
Microsoft.com New Design Preview - chaud
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/preview/
======
dchest
I decided to download Movie Maker so I went to Microsoft.com. They have a
Downloads menu there. I clicked "All Windows Downloads". (The site is pretty
fast, BTW). I selected "Windows 7", then scrolled down until I found Movie
Maker. I clicked "Get it now" and it showed me the Movie Maker page. On that
page I clicked Download Now, and it started downloading!

~~~
aristidb
This is a reference to Bill Gates ranting about not being able to download
Movie Maker easily. See here:
[http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/2008/06/24/full-text-
an-...](http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/2008/06/24/full-text-an-epic-bill-
gates-e-mail-rant/)

~~~
mattmanser
What I never really understood about that is that nothing happened after that.
No heads rolling, no massive rehash of the process, it just limped on being an
utterly lame duck for another decade. Until they are finally bringing out
something like a first class app store now.

Just shows the lack of direction the product was getting when you hear the
totally different results that Steve Jobs got. Admittedly BG was no longer CEO
then.

------
cageface
Microsoft now has, IMO, the most interesting design language of any of the big
tech players. I guess it remains to be seen if there will be any reward for
them in the market for this but, as a developer, I find this a lot more
appealing than anything Google or Apple are doing and C# kicks the shit out of
Java or Obj-C.

~~~
hk__2
Java runs everywhere. C# runs only on M$ plateforms…

~~~
Jacobi
I use Mono on a daily basis. It's a mature full featured cross platform .NET
implementation.

~~~
gouranga
It's not full featured. It's a pretty small subset. The most powerful things
in the .Net platform are the big chunks of code which take on large business
cases and make them go away.

For example the following either don't exist or are half-baked:

WCF (WsHttpBinding in particular), WWF (entirely which we use for WCF
correlation), EF (not a biggy but would be nice), WPF (the best part of .Net),
MEF (buggy and missing bits).

If I wanted cross platform, I'd go Java.

~~~
Jacobi
I do agree with you : mono is a subset of .NET, Cross platform compatibility
is not the main reason for using Mono. I really like the C# and the .NET
ecosystem. I use a native UI for each platform, but the core code is the same.
I'm not a big fan of those generic UI toolkit ...

~~~
gouranga
Agree on generic UI front!

------
zackham
Really nice support of different browser sizes. Resize your browser from wide
to really narrow to check it out.

~~~
rplnt
Except one thing that bugs me most on these "responsive" sites. The images are
still loaded at their full resolution. Even when I reloaded after I resized
the tab. Tried private tab to avoid cache - result still the same - 1600px
wide image loaded.

It's working really nice and all but I think the point of responsive sites is
to make them usable on small, mostly mobile, devices. And we still live in a
age when the mobile bandwidth is something to worry about. I'd imagine the
battery life would suffer a bit too.

~~~
bmuenzenmeyer
In case you didn't know, this is a pressing concern for developers that do
care about performance of responsive websites. Take a look at
<http://www.w3.org/community/respimg/>

Scott Jehl of Filament Group just delivered a talk at An Event Apart on
Responsible Responsive Design, and released Southstreet, a suite of tools
designed to make responsive design more performant. Check it out at
<https://github.com/filamentgroup/Southstreet>

------
nakedgremlin
That is an impressive adaptive site design update.

A couple of things I love about this is (1) the elegance of the menu toggle to
top in the small (mobile-size) view and (2) the slideshow control appearance
on small view and adaptation to breadcrumb implementation on large view. Quite
elegant and appropriate for each environment.

Of course, it is sad that the experience is rarely consistent when you start
digging deeper into the site.

~~~
sliverstorm
_it is sad that the experience is rarely consistent..._

It's a preview.

------
fratis
We've all known it for a while, but this redesign (which I think is quite nice
compared to Microsoft's previous efforts) throws their logo into stark relief.
It looks outdated. It doesn't match.

I'm speculating that we'll see an across-the-board Microsoft rebrand within
the next two years, including a new logo for the company. They've rebranded
their core software offering, they're now changing directions on their
hardware/software philosophy, and trying to gain some mindshare for their new
aesthetic (and their new appreciation for aesthetics more generally) is going
to be a core part of that movement.

Thoughts?

~~~
sjwright
I disagree, and I don't think they're going to change their logo. The
Microsoft logo isn't particularly creative, but at least it's not Verizon
ugly.

(Wanna know what _is_ Verizon ugly? The new Windows logo.)

------
toddmorey
I don't know, I just think you can take sparse so far it becomes soulless.
Simple, clean design can still be emotive. This isn't. The stock art humans
make this feel more like a Big Oil annual report. (And that Products menu is a
little painful!) All that said, this is leaps and bounds beyond their current
homepage.

~~~
aik
Sorry I'm not understanding but really wanting to. What do you mean "more
emotive"? What exactly could be done to this page to make it more "emotive"?
What takes away from its "emotiveness"?

About the products page -- overall I think it looks pretty clean, but I mostly
have a problem with the "More Products" category where they bunch together a
big list of random products.

~~~
mgkimsal
"What exactly could be done to this page to make it more "emotive"? "

Comic Sans seems to do the trick for many people.

------
zyb09
Shouldn't the menu be all capitalized?

~~~
brudgers
Words in all caps are harder to read.

~~~
molmalo
I think he he is being sarcastic, about the recent changes to VS 2012, having
all-caps menus.

[http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2012/06/05/a-de...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2012/06/05/a-design-
with-all-caps.aspx)

~~~
duaneb
Oh god, I thought that was an April Fools joke. Does Microsoft not hire design
people? It looks horrific!

~~~
molmalo
Given that the post is called "A DESIGN WITH ALL-CAPS" (yeah, the title is
all-caps, funny thing), maybe, the real problem precisely that they are
supporting their designers's view, over their user's feedback. You know,
trying to defend their "artistic integrity"...

~~~
chris_wot
What's really funny is that a whole bunch of people are responding in the
comments with all caps :-)

------
abruzzi
I really don't like the use of big photos like here, the new airbnb, and Bing.
They are busy, space wasting and bandwidth hogs. And to my eyes they don't add
anything.

~~~
josephcooney
They only waste space when you've got space to waste. I really like the way
the layout changes as the screen size changes and the images become more
cropped.

~~~
simonrobb
Yeah the responsive design is really well executed. But seriously, I can
literally only see the nav and four images when I load this page on my
desktop. Shocking usability. Every time I see a new MS offering I feel more
and more that they are investing in good-looking design rather than usable
design.

------
TazeTSchnitzel
Very modern, very metro, beautiful design.

I like it.

------
chris_wot
That's a totally odd font choice they are using. Check out the "d", the "b"
and the "p" - looks horrible in Firefox 13! [1]

Oh, and it looks terrible in Internet Explorer 8, as the layout is completely
out of whack. [2]

1\. <http://static.inky.ws/image/2290/image.jpg>

2\. <http://static.inky.ws/image/2291/image.jpg>

~~~
__float
Wow, bizarre. It looks nothing like that in Chrome.

<http://i.imgur.com/Ny3fo.png>

~~~
chris_wot
I've logged a bug with Mozilla:
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=769573>

------
Lisa2000
I am completely underwhelmed beyond the responsiveness, which is nice. Feels
very yesterday. One click thru to products page, and it's more underwhelming.
Shows lack of vision for the company. "Managing home and homework just got
easier." Really? This is the best their designers and copywriters can show us?

------
powertower
Broken in IE8 on Vista SP1 (divs are placing one after the other horizontally
instead of in their proper places).

~~~
mparlane
Same here, I guess it shows what Microsoft think of IE8...

------
ChrisNorstrom
Beautiful and much better. A little cold and sterile from all the white space
but it's a step in the right direction. They'll iron things out over time.

ONE thing. Where are the Previous & Next Arrows for the main slideshow?

------
Silhouette
Is this what we have to look forward to with Metro?

The design seems like a children's book combined with some ISP "landing page"
from 1995. Everything is big and bold, yet the entire page is almost
completely devoid of meaningful content. It's just a vast array of
disorganised links, or more precisely, a whole bunch of vast arrays of
disorganised links, with no sign of any rational information architecture or
even basic scannability.

Sorry, but I just can't find anything nice to say about it. It has absolutely
no redeeming features whatsoever AFAICS.

~~~
lusr
"It's just a vast array of disorganised links, or more precisely, a whole
bunch of vast arrays of disorganised links, with no sign of any rational
information architecture or even basic scannability."

What a ridiculous statement. Of course it's organised. Want to download
something to extend a Microsoft product line? Click "Downloads" and choose the
product line. Need Support? Click "Support". Want to buy a Microsoft product?
Click "Store".

Which use cases exactly are you imagining are not supported by this "vast
array of disorganised links"?

~~~
Silhouette
_Of course it's organised._

Really?

Go to the page. Open the first menu, "Products". They've grouped Windows stuff
together and Office stuff together. On the next column, there is everything
from Surface (which one?) to Hotmail. On the column after that, we have
products like "Partner network" and "Microsoft in the enterprise". This column
also has "Cloud services", but Azure is in the final column.

Let's try another menu, "Security". There are only four options on this menu.
Let's assume I'm someone who doesn't know what every Microsoft brand means,
but my friend told me I might have a virus on my Windows PC. Does that menu
give me the slightest guidance about which option I need? The names are
completely meaningless, unless you happen to know that Microsoft Security
Essentials isn't actually a guide to the essentials of security, it's the
product with anti-virus functionality.

 _Which use cases exactly are you imagining are not supported by this "vast
array of disorganised links"?_

I know what I want to do, but I don't know the name of the Microsoft product
or service that will help me.

I know what I want to do, but I don't know whether Microsoft offer a product
or service that can help me.

In fact, just about anything except "Tell me about Windows", "Tell me about
Office", or "I already know exactly which product or service I want, by
Microsoft Randomised Brand Name(TM), tell me about the thing I've already
found".

There is no sense of priority. No sense of leading a visitor interested in a
particular area through what Microsoft has to offer. It's just a catalogue,
with a lot of spurious entries thrown in and no descriptions for anything. It
is empty.

~~~
lusr
You seem to be blinded by some serious Microsoft hatred. "Microsoft Randomised
Brand Name(TM)"? "Office" is "random"? I suppose you think "Apple" or "Linux"
or "Ubuntu" or "Sun" or whatever it is you _are_ a fan of is less random?
Another ridiculous statement.

Your friend told you you have a virus? Well if you know that means "Security"
click on there, and, logically being unfamiliar with the 4 choices you pick
the first one, "Security Home". Bang, right there in front of you:

    
    
        "Download Microsoft Security Essentials for free.  Help shield your computer from viruses, spyware, and other malware."
    

If you're too scared to click twice, or if the word "Security" is unfamiliar
in the context of viruses, type "virus" in the search box on the home page.
First result:

    
    
        "What is a Computer Virus | What Do Computer Viruses Do.  Have you ever wondered what is a computer virus or what do computer viruses do? Learn how are computer viruses spread and how to prevent them."
    

Second and third results discuss virus removal.

That's the only specific use case you mentioned and I had zero problems
finding the correct solution. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to
criticize Microsoft (the 3 hours I wasted yesterday trying to get ASP.NET MVC
4 working is one of them). But you didn't list one valid criticism with a
specific use case. The rest of your post is a vague rant.

~~~
Silhouette
I don't hate Microsoft. I am simply observing that their new design and
information architecture are very poor in this specific case.

If you really can't understand that many of Microsoft's brand names are not
literal/descriptive or why this creates a usability problem if much of the
material on their home page is just links to such names without any
explanation or context, there is little more I can say here.

However, straw man arguments about brand names in general or advice that boils
down to "Just Google it" because the page doesn't contain any useful
information don't exactly help your case.

------
mc32
Looks like they're matching one of their main web properties' UI with their
new OS IU.

In some ways that makes sense, they're going all out or bust, in other ways
I'm not sure that searching thru Technet articles will be best experienced via
this new UI --granted their previous IF to Technet was horrible.

Something else is that previously they had no uniform design. different teams
had different designs for their domains. Once you entered a search term, all
bets were off on what the page you got to would look like.

------
creamyhorror
I think one thing conspicuously lacking here (besides rounded borders and
gradiented buttons, both of which aren't part of Metro style) is icons.
Nowadays most sites use icons to add visual interest to plain text.
Microsoft's old designs didn't, and I think they suffered for the lack of
them. The new design is refreshing and clean but would still benefit from
having some similarly clean and functional graphical elements, i.e. icons.

(Crossposting to their feedback.)

~~~
Goladus
Personally I hate when icons replace text.

------
GBKS
The simplicity of the metro design style is a great direction. It's in a way a
forced simplicity which can minimize the UI clutter we have come to know from
Microsoft. But reducing elements means that the few that you have should be as
refined as possible, and proportion, scale and white space become more
important. I think this site would look 10 times better and balanced with
better sizing and spacing of everything.

------
mtgx
I don't see anything special about this new design. It's sparser than before,
but I don't see anything "too Metro" about it. Just 3-4 images and text links.
Is that supposed to mean it's Metro? Because there are a lot of similar sites
like that on the web. Would Craiglist with bigger fonts, more space between
links and 3 big images at the top become "Metro"?

------
tmzt
So why didn't their Surface launch site look like that?? And will they be
fixing search (other than including Google GSE which would be a vast
improvement).

Edited to add: the answer to my last question is 'no':
<http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/search#q=surface>

------
yaix
Good to see that the use the "menu with down-arrows" correctly, that is "on
click", rather than flickery on hover.

~~~
bhrgunatha
This is one of the first things I noticed.

The problem is not just that it is flickery, it's actually often unusable.

There are so many sites that use on-hover to trigger a menu (often with sub-
menus), so that if you misplace your pointer even slightly, the top-level menu
option you selected disappears.

I've lost count of the number of times I have to play the game of selecting
from the top level menu, back down to the item I actually want.

------
mayukh
Here's one angle..MS has 2 large very different customer sets, the enterprise
and the consumer and in the past it seemed that a lot of the UI was some sort
of a compromise targeted to both.

The consumer tech group is definitely getting stronger at design .. and the
enterprise tech arm can rely on its salesforce

------
udp
I'm not particularly anti-Microsoft, but I absolutely _hate_ this design. The
text is so huge I find it painful to read, most of the page is taken up by a
slideshow of what seem to be generic stock images, and I have to scroll before
I can find anything useful.

------
andrewfelix
It's like a beautiful store front.

Click on almost any link and the beautiful geometric layout is replaced with
something different and far less pleasant.

This would have made so much more impact on me if the theme had been deployed
more consistently and thoroughly across more pages.

------
derpmeister
That's the squarest site ever! I take it IE _still_ doesn't support rounded
corners?

~~~
brudgers
What is the advantage of rounded corners?

~~~
simonrobb
Rounded corners are known to draw attention inward while angular edges "point"
outward, which could make rounded corners a better choice for content
containers from the usability perspective. An interesting discussion on the
topic here: [http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/11150/how-do-
rounded-c...](http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/11150/how-do-rounded-
corners-affect-usability)

OTOH, I love the feel of Metro and wouldn't change to rounded corners for the
world.

------
bane
It's pretty nice, works well across desktop to mobile (the slide-down menus
are a bit slow on mobile). My only issue is that I don't particularly care for
the Sans-serif font on the section headers. It just doesn't look "right" to
me.

------
curiousfiddler
Looks neat, uncluttered and peppy! But what about the favicon? That is so
1990!

~~~
bicknergseng
Especially when an awesome fav seems easy for those guys. I guess they
probably don't want to use the Windows one because it's only one of their
products.

------
rbanffy
Not a very efficient solution to the "Google is getting too much attention"
problem. I have to respect the people who did it, even if I don't the manager
who decided to show it before it's ready.

------
dutchbrit
Wondering if Blitz Agency designed this, they're known for doing design/web
work for Microsoft.

<http://www.blitzagency.com/>

------
damian2000
Nice look, but, slow as hell to load. 15 seconds before anything appeared.
Maybe because I'm in Australia. (my net connection is around 5mbit so its not
that).

~~~
jameswyse
Only took a couple of seconds for me in Australia, though I'm on fibre.

------
dewiz
Really cool responsive design, works and resizes smoothly both on FF and
Chrome, while I've seen some similar implementations being very slow on
Chrome.

------
juanpdelat
Wonder if they're planning to make ALL their web content responsive. A lot of
work for their web devs!

------
sausagefeet
God, finally a MS website that I can actually determine something about what
the company does from.

------
TamDenholm
Is it just me or does the guy in the last slide look like hes using a
photoshopped macbook air/pro?

~~~
levesque
I don't see why they would do that, it would be beyond stupid.

~~~
politician
I grabbed the image and tossed it into Paint.NET; there does appear to be some
artifact in the center of the laptop lid that could possibly (to my unskilled
eye) be (mis)interpreted as the leaf on the top of the Apple logo. However, I
don't know enough about this stuff to say anything more than that someone
should take a look.

------
citricsquid
I like it but something about it (well, the entire metro design) feels... off.
This is the sort of _style_ I really enjoy so I maybe it might just be the
feeling that's too forward for a company like Microsoft, but something about
it that I can't put my finger on makes me second guess how much I like it.

------
akshat
There is no auto-complete in the search box. Should this not be expected?

------
orangethirty
Congrats to the MS web team. Great job. Makes me want a job there. :)

------
robmiller
Uses jQuery and Modernizr libraries. Nice work Microsoft.

------
dkroy
What is bi:index used for?

------
perfunctory
is there anybody who really likes these slide shows on the home page?

------
billpatrianakos
It looks great actually! What kills ,e about Microsoft though is that,
especially recently, they've done a great job in making their sites, OS, and
software quite pretty but they _still_ after all this time have absolutely
horrendous font rendering in Windows which kills every design they come out
with. I'm a developer who uses a Mac as my primary machine, Linux as a
secondary machine and in the past month has been forced to use Windows at my
new job. I wasn't happy about it but it turns out I've gotten just about as
productive with it as any other platform. But the problem is that now, 4 weeks
in, I get terrible eye strain and the whole system looks ugly because fonts
are jagged except at really large sizes. It's ironic that this new site looks
awesome on my iPad and Mac but not so much on their own OS, Windows. Why can't
they fix that already?

~~~
wisty
Microsoft font rendering is different, not worse.

If you want to make it more like OSX, there's a tuning app here:

<http://www.microsoft.com/typography/cleartypeinfo.mspx>

~~~
mitsche
AFAIK there is no way in Windows to control hinting, which in my opinion is
the thing that makes Windows' font-rendering unbearable, especially on
displays with a high PPI count.

There's hacks out there, but they're exactly that: hacks. And they don't
always work that well.

------
idleloops
Blinded by the white. Inconsistency of design between child sites.

------
FACKER
HTML5

------
rsoto
Weird, I can't see anything if Adblock is on. Make sure yours is whitelisting
microsoft.com (at least temporarily).

~~~
ineedtosleep
I see everything fine here.

Using Linux with:

* Chrome 21.0.1180.4 dev with AdBlock

* Firefox 13.0.1 with AdBlock Plus and NoScript with all scripts blocked

~~~
FACKER
with AD BLOCK PLUS beta! i see evrything fine, Same versions as above!

------
uvTwitch
It's taken a long while, but Michaelsoft are finally getting their shit
together. Well Done!

~~~
mintplant
Sorry, Michaelsoft? Was that an intentional inside joke?

~~~
uvTwitch
I just find this really funny, and refer to MS as such:
[http://brog.engrish.com/wp-
content/uploads/2010/03/michaelso...](http://brog.engrish.com/wp-
content/uploads/2010/03/michaelsoft_binbows.jpg)

