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Microsoft’s Bing Looks Nice. What About the 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).

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?

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

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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