QWANT UNVEIL ITS NEW DESIGN
On April 15, 2015, Qwant released the version 3 of its search engine whose colorful user interface, as well as its promise of privacy, were at odds with those of the dominating American platforms. Often flattered, sometimes criticized, the design that has contributed to the success of your search engine is now evolving to allow you to search faster and more efficiently on all kind of screens, mixing websites, news and content from social media.
In three years, Qwant has continued to evolve and to offer to its users new features that were not imagined when the initial interface was designed. This is the case for the “verticals” dedicated to music and video games and for the “Instant Answers” which offer richer and more immediate interactions. These frequent iterations, while always offering ever more value to the users of the search engine, have sometimes made the user experience more difficult. We therefore had to analyze in-depth the strengths and weaknesses of our interface to design the version 4 of Qwant.
UNDERSTAND AND ANALYZE
This is what we have done thanks to our users , who are as vocal on social media as during the many encounters in the conventions and events where Qwant is present. We also study the reactions through users tests in a laboratory.
Our design team partnered with the LUTIN lab to conduct usability tests with a public sample representative of the population. Occulometric data (eye capture) and verbatims (free comments) collected by the ergonomics researchers team confirmed Qwant’s designers and developers in their idea to redesign the search engine.
REDRAW QWANT’S INTERFACE
Several questions articulated the design work:
1. How to allow an optimal reading of search results while still highlighting “hot” content (news, tweets)?
2. How to facilitate exploratory searches on Qwant, through “verticals” (Music, Games)?
3. How to modernize Qwant’s graphical universe while respecting its DNA?
In order to make the reading of search results easier on desktop computers, our design team decided to give up our traditional three-column view (web, news, social) in favor of two complementary columns.
The “Instant Answers”, initially placed at the top of the page, are now placed to the right of the results, giving valuable space on PCs and Mac for Internet users with a 16/9 screen. News and content from social media are placed in this same column, which allows hops to other types of content without interfering with the reading of web results. This new layout allows the glimpse to follow the “F” characteristic of search engines: strong on the first lines of the text, the user’s attention weakens more and more when the page goes down, thus creating the letter « F »…
A BETTER INTEGRATION OF VERTICALS
Another point of improvement was made on the navigation within the “verticals”. Access to search worlds specialized in music, video games and soon sport is a strong feature of this new version of the search engine.
We have set up a double navigation common to the main search engine and to Qwant Games and Music. Placed under the search field, a first menu allows users to switch between the traditional search and the vertical ones. When one of these is activated, the vertical bar dedicated to content types (web, news, social, images, videos, shopping) evolves to offer new options. In the case of Qwant Music, the menu allows for instance an exhaustive access to the aggregated contents on an artist’s page. This system allows a better integration of the « verticals » within Qwant while dissociating them from the usual functionalities of a search engine.
A NEW GRAPHIC CHARTER
Finally, we have make Qwant’s visual identity evolve, while preserving the metaphor of the spectrum of light that made the success of our logo. Rather than literally representing a palette of colors, we have chosen to build our logo around 3 light spots (red, green, blue) which, when combined, allow an unlimited number of colors. This is called the additive synthesis process.
The multiplicity and nuance of these colors is for us a symbol of the variety and the neutrality of our results, which allows users to see the world as it is, without being locked into their own . The combination of these lights gives a color identity to each of our « verticals ». We also worked on the typography to accentuate the “magnifying glass” placed in Qwant’s letter Q, and to make our brand easier to read. Sometimes people say “Q-Want” instead of “Qwant” because they didn’t see it’s one word. Finally, a multicolored pattern is available on all our supports. We use our new identity everywhere from screens to brochures and goodies, and it brings all of our products together around the same shapes.
AN EXHAUSTIVE DESIGN SYSTEM
Behind all these graphic changes is a brand new “design system” (a set of design principles and rules for designing interfaces) that gathers a hundred components reusable off-the-shelf by our developers to compose all the pages of the engine on computer and mobile screens. This kit has allowed us to gain consistency, rationalize our choices and industrialize the development of interfaces.
A MOBILE EXPERIENCE IN LINE
All the elements of this new design are of course also available on smartphones and tablets, in order your search experience remains consistent regardless of the devices you use. We have particularly reworked the research results in the form of “maps” so that the information is better prioritized.
And now? We are impatient that you discover our work on the version 4 of Qwant. You can now access to the new interface by using Qwant. For a few weeks, the old v3 design will be accessible here in case you need to access it. We wish you a good discovery and invite you to fill in our evaluation questionnaire to share your feedback. These valuable comments will allow us to keep improving Qwant.
