Google: Tweaking in Public

Google announced the next step in their redesign today: They’re removing the ubiquitous black bar and replacing it with a drop-down that emanates from the Google logo. And they’ve elevated the search bar, which was glaringly missing in the black bar iteration.

While I believe Google’s strategy of streamlining and infusing social into all of their services is the right one, they’ve been tweaking their new design in public quite a bit lately. With several high profile user experience fails in its recent history, perhaps Google should take their tweaking a bit more private?