Corporate Live.com Search web design

The new Live.com Search home page is way too “corporate blue”. The cliché blue symbolises stability and openness, but it is not doing it for the new front page. The design is actually great! It does not, however, work very well because Microsoft has overdone it and made it plain dull and boring. It would have worked well for some sort of clinic, as the design is very calming!

Boring blue design, from © Microsoft.

The design does not convey what the site does, users have to really look at it to understand that it is [primarily] a search engine. The main problem is that there is nothing drawing the users attention to the search field. There is nothing about the page that says “Hey! Enter a query in this field and I’ll retrieve the search results!”

This design would have worked better for a site such as Microsoft Update or Live.com Online Safety Scanner. The design would also work rather well for business/economy news site. Or maybe for an anti-virus provider.

A positive note is that Live.com successfully separates region and language. The site can be set to United Kingdom region and displayed in Norwegian. Very few websites successfully separates region and language. (A country—or a flag—is not the same as a language.)

The Live.com Search result pages are still crap, though.

The front page design is great in it self. But it is very boring and not appealing for a search engine. Microsoft has to do better if they want users to start using their web search engine. Maybe their recent gice-users-cash-for-searching-with-them scheme will work out better than their design?

I still mean Ask.com’s front page (and how their incorporate reference material in the search result pages), Google’s result pages, and Yahoo! Search’s search assistant/suggestions are the best. If they could have collaborated and combined their expertice.

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One comment

Hi Daniel,

Thanks for stopping by on my blog. I actually was planning to write an article about usability of Live search and Google.

I agree with you that the results of Live search are still a bit crappy. But I do like the transition from where they came from, it is said only that they simply copy their competitors.

If they would provide superior results I would be fine with this interface, there is not too much distraction and it all turns about the search 'part' which is the most important!

Good article.

Comment by Niels (Subscribed) at 2008-05-26 @936.

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