I have not visited any Microsoft property for some time now and I have this strange feeling about the UX. Sadly I can not say if it is my deeply rooted aversion against everything Microsoft or if the UX is really odd.
The UX was not done in any way to feel like something else. We tried to design something that worked well for Jupyter users as well as looked nice and was usable.
That being said, our teams strengths are not in UX by far. We are starting to work with designers to improve the "dev-UI"" we currently have.
If you have any more feedback you would like to share we would love to hear it. There is a public tracker at https://github.com/microsoft/azurenotebooks and an email that goes to the team at nbhelp@microsoft.com
And it's really slow.
It took me 55 seconds to load the page (42 of which went into downloading a 6 MB large GIF). 40+ requests. And it doesn't seem like a slow Internet problem at all.