The brand new search engine Cuil - complete with funky logo, web 2.0 design, black background, frame type interface and pictures in the results column!
We have already seen by now the blaze of glory that surrounded Cuil has helped to unleash an online backlash against it, with the claim that Cuil was more of a danger to itself than any other company thanks to downtime and poor performance on both a technical and functional level being a common one. The fact that Cuil has set itself up against Google only made matters worse.
But putting all that aside - what about the look and feel of Cuil? Once all the initial bugs are resolved (and believe me, after some of the images that came up on the most innocent of searches can attest - they have some serious bugs) - will the user experience that is Cuil prove cool enough to pull users off Google and co?
One commentator over at Information Week didn't seem to think so -
" The front page is oppressively dark - I understand that it's a "cool" color scheme, but it's psychologically stifling. The kludgy results page is even worse; it appears as though someone decided to use their 1337 AJAX skills to cruft up some new-fangled frames, which have been deprecated in design circles for years on account of they're also psychologically stifling - they eat up browser real estate and you can't get rid of them. And of course the ill-conceived double-or-triple-column business. The frames would be bad enough, but now we're expected to scan the page in a non-intuitive way between them? Ridiculous. And don't even get me started on the cheesy generic Web 2.0 gradients and that chromed-out out-of-place accordion menu. The content of the menu is interesting, but the positioning? tThe presentation? All pretty much awful."
Ouch.
I would agree that the color scheme leaves a lot to be desired - especially if they are not aiming for some underground niche market.
The main problem with the column system is the alignment - you just do not feel comfortable looking at the results page.
There is definately potential at Cuil - with the suggestive tabs and the additional category menus smart extras, but the layout and User Interface will also need tweaking along with the indexing.
The miffed commentator does not stop there - posing the question "the whole show makes me wonder if they did any usability testing at all, or even if they tried more than one design. Simplicity, familiarity, and functionality are paramount when trying to step to the Google empire. If the algorithms behind the engine are "better" - and so far, given the way the information is presented, that position is hard to support - let that speak for itself"
Well, the fact is we cannot be familiar with Cuil yet since it is so new - once you use the search a few times you can begin to get a sense of what it could be - but only if the search capabilities are tightened up considerably and a little more attention is paid to presenting what are essentially a potential very good set of new good ideas in a way that is visually rich and yet simple and appealing.
And whats with the blue i? Anyone?