Chrome Home

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2021-07-25 22:00:08

Chrome Home was an ambitious redesign of mobile Chrome's main UI. It brought Chrome's toolbar to the bottom of the screen and turned in into a peeking panel that could be swiped to expose additional controls.

Phones were growing in size, and we had opportunity to innovate in creating a gestural, spatial interface that would still be usable with one hand.

Mobile Chrome was also growing in features - but because its minimalist interface kept everything within a three dot menu, these features were underutilized and hard to access.

The idea caught traction internally, eventually becoming a Chrome org priority. I then led a team to execute and iterate on the concept. Executing on Chrome Home required rethinking not just the toolbar, but almost all of Chrome's UI: search, bookmarks, tabs, prompts, etc. To inform our decisions, we used a variety of prototyping and testing approaches of increasing fidelity. Ultimately, such a fundamental change to a web browser required nothing short of building it into the product and testing it in longitudinal studies and live beta experiments.

We heard a mixture of reactions. The feature gained a cult following among the tech community. But for some mainstream users, the change felt disorienting. Chrome serves billions of users around the globe with varying tech literacy. I became increasingly convinced that launching Chrome Home would not serve all our users well.