evan meagher

Issues with Bing’s User Experience Philosophy

February 12, 2010 at 4:35 pm

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.

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Design, Usability, User Experience

Digg Button Optimism

May 7, 2008 at 12:02 am

While walking to and from class the other day, I listened to a podcast of Daniel Burka, digg’s creative director, speaking at Web Directions North back in January. He discussed many of the design choices they’ve made at digg and Pownce, including the sites’ initial layouts and digg’s infamous comments section. One thing that I found particularly interesting was what he said about the digg button.

One of the most powerful things about digg is that you come and you hit a button and the number goes up by one. It’s not a question of you like it or you don’t like it, it’s just kind of if you like it, hit it. That’s really important, I think. And it also makes things more positive because it’s not about disliking things.
Daniel Burka

The idea here is that if you center a user’s interaction with an interface around a positive action, then that user is more likely to come away with a positive experience with that interface. In this way, digg focuses on the act of showing interest in a certain story or object. In this sense, there really is no negative aspect to digging. The bury feature isn’t meant to be an outlet for personal disapproval of a story. It’s meant for stories that aren’t appropriate for the site. If you don’t like a story, just don’t digg it. It’s that simple.

This simplicity has directly led to digg’s popularity. The ease with which users interact with the site opens it up to a wide audience. People may only read 20% of the words on a page on average, but plenty are willing to make a single click to show support for a story on digg.

As a side note, apparently if you bury with a purpose (i.e. specifying a story as innacurate or OK, This is Lame), your bury counts for more. Keep this in mind the next time you see a story that shouldn’t be on the homepage.

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Design, Usability