Microsoft.com New Design Preview
microsoft.com
microsoft.com
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.
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.
1. They followed design principles too well. Strong constraints: check. Simplicity: check. But Metro is too constrained, too systematical. App designers are left with too few breathing space. Apps look all the same and feel too cold. I want my gradients back.
2. It doesn't look that good on big screens. For instance, launch screens of Windows 8 apps : it's too minimalistic to have big white icons on a flat monochrome background.
I think Metro has a lot of growing to do, but it seems like a language that could be very interesting down the road.
In microsofts case it's the "metro" style, with lots of bright (almost cartoony) colors, big blocks filled with lots of light-weight, sans-serif fonts.
Now I want their web team to share knowledge with the Metro team. :)
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.
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
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.
It's a preview.
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?
(Wanna know what is Verizon ugly? The new Windows logo.)
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.
Comic Sans seems to do the trick for many people.
.. that being said, it is pretty cute when it's shrunk down for mobile.
They obviously want some feedback on their new design. Where would you place it?
The only reason this site is visible is for that feedback button, which will be read and acted on before it turns in to Microsoft.com
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2012/06/05/a-de...
I like it.
Oh, and it looks terrible in Internet Explorer 8, as the layout is completely out of whack. [2]
ONE thing. Where are the Previous & Next Arrows for the main slideshow?
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.
It is bad enough that we're so obsessed with web apps today that some people actually consider tools like HTML, CSS and JavaScript to be good for application development. But if native applications are going to look even worse...
Fortunately, they won't, because real people still have real work to do, and user interfaces that look like (and have similar power to) a five year old's toys are going to suck for that. Microsoft will want everyone to move over to Metro, just as they wanted everyone to use their new shiny technology last year and the year before that, but they'll still support the stuff that people write real applications with, for the same reason that you can still write native apps in C++ instead of using .Net and C# for everything.
In fact, most of Microsoft's own big money spinners don't tend to use their shiny development technologies, and they never have. Like the incompetence of politicians, this is one of those universal constants that brings hope even when everyone is saying really stupid things. :-)
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"?
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.
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."
"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."
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.
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.
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.
(Crossposting to their feedback.)
Edited to add: the answer to my last question is 'no': http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/search#q=surface
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.
The consumer tech group is definitely getting stronger at design .. and the enterprise tech arm can rely on its salesforce
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.
OTOH, I love the feel of Metro and wouldn't change to rounded corners for the world.
Personally, I am fucking sick of rounded corners, so seeing the right angles here really made me happy. I'm guessing their designers felt the same way.
See this comparison of the two methods in detail: http://damieng.com/blog/2007/06/13/font-rendering-philosophi...
If you want to make it more like OSX, there's a tuning app here:
There's hacks out there, but they're exactly that: hacks. And they don't always work that well.
Using Linux with:
* Chrome 21.0.1180.4 dev with AdBlock
* Firefox 13.0.1 with AdBlock Plus and NoScript with all scripts blocked