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MSN Search - From A UI Perspective

Posted by timothy on from the competition-tunes-the-world dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The user interface community has also started poking and prodding away at the latest iteration of MSN search and has discovered some interesting findings including: XHTML strict, CSS for layout and the death of IE 5 support. You can also read first-hand MSN designer insight into the design process as well."

2 of 297 comments (clear)

  1. But still.... by the_mighty_$ · · Score: 5, Informative

    ...its gone from about 130 errors when it was first released, to eight errors now. Not bad. Not bad at all.

    --
    VI VI VI - the editor of the beast!
  2. Faster load times... by GillBates0 · · Score: 5, Informative
    Microsoft links to an explanation of benefits of the new MSN where they list the top (first) feature as being "Faster load time". Not sure what the old HTML file size was, but it would be interesting to have as a comparison.

    According to the Wayback machine, file size doesn't seemed to have changed (or reduced) that much. This old version from July 2004 is actually smaller (33.95kb) than the current one which is 40.55kb. Note that this is from Firefox's "View Page Info" which does not take the total size of the images, etc into account (I think).

    But then there are several factors other than raw filesize leading to slower load times.

    It's nice to see webpage developers at Microsoft aware of standards, and trying to adhere to them. From this comment:

    At 6:29pm on 1 Feb 2005, Venkat Narayanan wrote:
    Guys,
    I work on the MSN.com Homepage team. Thanks for all of this feedback.
    We know that there are still some validation errors. There are still some accessibility issues. We will be working to fix those issues as soon as possible. Please let us know what you think.

    I think it only needs standards awareness from a few of the low-level developers to bring about a change. Even if the high level management/QA may not know or care about standards, a developer could make the work standards friendly without foregoing any of the performance/features. It would help, though to have management promote standards awareness, and devote resources to make sure they're complied with. Good for Microsoft if they're doing this. On the other hand, it may only be these few standards aware developers trying to do the right job.

    --
    An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam