Recently I visited www.souq.com, a website I often use to buy and sell used items. I was surprised to see their new search box! It is the largest search box I have ever seen. And I think might be officially the largest search box on the web!
Usually people tend to dislike new interface changes with websites they frequently visit, and this what seems to have happened when I asked a few friends about their opinion about this change. But I think, this was the right move; Am sure 99% of users visiting this website, know what they are looking for and will search for it. The possibility of a user browsing through categories is very small. And am sure the website designers have pages’ visits data and they know already that. So if SEARCH is the focus, why not to make it bigger. Here they made it bigger not only in width but also in height, also to give more space for bigger font, now the input font is even bold.
Other search websites have already taken this step. The most popular move was from www.google.com
Google search box got bigger
Other examples also include Yahoo!
Old Yahoo! Search Box
New Yahoo! Search Box
And dogpile.com (a search-engine that returns results from Google, Yahoo!, Bing and Ask)
Dogpile Old Search box
Dogpile New Search box
Another interesting Big search box I have found, was in the beautiful Nike website
Nike Big Search Box
It seems that good websites today have adopted two design approaches which I find very important. First, more macro and micro white-spaces (this is a good short article about whitespaces). Secondd, bigger fields. Specially when it comes to fields that need to be filled by users for searching or even for signing up. In one word, design became more focused.
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