November 11, 2004 | View Comments (34) | Category: Design Critiques
Summary: Micrsoft releases their Search Engine, but misses key design erros.
I have been working on an article that I am having a difficult time with making coherent. This doesn't happen very often (*cough*), but it has this time. However, I was blessed today. Today I was able to view the new MSN Search Beta website. It's a thing of beauty I might add.
If you believe any of that...
In any case their site has launched and it's a bit disappointing. Google was never the highest of quality, but at least it didn't seem like they tried to make something look good and failed miserably at it. I think since it's Thursday today will be a good day for an analysis. Don't you?
If you are scared to visit the site then here it is in its current state:
Since the majority of us have been exposed to Google's design for a couple of years now, some might believe that design is not that important of an issue when it comes to search engines. However, the design of Google was a paradigm shift from the portal/search engine design that was running rampant back in the days. In this respect Google's design was perfect.
However, you could also tell that Google's design wasn't done by designers at all, but programmers. It worked out it seems. In contrast you have Microsoft's search which I can't tell was done by designers in a hurry or programmers pretending to be designers during their lunch break.
The reason that design is important with regards to search engines is because the design should be invisible. People go to search engines to get in and get out. There is no need to stick around so making the most beautiful of sites isn't necessary. However, making something coherent is very necessary.
Today I am making myself an expert at search engine design because I don't know if they even exist so I am taking the risk and calling myself THE expert of search engine design. As my first duty as expert I am proclaiming that the most important element of any search engine homepage is the search box. Nothing else should take priority.
In Microsoft's case can you see what takes priority? Let me show you.
The blue swallows the whole design. I am no longer concerned with the search box because now I just wish to go swimming in the giant pool on my screen.
I can understand them wishing to use blue because of branding issues, but my suggestion would be to make the whole background blue and have the white search box in the middle or maybe just lessen the huge amount of space above. Then the eye can more readily be drawn towards the search box.
With the bluespace issue mentioned above you would think that the designers have a high regard for whitespace and making sure every element has room to breathe. Well no further than 10 pixels down they go ahead and contradict themselves.
It's quite possible that the design team held a contest to see which one of them could pack the most elements in 73 pixels of vertical space. My second hypothesis is that the elements on the page are living organisms and blue is such a cold color that they decided to huddle together to provide warmth for each other.
When your homepage has such a low amount of elements on it, why not take advantage of the whitespace given?
What in the hell is a Tink? A Tink is a link that wishes to be a tab or a tab that should just be a link. So what are the Tinks on this page? Here:
I won't go into analysis here because I really think that Yahoo! hit a homerun in their execution of search tabs. Distinguishable and color coded, that's how I think everyone should do them.
These are what inspired me to even write this piece. The buttons are ugly. Either the text is too large or the buttons are too small. The gradients look amateurish. This is what frustrates me about the site. Someone actually tried to design it, but just didn't know what they were doing. They pressed their limits too hard it seems.
Well it is a new site so I wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt. I went to the About Page and it isn't that bad. Weird alignment issues, but whatever. It didn't really tell me anything about the Site itself so I figured the blog had to hold some important information. I only viewed it in Firefox, but I don't think I need to say anything about it.
They use CSS.
Okay, it really isn't as bad as I make it seem probably, but those buttons...man...those buttons. The branding could use a little work. For example, Google isn't afraid to let you know where you are at. Open the design up a bit more. Use some of the $40 Billion you have in the bank and hire a designer and you shouldbe good to go.
Trackback URL: http://9rules.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/368
Heh. Right on. I thought about some of the issues you point out after trying it out for a bit earlier today. As for search results, well, I can tell by looking at my logs that my site is currently not ranked as well by msn search as it is by Google -- Googlebot spends around six times as much time at my place as MSNBot does.
Design and search result issues aside, did you view source? Amazingly, MSN search uses almost valid (yeah there is no "almost" valid, but you get the point) XHTML 1.0 Strict. What's up with that?
Roger Johansson (http://www.456bereastreet.com)
Very nitpicky, but... I hate it when people take fairly well known naming conventions and change them.
Everywhere else you go it is called "Advanced Search," but MSN has to go and call it "Search Builder." Even if it functions a bit differently, we'd all get the point. It would have saved me a precious nano-second of comprehension time if they just used "Advanced Search." I would have immediately known if I wanted to click it or not.
seth (http://www.thegeeklystandard.com)
Yeah, those buttons are ugly. In Safari, I don't get to see the ugly buttons, but I do get to see an ugly blue box where the custom buttons should be. Here's a screen cap of what I mean. http://www.iinet.com/~cfenison/images/msnbuttons.jpg
Chris Fenison (http://www.chrisfenison.com)
RE: #4
Something tells me Microsoft doesn't care too much how the site looks in anything but IE/Win. Even MS's home page only really renders properly in IE/Win.
But it really looks unprofessional in Safari. Well actually I think those buttons look unprofessional in any browser...
Jason G (http://www.jgleman.com)
Well, they have a blog. Maybe somebody should go and tell them how hideous their new search is...
Scrivs?
Stu Schaff (http://www.devsyn.com)
Hmm, what's the link? I went to search.msn.com and it does not look like that. It is quite simple, reminiscent of Google.
Zelnox
A good read! I think in most cases you're right and you would certainly expect more from a large company!
Perhaps $500 and a free-lance designer and MSN would be on top of it ;)
David Jones - Elegant Design (http://www.elegantdesign.co.nz)
I feel sorry for anyone using a Mozilla browser set to a larger font size. If I increase the text size just twice in my copy of Firefox, the design breaks. The lower options, (search builder, settings, help, espanol) completely disappear.
Seth, I agree with you on the Seach Builder vs. Advanced Search terms. I don't think that's nitpicky at all.
JonathanB (http://www.bloy.net/)
I agree, this is one of the ugliest M$ sites i've seen.
IMO, they should stick to the design on search.msn.com.
Josue Salazar (http://www.josuesalazar.com)
Agreed with the buttons, they are terrible. But I think the most important part - the actual search results page - looks decent. Simple like google, but nicer.
If I were to adopt this as my search engine I'd never actually see the front page anyways, thats what bookmarklets are for ;)
Tim (http://www.gfxmonk.com)
Hmmm it's odd that it doesn't conform to any specific style standard, something MS are usually VERY hot on. Points to a rush job if you ask me.
I can sort of understand the idea behind the big blue "pool" as they need to differentiate from Google but no, I can't understand any of the design decisions - hell if whoever did it had just used some of the common elements from the main MSN or Microsoft websites, it would at least look a bit more like the real thing.
Hang on, this isn't some elaborate hoax, is it?
Gordon (http://www.gordonmclean.co.uk/)
Agree with every point you got there.
They may try to live up to Google´s performance, but they failed designwise for now.
ChristianM (http://www.coldheat.de/)
Well it is beta - you know, the time for testing, getting user feedback etc. etc.
Maybe they'll listen and fix some of these problems.
Maybe pigs will fly :)
Tim (http://timandkathy.co.uk/)
If you don't like MS branding, you probably won't like it. This seems more like Microsoft bashing then constructive criticism to me.
Hayo (http://hayobethlehem.nl/)
The actual design of the search mainpage is very nice - the only problem is that it's not usable. The 'tinks' (a term I've never heard before, but its perfect) are stupid, the search box isn't big and prominent enough, the buttons look do look amateurish, and any person browsing without JS won't be able to use the 'search builder'. I do like the gradients and the blue color, though; it reminds me of http://justwatchthesky.com. I understand that that isn't the main function of a search page, though.
I was impressed, however, that they're not using any s, or s, or bgcolor=s. That makes me happy, and I think should warrant a little more than the one sentence you provided in your post.
Ultimately, I am worried that users will switch over to MSN for searching, and then remain with IE, hotmail, and windowsupdate. This will affect google's seach page use, in my opinion.
tom (http://none)
I don't care how it looks (okay I do). There are no search results for my first three trys. That sucks more.
Matthew Oliphant (http://businesslogs.com)
Ok, I saw finally.
The blue rectangle doesn't distract THAT much. Although I agree that it may seem a little crowded, it means less mouse pointer movement. The suggestions above can be applied to Google as well?
Zelnox
"If you don't like MS branding, you probably won't like it. This seems more like Microsoft bashing then constructive criticism to me."
I don't think that's fair, really. Scrivs recognised that MSN were trying to fit in with Windows' existing branding, but that the end result didn't live up to their usual high quality!
Tim (http://timandkathy.co.uk/)
Well if that was bashing then I guess the other 10 critiques I have done should be considered bashing as well. Maybe the tone set out wasn't the right one, but I was in a good mood so I made it lighthearted. I recognized the branding effort, but is bad design part of a brand as well?
Scrivs (http://9rules.com/)
I think you're spot on about your design opinions on this. It's apparent to any designer right when you launch it -- that box alone is too overpowering, and seems as if there's no real control of it just being plopped in the white space. It just seems like they didn't take care for the little elements of detail that add emphasis to design. Google may be a minimalist design that's not really that much design, but it looks like they put more care in atleast spacing their elements out. I am suprised MS didn't make it look more like the XP log in page, or atleast the graphic that it leads into more so.
Also, interestingly -- on Safari I get my Mac Aqua buttons, I don't see those graphic buttons as posted.
Brady J. Frey (http://www.dotfive.com)
... I forgot to say that I am amazed they used CSS for their layout -- that's the only thing that gives them one up on google, not a table in there I saw. Their CSS looks a little over bloated, is it affecting other page elements too?
Brady J. Frey (http://www.dotfive.com)
The button text is only screwed up on Gecko. They look fine in Opera and IE (of course).
I like the colorful design, IMO it's much nicer to look at than Google. I do agree that the blue space is wasted and the tinks aren't very good but overall I like it. I was pretty shocked to find that not only is the code valid (except for one mistake with a non-existing attribute) but it's all properly marked up with headings and lists, etc, except for the text "The stylesheet is not compatible with your browser" which is really not good practise. It just adds useless text for people on mobile devices and screenreaders.
Luke Shingles
The positioning of the gradient is bothering me...the lightest part of the effect ought to be, in my opinion, in the bottom left where the search box is. As it stands, it draws my eyes to the centre, highlighting the word "beta".
Also, I'm curious as to why the ability to change the language to Spanish is given as much importance (navigationally speaking) as the search builder, help, and settings links. Switching languages also gets me a different set of results on a query of my name; curiously, my own home page doesn't appear when I search in English, but it's the 3rd result when I search in Spanish.
paul haine (http://joeblade.com)
Having said that, I do like the search results page - having a blue header area helps differentiate the results from the navigation, and makes a nice change from Google's sea of white.
paul haine (http://joeblade.com)
I can't help thinking that it looks better with the styles turned off! I doubt that it was a designer or a programmer that did it. Most likely it was a nephew or distant cousin of Mr Gates looking to have an addition to his allowance. Who hasn't heard "I can't pay that much, my neighbor's kid said he could do it for $50!"
Adrian Rinehart-Balfe (http://www.boogenstein.com/)
Has anyone else noticed how much the results page looks like Google's? The colours, the placement of the sponsored links... It looks to me like Microsoft just ripped it off of Google, only they've made it feel more cramped and harder to read by increasing the text size.
Sara White (http://blog.splashdesigngroup.com/deepthoughts.php)
I'm also wondering why we get the default form styles in Safari instead of the ugly gradient buttons. It's frustrating to think any one of us could probably fix this monstrosity in half an hour. I am always perplexed at why companies with all the money in the world can't seem to spend their money on the right professionals. Tis' very strange.
Jim Amos (http://graphikjunkie.com/)
I'm also wondering why we get the default form styles in Safari instead of the ugly gradient buttons. It's frustrating to think any one of us could probably fix this monstrosity in half an hour. I am always perplexed at why companies with all the money in the world can't seem to spend their money on the right professionals. Tis' very strange.
You're barking up the wrong tree. Go call Apple on that one, Safari refuses to accept any form styling in order to keep it 'consistent' with the OS. They could use images instead, but that's the only solution. I hate Apple for that.
As for the design.. it's terrible. They could have paid someone $500 to design the homepage better than they did. I can't understand what they were thinking. It looks terrible.
Kyle (http://www.warpspire.com)
Hey, our aqua buttons would be prettier nonetheless:)
Either way, even though google's LOOKS better, it's a shame that MS had to make a search engine tableless (though the code is still a bit of a mess, but even the search results are tableless) - I would have hoped Google would have stepped up to the plate for that one first.
Brady J. Frey (http://www.dotfive.com)
Kyle, you hate Apple for consistent widgets?
I hate (well, dislike) custom form widgets on every page. I'm glad Safari and Camino go the route of better usability and keep their widgets standardized with the OS.
Paul D
Now I know that Microsoft aren't developing Explorer for Mac any more, though they still support it, but you'd have thought they'd at least check their sites work in it... the main page looks okay but click on Search Builder and this happens:
http://www.weblogimages.com/v.p?uid=abiw&pid=228154&sid=aBE31acuw7
The Country/Region, Language and Results Ranking don't work at all, the others do work, but it's not exactly pretty...
Sarah N
I have used BETA and it is plus spectacular. Watch out Google, remember Netscape? They now have like 2% of the market.
BETA is great at finding sites that are usually buried on page 20 of google. Google relies too much on links, and not so much on content.
So real old pages 5+ years old dominate google, and their content is stale. BETA has a lot of fresh new faces!
CarlosX (http://www.CarlosX.com)
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#1
Yeah, I agree with most everything you'd said. When I saw it, I thought the exact same thing -- "Either some designer had a very short deadline, or someone who's not a designer thinks he is."
It's interesting that this site -- all five or six elements of it -- is actually worse than most of MS's other work.
Jeff Croft (http://jeffcroft.com)