You can try out the new Microsoft.com home page by going to http://labs.microsoft.com/en/us/. It’s slick, fast, easy-to-use and visually appealing.
Joe Wilcox at Microsoft Watch noticed:
“The software giant is testing a new home page, and do I detect some AJAX? The new Microsoft.com also introduces visual concepts, like thumbnails, similar to those used in Windows Vista.
“The shared Windows Vista design heritage is one of approach. It’s quite brilliant, if intentional, and lucky, if accidental. One way for Microsoft to take back the Web–rather than Google and Web 2.0 companies taking the desktop–is to unify the user experience across its desktop software, Websites and Web services. Office 2007 and Windows Vista offer an unprecedented number of visual cues, at least compared to their forebears.”
Kudos to the Microsoft.Com team!
2 replies on “Try out the new Microsoft.com home page”
New page is ghastly, and approaching unusable
As for the comments posted above …
"is to unify the user experience across its desktop software, Websites and Web services"
This sounds like marketing/market research guff .
Basically they wanted to show off new technology not improve user experiences
Pages should be clean and simple in appearance, easy to navigate. The new home page is not.
Public Web-Pages should present information in a wholly different manner from desktop application interfaces. Why? Because they are for different things.
Desktops apps are designed to enable you to do things; web pages are designed for readbility
As for web applications … well it depends 🙂
So … No Kudos to the Microsoft.com team
Appreciate the feedback.
IMHO, it was nice to see this feedback from Microsoft Watch, rather than an internal Microsoft source. I believe that our Microsoft.com team found that in their research that the home page layout is preferred to past versions. I work closely with the team and know that they’re dedicated to improving the overall user experience with our web sites.
I agree with you that "pages should be clean and simple in appearance, easy to navigate."
So, I guess that we disagree, which is fine.