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?