MSN Homepage Redesign Critique
Title: MSN.com http://www.msn.com/preview.aspx
I'll be honest, I'm not a regular user of the MSN homepage, but I've followed it over the last 10 years. This design is a radical departure from their old homepage and a welcome change in a crowded market of news aggregators. MSN has struggled to separate itself from Yahoo and Google, but this makeover helps differentiate the service. *ZURB is a close-knit team of interaction designers and strategists that help companies design better (www.zurb.com).
Created by Bryan Zmijewski
Captured November 16, 2009 at 11:41AM
With the Notable FireFox Plugin
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1
It's interesting how companies alert people to a new site. Putting a beta or preview label allows a team to deal with failure upfront. But why?
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2
The navigation is simple and easy to drill down to a topic (large clicking area), but the drop down menus get in the way. They're a bit slow to respond to the rollover.
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3
Great use of a headline. Big and bold. A huge departure from the old MSN homepage.
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4
Wow, this is a bold move by one of the most traffic pages on the web. The white space alone seems like a huge risk for such an advertising dependent page.
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5
This is a new trend by Yahoo as well- cycle more news stories onto a single page. The problem is that these are too small to accurately control.
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6
Incredible discipline to not jam the ad higher on the page. If you compare this with the old homepage they're still able to get the ad higher on the page.
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7
Bummer, unlike the top nav, the clickable area on this subnav is relegated to the words.
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8
Interesting treatment on the search bar- this is a huge departure from the previous Bing search box. Associating the search clicking action with Bing is good, but it's going to be extremely difficult to get people to say, "just bing it." All other search filters have been removed- this seems like a smart move.
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9
Very odd placement for a security update! This has to be a biz requirement that was thrown into the page.
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10
Amazing amounts of effort and money have been thrown into being with the cool kids, Facebook and Twitter. Microsoft put $250 mil into Facebook, so it's surprising that Twitter gets free advertising.
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11
Wow, surprised again by the constraints of this redesign. Local, movies, maps and jobs are probably the four most used links (Yahoo on the other hand forces you to choose your links). This was a sound choice by MSN.
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12
Huge effort around local content- a smart move by MSN. Full headlines are important (Yahoo truncates the headlines of local news).
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13
This is a nice addition- local content is going to start growing.
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14
Useful settings, but it's unclear why this was included as a main nav item- the functionality is different.
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15
Very cool- instead of just showing popular searches, contextual information is provided next to the term.
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16
Odd placement of "advertisement," the top ad has this below the ad.
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17
Very sparse. A small call to action might increase use of the search form.
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18
Amazing constraint on this footer nav for a huge business that has hundreds of business units. It will be interesting to see this one play out.
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19
It's incredible to see a big white patch here. It gets filled with your information from the social site, but it's an activity that most people will not do. Anyone in advertising yelling? :)
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20
Big departure- links are no longer blue and not distinguished unless you rollover the text.
Comments on this Post
Bryan Zmijewski says,
Here is the current MSN homepage. A couple observations:
Bryan Zmijewski says,
Some interesting research reveals:
Here are a few news outlets that covered the redesign:
All Thing Digital: MSN’s Bob Visse Talks About Homepage Redesign (Kara Swisher does a video interview and jabs a few at Bob).
ClickZ: MSN Homepage Redesign Comes with New Ad Options
CNET: Microsoft gives the MSN butterfly a makeover
Bryan Zmijewski says,
Based on the coverage, everyone kept saying that this was the largest overhaul in the last 10 years, but a quick scan of the archives shows that there have been quite a few smaller attempts to change the design.
Here is snapshot from 10 years ago. A couple observations:
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