Issues with Bing’s User Experience Philosophy

Microsoft’s Corporate VP in charge of Bing, Harry Shum, gave a talk yesterday at UW, describing Bing’s goals and key technologies. He showed off some cool features and interesting technical hurdles they’ve overcome, but the main takeaway I was left with was a profound disdain for Bing’s user experience philosophy.

Midway through the talk, Shum mentioned that Google’s stated philosophy is to minimize the time that users interact with search results pages. A search engine should do little more than give you easy access to maximally-relevant external content and then get out of your way. I couldn’t agree with this more, but Bing’s strategy is very different. Shum said that their goal is to get people to interact completely with Bing, instead of solely acting as a helpful navigator. Bing is littered with features intended to keep you on Bing, including quick-info boxes at the top of search results, fancy inline slideshows, and built-in Wolfram|Alpha support.

Bing is designed around “complex task and decision sessions,” instead of simple query-response chatter. I don’t entirely agree with this use case. I understand that some people may like the type of interactivity that Bing provides, but that’s not how people I know search for things on the internet. People don’t go to Google with the goal of getting their information from Google. They search with the intent of gaining access to some relevant piece of information on some other site. It’s like Bing is trying to be the illegitimate child of Google and Wikipedia, but ends up with AOL.

As a side note, Shum’s talk gave me an interesting view into the workflow of a Microsoft head-honcho. During the live demo portion of his talk, I was startled by his Internet Explorer setup. His four toolbars (including separate ones for Live Search and Bing), in addition to the IE browser chrome, left about 65% of the browser window actually occupied by webpages. I wish I had a screenshot. Take into account the giant blocks of ads centerstage and to the right of results in Bing, and you’re left with precious little room for useful content.

The talk as a whole was somewhat frustrating because I want Bing to succeed. I like Google as a whole (so much so that I’m interning there this summer), but their dominance of the search market is pretty ridiculous. As consumers, we all benefit from competition between services in the same space. As such, it’d be nice to see Google get some solid competition to keep everyone on their toes. I hope that the Bing team continues to iterate on their aspirations for usability and develops a kickass service to shake things up.

Computer Science and Empiricism

In a talk given at UW today, Alfred Spector, Google’s VP of Research and Special Initiatives, made a point that I hadn’t thought about before. He made the statement that computer science is much more empirical today than it was when he was a graduate student 30 years ago.

I’m currently reading Logicomix, a graphic novel with a twofold role as a biography of Bertrand … Read the rest

Geolocation API for distributed computing research

Last quarter, I quit my web development job at the UW Clinical Trial Center in order to pursue research within UW’s CSE department. As a startup project for a distributed computing research project called Seattle, I put together a simple geolocation library that uses a Python library called pygeoip to look up location data for hostnames and IP addresses.

The first step was to set … Read the rest

Calculating server time with a Javascript date object

A few weeks ago at work I was assigned to develop a warning banner to be displayed across our intranet data entry site to warn users of impending code launches. Our users tend to leave pages open for a while as they enter data, so we wanted the banner to display dynamically. For example, if someone had a page open during a specified warning time, … Read the rest

Visual feedback and saving inventions on Eureka

I just launched a couple new features for Eureka. First is an animated loading bar after you click the button to generate an invention. Very minor, but I thought some visual feedback was necessary instead of having the user stare at an unchanging screen while the Markov processor runs.

Second, you can now save and revisit inventions. As suggested by commentors,  generated-invention pages now have … Read the rest

Next entries »