Microsoft’s Bing Looks Nice. What About the Usability?
Tags: bing, search engine, usability
The new search engine from Microsoft looks nice. At least for the front page, which displays a different, nice picture every day.
What is Bing all about?
The home page fails to communicate visitors what the website is all about. While everybody know what Google or Yahoo! do, almost no one knows what the heck is Bing.com. I would have inserted a nice tag line below the logo, something like “Microsoft’s Search Engine” or similar.
How do I perform a search?
There is no “Search” button on this page or the search results page. You should always display a web button properly and label it correctly. In this case it should have been “Search” or similar.
The search results page
Let’s go to the search result page (probably the page users will spend the most time on). Here the search button is missing again, the value proposition also. The page is too crowded and the information on the page is hard to read. I would give user the option to hide the related searches and the history (by default they will be hidden).
The focus is not on the center of the page where the search results are, but on the top left section of the page, where the orange image has the most contrast with the rest of the page:
Bling Search Results
Give me my eyeglasses!
Notice how hard the links on the top left-hand side are to read? Why would you have such important links overlaying on a background where it’s distracting for the eyes?
Bing's Top Links
Where’s my search, dude?
So, Bing, I searched for “2 person tent” and you decided to show the results for “2 person tents” (notice the added “s”) at the end:
Where's my search
Is that a image or what?
What are those numbers at the bottom of the page? Are they links, or images? What do you mean by Next? Is it Next Page or Next Set of Pages?
Page Numbering
There are other problems on the page (strange play buttons on video search results, the strange vertical line on mouse over the snippets, etc.), but I will give Microsoft time to fix some of them before I take another look.
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Dan said:
Aug 11, 09 at 8:04 amCome on, my 55 year old parents figured out how to use Bing.com on the fly.
Steve said:
Jan 17, 10 at 1:29 pmI belive None of the point you’ve made are valid!
Bing is not exactly a Microsoft version of Google. It’s marketed as a Descision engine, not a search engine.
And There IS a clear search button and it uses a magnifying glass icon to represent ’search’. Just what this website does!!!
And your search has not gone anywhere! Bing has intelligently INCLUDED results with ‘tentS’. And You have also been presented with an option to show results only with tent without an s.
‘Next Page’ or ‘Next set of pages’?! Since ‘next’ in search results is almost never executed as ‘next set of pages’ it is safe to assume it means next page.
And contrast is usually used to make an element stand out, it is superbly used on control navigations on left and ads on right. As for search results, they do not need orangle highlights to standout. They are clearly visible as results yielded from your search!
And besides, Microsoft’s website and online services are executed by the best designers and professionals in the world before put to rigorous user testing! It’s not likely they’ll make websites like that.
TraiaN said:
Jan 19, 10 at 2:24 pm@steve: no matter what kind of an engine Bing is, I think using white text on gray background it make text hard to read – I have problems reading it, others had too. Also, Bing is one of the few websites where the logo is displayed on a busy background. As for the search button, the magnifying glass is not as intuitive as a standard search button and it’s missing the call to action (Search).