Noted on contrast. We will look into it more -- that's exactly the kind of feedback we were hoping to get.
I've been mostly against flat design for a number of reasons but IMO, you've achieved a great design. I really like the minimalism of the hamburger button. Again, everything just gets out of your way.
Perhaps enlarging the font-size of the search result snippets might help with the contrast complaints - personally, I like your use of the grays. Again, it conveys a modern design.
I really hope that there will be an updated iOS app soon too :)
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.
Personally, I find the new design conveys a more relaxing experience although I'd like to see some of the fonts grow a bit. By modern, I refer to a different online world than #000 against #FFF and skeuo approaches. I'm not saying, those days are over completely, but fresher approaches are nice too.
Let's face it - design will continue to morph based upon different philosophies and whims, just as fashion does. Some visions are worse than others but some are implemented in pretty clever ways. I like the way DDG went with theirs.
For a modern web property or search engine competing against the likes of Google, what timdiggerm mentioned in a reply nails it. Sticking with an older design philosophy conveys a negative image for many users.
However, other properties going flat and subdued do not necessarily get my attention just because everyone else is doing it. This one does though because they did a lot of things right. The more I use next.duckduckgo.com the more I appreciate the small details that were thought out.
There are also some WCAG guidelines on contrast.
Here are some contrast checkers: http://snook.ca/technical/colour_contrast/colour.html http://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/ http://www.checkmycolours.com/
If anything should be questioned in hindsight, it should be why so many managers and executives allowed designers to seriously submit such bad ideas for consideration, never mind allowing such unusable designs to actually be implemented.
Presumably these are the same designers who feel a "push" sign next to a nonfunctional handle is a good design for the hardware on a door.
And the social widget is broken too.
It's kind of funny that we went from black on grey (netscape), via black on white (ie4) to grey on white (by design/via css) -- rather than simply back to black on grey or grey on black ("console" colors) -- as there's been some studies indicating that darker background leads to less power usage -- which actually has a usability benefit in longer battery life -- all the while maintaining a lower contrast.
Contrast has been mentioned, it's better on your "cards" (top toolbar that appears on some searches) than on the general results. Other than that, I'm not sure your choice of font is very good. It's not quite crisp enough to easily scan and read lots of text at once. I tried switching to Helvetica Neue instead of Proxima and things instantly looked more readable.
Overall a good step in the right direction though.
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! :)
PLEASE bring them back!
I actually don't mind the fixed header on the current version because it is much smaller and less obtrusive than the header on the redesign. I dislike fixed headers on news sites like the New York Times, because I want as much vertical space as possible to read the article. On a search engine, there is no issue of losing context, so a tastefully constructed fixed header is acceptable.
I understand why you wanted to add a second toolbar for more options and am not suggesting that you removed completely remove fixed headers for the default landing page. I just think that the second toolbar could easily fit on the same line as the search bar.
I see @tripzilch has commented below that he uses a bookmarklet that changes position:fixed elements to position:static. That's probably a better solution than my version which changes them to position:relative. I will have to try that method too.
And: thanks for listening to your users!
You realize HN comment pages scale pretty well, right? And everyone's happy.
There's no reason a site like DDG shouldn't make better use of larger windows. If someone wants to read long lines across a full-screen window on a 30" display (and I don't), they should be able to. In my case, I'd just like sites to make reasonably good use of a 1280-wide window (half a 30"), which DDG doesn't. That's not unreasonable.
Anyway, here's another good example of a page that scales well:
There are W3C standards for accessibility for a reason, and widely used sites should follow them.
When I see a site with such low contrast I think "the owner of this site doesn't really care if people actually read the contents" so I usually just close it. Unless I know from a reliable source that the contents is actually something very very interesting, that I would want to read then I'll take the extra effort and try to read it.
Keep up the great work!
And one more suggestion about this: When I click on the up arrow, focusing on the search bar would be nice. But that may be just me.
[0] Like this: http://cl.ly/VMql
I also dislike that the search results do not really have anything differentiating their different sections as opposed to the current results where it's easy to see title, description, and url at a glance. (To be clear, I don't think change isn't possible or that things should stay exactly the same, just that some kind of differentiating factor would be extremely helpful.)
And I also use DDG as my primary search engine. Integrating it into Firefox and only using g! when my results are poor.
On the search page, click the hamburger icon on the top right.
There you can adjust the fonts (to some extent), colors, the position of the header (make it scrolling again), and many more things. All of this is impossible with old DDG, or Google, or Bing, or Yandex, etc.
I wish people that have time to write 3 long paragraphs of complaints actually have tried what they are complaining about. Or, if they have, made it clear that they complain about the defaults.
My ideal defaults: Header should be shorter. Contrast should be higher. The O-click box should be hidden and only its tabs should be visible. It should use as much horizontal space as possible (wonder if they plan to add something on the right side). A little bit less spacing between results would be great.
Even though they seem to be nice people, I don't trust them, and I don't believe that the url they are showing is the location where I will go if I click on the link (I don't trust the status bar either), so they should remove that last line from the result and add the icon and the domain (that's ok) to the main title.
"I dislike fixed headers for any interface that isn't for a phone or tablet because almost all laptop and desktop screens are widescreen."
Are you saying that only fixed headers only work on mobile interfaces and they shouldn't be used on desktop? If so, I disagree with you. Fixed headers, if they are used at all, should only be used on desktop. There's simply not enough screen real estate on mobile. DDG actually does a nice job with this and doesn't use the fixed nav on mobile. Also, I don't see how desktop widescreen has anything to do with a fixed nav header.
If you are saying that fixed headers only belong on desktop/laptop, then I agree with you.
Fixed headers should be banned on all devices.
They're a crutch, an annoyance, steal real estate, make me dislike your site, and frequently (if I cannot remove them by some means) will encourage me to use an alternate site.
For content-heavy sites, these and similar annoyances send me straight to Readability via bookmarklet or plugin.
Though Steve, who thought he was God, took it away from some of You.
And how long it's taken each time?
That and page-up / page-down. Yes, they're somewhat useful for navigating documents (including webpages).
Terror and repressed memories are like that, you know.
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.
If you use Chrome, the Google Accessibility team has released an extension that can increase contrast / invert colors for better readability: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/high-contrast/djcf...
But the new interface is nice.
The flat look has received a lot of criticism in the past couple years, but to be completely honest, in the many arguments I've heard against it, I couldn't really find one that can really stand it's ground if I may say so. On the contrary, I find a lot of merit in the new principles that are being embraced trough this approach, such as e.g. the emphasis on interaction to distinguish elements, instead of artificially imposed "symbolisms" (whether this is an underline, or a button-shaped, well, button :) ). This gives me a hint that, as a design community, we have a more mature approach to designing for those unearthly things we call "devices" than we did a few years back :)
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]
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.
I find the contrast to be perfectly fine. But someone with a different monitor can see completely different colours/contrast.
The only thing I can see is maybe slightly making it darker wouldn't hurt anything.
To the extent I still use Google (various products not just search) one thing is constantly happening is that setting options are removed. I find links showing me how to fix what Google has broken and then the settings I can use to do so have seemingly been completely removed by Google :-( This continuing practice has encouraged me to move more and more away from Google. DDG is my default, though still use Google search a fair amount when DDG doesn't give great results or I want to filter by date.
Which is why you chose to write your comment in a low contrast colour.
As you scroll down you see about 50px less vertically devoted to results, a tradeoff easily outweighed by the top suggestion toggle drawer thingy awesomeness.
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, although poor implementations are very unpleasant and can create a jarring parallax effect. Unfortunately, fixed elements on the sides are soooo MySpace and have fallen out fashion, and many sites waste most of the space on the sides. The header in the redesign in obscenely large and the new page shows me less results at a time.
I have young and healthy eyes with 20/20 vision. Even so, when I use my laptop for coding and reading text, I turn the brightness down because it is easier on my eyes and does not give me headaches. I believe that the best practice is to make text #000 on a white background or very light background (like news.yc does), and to let users adjust the brightness of their display if this is uncomfortable. There have been assertions by that lighter text with white is better (and unfortunately this is the latest and laziest design trend), but I have seen no formal evidence of this and believe that this is mostly a combination of overbright display screens and poor text rendering by OSes and browsers. If you turn the brightness of your screen down, you solve the "too much contrast" problem (if it ever truly existed) and can tell when any text isn't #000. For me, DuckDuckgo's current snippet display color is to light at #333, and ridiculous at #595959. If I set the brightness of my laptop to the maximum setting, the snippet text is more tolerable but still uncomfortable.
I dislike the neo-flat, iOS-like buttons, but they don't really make the site any harder to use. I find that neo-flat buttons are almost have an underlying hypocrisy. The idea behind the flat painting movement is that you can discern what was called "optical depth" without using traditional perspective to mimic the depth you see with stereoscopic vision. The neo-flat movement is based on the idea that you don't need to underline hyperlinks or add perspective based shadows and gradients to distinguish what a button is because you can just use colors alone or make everything a link. If this were really true, then you wouldn't need to make the neo-flat buttons change colors when you mouse over them, because it should be obvious that they are links. You can see similar hypocrisy in Google's A/B testing of non-centered labels in certain neo-flat buttons on their websites (especially YouTube).
Edit: I rewrote the first sentence of the third paragraph to make it more clear.