

jfoster wrote: post #228
terminado wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the love of christ, whatever you do, please don't ever implement "DuckDuckGo Instant®". This auto-complete predictive suggestion list business isn't half bad, but there's nothing I hate more about Google than their bloody "Instant" features.

Can you explain what you don't like about it? I was just thinking the (almost) opposite, that a full page reload after searching seems unnecessary.

Google Instant is irritating because I'm trying to type a search string into a field in the middle of the page, and as soon as I enter a single keystroke, my entire thought process is interrupted when the field I'm focusing on is thrown upwards to the top of the page, without waiting for me to confirm that I'm finished typing.

So I want to search for "apple" and guess what:

I type the letter "a"...

Now the whole page is disrupted, and I have to stop, and check the page, to make sure the sudden change is what I expected it to be. Is the page doing what I intended? I only typed one letter...

Did I actually type the letter "a", or did my finger slip and type the letter "s"? Wait, where's the field? Oh, it's up at the top of the page now... What was I doing? Oh, right, I was going to search for "apple"...

Why did the page change, when I wanted it to stay put, while I complete my thought? Why didn't the page wait until I pressed the enter key, to confirm that I was finished, and ready to search for the intended query?

Do I care about whether the page sends an ordinary post with a form submission, and reloads the page? No.

Do I care about whether the page sends an AJAX request, and is re-rendered by a JavaScript library? No.

I want the page to remain static and reliable while I perform my task. After I'm done typing, it can go crazy, and do whatever.

Re: The next version of DuckDuckGo

#312

Post by CWuestefeld »

timdiggerm wrote: post #301
hueving wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>it conveys a modern design. That's a terrible reason to pick a design. If you have no justification for a design other than 'lots of other new websites do this', then you have no justification at all... unless your purpose is to blend in and be forgotten.

Ah, but an old design conveys amateur quality, which does not compete well in people's minds with Google, etc.

I don't think that Levi-Strauss is losing market share for not being trendy. A strong, working product trumps fashion, in my book.

Re: The next version of DuckDuckGo

#313

Post by azinman2 »

fsck--off wrote: post #61

I use DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine and have had a positive experience using it. This redesign incorporates two of the worst design trends today: very low contrast text and gratuitously, obnoxiously large fixed headers. I dislike fixed headers on any non-phone/tablet UI because almost all laptop and desktop screens are widescreen. Fixed position elements on the sides of the screen make much more sense, altho…

Disagree -- you're attacking the wrong cause of your issue. There are many aspects to text being readable than having extreme contrast with colors. As you even said, "white or light background." That already shows malleability. Font style (serif vs sans), line spacing, column width, header:content size ratios, etc matter. You're over simplifying the problem. Making the text #000 won't solve your problems and generally looks worse. When you buy a professional book they also aren't #000 on #fff -- that generally will look bad and amateur.

Design is an art and takes a lot of iteration of all those things I mentioned and more to obtain aesthetics and usability. Personally I find the new DDG hard to scan in part because I'm used to google, but also because there are different elements of the design I think to be poor choices:

1. The black text for header and content doesn't help anything pop. It needn't if everything else is setup correctly, but it isn't doing any favors. Instead the only color between listings is the favicon which makes it feel random.

2. The weighting of the header isn't sufficiently different from the body of the search, giving them less contrast relative to each other, and thus harder for my eyes to scan. If they had put the title in all upper case, chose a bold condense font, bigger font size, etc then there would be more contrast between the two.

3. The listings are variable length with not much white space between them, so that contributes to it being harder for my brain to chunk and reliably scan.

Those are just a few of the issues as I see it. A professional designer / typographer could help a lot more.

Re: The next version of DuckDuckGo

#314

Post by SrslyJosh »

yegg wrote: post #2

Hi all, thanks for checking it out and we're looking forward to your feedback! This next version of DuckDuckGo is in public beta. Here's the post about it I just made: https://duck.co/forum/thread/5726/duckduckgo-reimagined-and-... There are still a lot known issues that we're still working through before we can make the transition. I'm sure this thread will uncover more :)

Things I like:

1) The checkbox for visited links. However, I think there should be an infobox (visible by default) explaining what it is the first few times you search. A link explaining how it works (for the privacy conscious) would also be good.

Things I don't like:

1) Moving the favicon below the page snippet. I think it should actually be up top and larger, since it's useful for skimming results.

2) Lack of color/contrast. Feels like someone sucked the life out of the site. This is important, because (for example) when I'm skimming results it's helpful to have the page titles (blue) stand out from the snippet (black).

3) Left-aligned results. I find it easier to skim the results when they're centered, rather than left-aligned. This is something people who have been using Google won't notice, but after reading DDG's centered results for a year or so, going back feels jarring, like I'm going out of my way to read them there. The center of the screen seems to be where I look first for content.

4) Larger header. Vertical space is precious, especially when you consider how much is already consumed by an OS menu bar, browser chrome (titlebar, address bar, bookmark bar, tab bar, status bar) and (on Mac OS) the Dock at the bottom of the screen.

Re: The next version of DuckDuckGo

#315

Post by Angostura »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #312
timdiggerm wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, but an old design conveys amateur quality, which does not compete well in people's minds with Google, etc.

I don't think that Levi-Strauss is losing market share for not being trendy. A strong, working product trumps fashion, in my book.

Levi-Strauss uses a deliberately retro design language as a core part of its marketing. All those rivets and obvious stitches serve little purpose other than to project an faux-naive olde timey image. I can't see any reason for DDG to follow a similar design approach, unless they want to go for the Steampunk user base.

Re: The next version of DuckDuckGo

#316

Post by gabriel34 »

fsck--off wrote: post #61

I use DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine and have had a positive experience using it. This redesign incorporates two of the worst design trends today: very low contrast text and gratuitously, obnoxiously large fixed headers. I dislike fixed headers on any non-phone/tablet UI because almost all laptop and desktop screens are widescreen. Fixed position elements on the sides of the screen make much more sense, altho…

Not a designer but it's my opinion that low contrast text has it's benefits beside looking good.

Sure, low contrast is very bad for walls of text such as the ones on this very site (when you "Ask HN" or "Show HN" something, but DDG's implementation directs my eyes toward the page title. If you are going to have a lot of info show on any one place, you'd better direct the viewer's attention.

I would keep the different contrast levels, but would do it differently.

Right now my there are several levels. My eyes are directed to page title and the words I searched for. Page title doesn't really help that much for most pages (unless I'm looking for something quite unspecific) and I already know the keywords I looked for. Right now I go to the keyword in a three line summary and have to find where does it fit; I begin reading from the middle, it's more exhausting and potentially slower

Page title is less important than the text surrounding the term I looked for and the domain name of the site. Bold that, not the keyword I already know; direct my eyes toward info I want.

FavIcon being the only colored element besides Dax stands out too much; put it left of the result like this:

            [title]
            [summary]
  [FavIcon] [summary]
            [summary]
            [url, mouseover complete url, link from this page]
On a next version:

I'd use my indexer to capture keywords for the result document. I would try to cluster the results based on that, so "man top" returns clusters of linux help and of clothing and the user selects what he meant, filtering out the noise.

I don't know how taxing that would be, but not every page has to be indexed this way. Even 10% of the index having these keywords would be statistically significant to build the clusters. The keywords from this index would be highlighted in the results. Search could be machine tailored in case the user decide to go deeper than the 10%, so as to return documents likely to belong to the cluster, but not processed into it.

Re: The next version of DuckDuckGo

#317

Post by ugexe »

Angostura wrote: post #315
CWuestefeld wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that Levi-Strauss is losing market share for not being trendy. A strong, working product trumps fashion, in my book.

Levi-Strauss uses a deliberately retro design language as a core part of its marketing. All those rivets and obvious stitches serve little purpose other than to project an faux-naive olde timey image. I can't see any reason for DDG to follow a similar design approach, unless they want to go for the Steampunk user base.

This is not true. If you are a desk jockey then maybe you don't need rivets, but they (along with all stitching besides the back pocket stitch design) certainly help keep your denim together if you are the least bit hard on them. Ripping off pocket corners or blowing out crotch stitching is something that happens. And I'm pretty sure Levi's also offers denim with non contrast stitching.

Re: The next version of DuckDuckGo

#318

Post by CmdrKrool »

yegg wrote: post #309
CmdrKrool wrote: post #241

I can't turn off the infinite scroll. I've set "Auto-load" in the settings to Off. But when I scroll to the end of the page new links still get appended automatically. This also happens on the current version DDG as well. Am I misunderstanding this option?

What browser/OS?

Firefox 28 on Windows XP. My usual browser, loaded up with all kinds of extensions and stuff, so I also tried:

Chrome 35.0.1912.2 (from portableapps.com) on Windows XP.

So as to make sure it's not my fault for using XP, I went and updated my Arch Linux box and tried:

Firefox 29.0 on Arch Linux

Chromium 34.0.1847.132 on Arch Linux

Both of those browsers are untouched by extensions.

In every one of these cases, I go to duckduckgo.com or next.duckduckgo.com, go to the settings, change "Auto-load" to 'Off', type the test search "Rob Hubbard" into the search box at the top, press enter, scroll to the bottom of the page by dragging the scrollbar with the mouse, and see the text "More Links..." automatically change to some animated dots and then the further results appear a moment later.

Hope all this detail is helpful!

Re: The next version of DuckDuckGo

#319

Post by tripzilch »

yegg wrote: post #105
fsck--off wrote: post #61

I use DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine and have had a positive experience using it. This redesign incorporates two of the worst design trends today: very low contrast text and gratuitously, obnoxiously large fixed headers. I dislike fixed headers on any non-phone/tablet UI because almost all laptop and desktop screens are widescreen. Fixed position elements on the sides of the screen make much more sense, altho…

Thanks for the feedback! Our current version also has a fixed header, and that can be turned off in the settings, which we plan to make work in this next version as well. Noted on contrast. We will look into it more -- that's exactly the kind of feedback we were hoping to get.

I didn't notice the fixed version in the old look, probably because it's not as tall.

In the new version, it's taller, and makes it so I can only see 4 results at a time on my 1366x768 netbook. Makes me want to reach for my "fixedfixer" bookmarklet (sets all position:fixed styles to static), which is not really something I want to do every time I use my search engine. Still, that's more convenient than having to change a setting every time I clear my cookies.

Otherwise, I do like the clean and airy/breathing space in the new look.

Just be mindful of vertical screen estate, it's one of the most precious things to squander, and from a usability point of view, the only thing you can really argue that might need to be there is just the search box.

Personally, what I think is a better solution for that, is one of the older Google layouts, which had a search box at the bottom of a result page as well as at the top. Then you could just scan the first page of results and when you got to the bottom you probably had some ideas as how to refine the query, and there it was, ready for the next search! :)

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