Yes, I am talking about that MSN.com. The web site that has the blue background. The one with the text that’s way too small. The one that the only reason anybody ever has it as their home page is because they don’t know how to change it to something else.
That being the case, MSN’s upcoming changes are sure to get noticed. The logo changes both with the butterfly and font, the blue background is (finally) gone and said honestly the overall experience of using it is a whole lot better. Heck, you might even find it useful because we all know the current MSN just plain sucks.
Why does the current MSN.com suck? Because the design coddles to a bygone era where web designers were deathly afraid of making anybody scroll for anything, hence the stupid tiny text on the current MSN. There’s this ridiculous belief that if anybody has to scroll down for any content on your web site, you lose. This is only true if your content sucks. Scrolling down is not evil, never has been and never will be. If you’ve got something worth reading, the reader will happily scroll; there is nothing wrong with that.
What makes the new MSN.com a notable improvement?
Color coded organization:
This is a big deal and it’s not easy to pull off design-wise, but the new MSN makes it work. And when hovering over menus, a nice dotted border appears with menu choices below.
Tabs:
The blue "Games" in the screen shot above is an example of a tab in the new MSN interface. These are located in several areas and yes, they work well. Like with the top menu, some (but not all) tabs will have different colors compared to others.
Social connectivity:
Oh yes, it has it. The old-school Web 1.0 portal finally jumps into the modern age with Facebook and Twitter connectivity right from the same page. This is a really big deal because it gives people a reason to use MSN as their home page other than for just looks and information.
The beauty of the way it works is that the new MSN doesn’t shove you elsewhere, such as a "my.[web-service-here].com" just to get this feature. It’s on the home page right where it should be. That counts and counts huge. And YES, you can post status updates right from there as well for Facebook or Twitter. I tested it myself.
Microsoft said a few years back that they were going to put a huge effort into making their offerings modern. This started with Windows Live, then Bing and now MSN. I never thought I’d ever see MSN get out of Internet Stone Age, but it looks like it finally will – and do so in a way that truly will wow you and prove to be useful at the same time.
Can’t say I like the new design better than the old one. I dont like having to click a bunch of tabs to see all the headlines that would have displayed on the front page of the old design. And if I want to use facebook or twitter I will go to their websites.
I’ve had MSN as my homepage for at least 10 yrs and I am so disgusted by the “upgrade” I am going to ditch them and try something new. Years ago, when they switched me to a watered-down Yahoo design, I deliberately switched back to the old blue MSN (by the way, I’m surprised a techie like you apparently failed to realize you can make the font size larger in the traditional version!) I prefer the contrast of the blue on the page; not having to click on tabs to navigate; and though I’m a Facebook user, I link to it directly from my desktop. The new page looks like a low-budget newsletter and is much less graphically appealing. MSN bombed on this one, sorry.