Stefan Is... scrutinizing the user experience of Live Search (Episode 005)

Posted By: Max | Apr 28th @ 2:03 PM | 24,799 Views | 10 Comments

This was one of my most enjoyable talks with the team that brings you Live.com.  This time, we dove into the User Experience and User Interface—topics I am personally intrigued by.

Have you ever wondered how we make our decisions?  What we do to optimize speed and efficiency?  Who do we test our ideas on?  What the heck is the “Golden Triangle?”

These answers and more in this chat with Venkat… so dive in.
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#Apr 28th @ 2:28 PM
exoteric
exoteric
I : Next<I>
The Windows Live team has done a great job on the design and usability of Windows Live.
Still much can be done, e.g. in the customization department and desktop integration, but it feels very well thought out.
#Apr 28th @ 4:49 PM
intelman
intelman

Ooo Jing!

The Pictures on Live are pretty sweet. I try to look at them everyday.

I love the flight tracking in Live. Google Search completely owns live in conversions though.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%28Pa*L%29%2Fs

Apparently a Pascal Liter Per second is a watt.

#Apr 28th @ 7:58 PM
Charles
Charles
Welcome Change
I like how this series is evolving. Thank you Max and Stefan!
C
#Apr 29th @ 10:00 AM
JohnFrum
JohnFrum

When I set up a new system, one of the first things I now do is set the default page to www.live.com.  I love the hotspots.  Which brings up an interesting question.  Why is MSN still the default?  MSN is horrible for a number of reasons.  It just boggles the mind that MS would put an effort into making something good like live search and then snub it by letting the clearly inferior msn be the default.

#Apr 29th @ 10:11 AM
maxzuck
maxzuck
Spaceman Spiff!
That's really a question of how you prefer your browser should behave on the first load... are you looking for instant content or a quick load with the ability to find something else?

If it's the former, MSN makes sense... the latter, live.com.  But hey, you obviously know what you're doing and change the homepage quickly to what you like, so BOOM good on you Smiley.
#Apr 29th @ 1:17 PM
JohnFrum
JohnFrum

"If it's the former, MSN makes sense..."

I don't want to get too far off track since I mostly wanted to focus on how great Live is but I have to disagree.  I don't think MSN ever makes sense.  It's that bad.  It tries to do so much that it doesn't do anything well.  I just loaded it again to make sure I was being fair.

The first thing to grab my eye is an add for Nissan.  Just left of that is a slide show of random news items.  Below that are some categories of news items that are so cramped together that it's difficult to feel interested in looking at any of them.  On the far left is a video highlight of Opera for some reason that's not very clear.  More adds for Geico and Hotmail are sprinkled about.  There is a search bar at the top which is fine but it's dwarfed by a list of various categories of items to click on that reminds me of AOL or Gopher.   As if that's how we're really supposed to find things on the internet.   It's all just a disjointed crazy mess that doesn't know what I want so it tries to give me everything at once, which is not at all what I want even from an instant content site.

My real point is that msn was a failed attempt to imitate Yahoo.  Live is a successfull attempt at imitating Google and is even better imo.  Who is more successful, Yahoo or Google?  Google.  So live should get top billing over msn.

/rant

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