Taking a look at Google’s persistent navigation

Google is at it again, iterating on their products – and I think they’re on to something good here by standardizing and improving the behavior and interactions of their persistent navigation across all of their products.

But let’s define “persistent navigation” before we get too far into this post. I define persistent navigation as navigation that accessible from anywhere across a domain – regardless of the action that a visitor/consumer is undertaking.

Iin some websites, due to the way they behave their persistent navigation can include their Main Navigation (see http://www.cnn.com/) and in others, their Main Navigation is not considered persistent since it adapts itself to the section of the site the visitor is on (see http://www.massgeneral.org vs http://massgeneral.org/cancer/).

This is what Google’s persistent navigation looked like just a few days ago (I’m going to say 3 days ago, just to set a timeline):

And this is their current rollout

Subtle and jumping into the “web 2.0″ visual style. How so?

  • They’ve done away with underlines, instead opting for a visual element (blue bar) on top and spanning the length of the container for each item in their persistent navigation
  • the traditional “link blue” has been substituted with a pastel like blue and
  • there’s a nice gradient behind their persistent navigation instead of a harsh line separating it from the content

As I said, subtle changes – but they seem a step in the right direction by being more sophisticated and finessed than their previous execution.

What do you think?

Published on February 17th, 2011 by Eduardo Ortiz and filed under these categories: Navigation, User Experience, design this post is also tagged as: , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

One Comment on “Taking a look at Google’s persistent navigation”

  1. 1 Name (required) said at 12:17 pm on February 17th, 2011:

    Agreed. Google is not traditionally known for their design ‘fineness’ as you say, but this is a step towards better aesthetics.

    Because of some of the visual treatments, especially lowering the saturation of the blue text, the persistent menu sits in the background much better. Users still certainly know it’s there, but it commands much less attention now.

    I’m taking a leap here, but the thing I love most about the persistent bar is that it communicates that Google does not live in silos. Google Maps, Docs, Mail, News etc, they all talk to each other. Whether or not it’s true. It suggests that the services all talk to each other and that the more Google services you use, the better experience you’ll have because it’s so easy and we’ve given you a nice shell for all of your mail, docs, calendars etc.

    Now–if they could just do something about Youtube.

Leave a Reply