MSN changes it’s homepage for the first time in years.

• Latest posts
• November 4, 2009

I just seen a tweet from Jeremiah Owyang (Altimeter Group) about the new MSN homepage and I’m curious whether this is for the better or worse?  And why all of a sudden is the existing msn.com having a grey unclickable shadow over it?

The existing homepage is as the first screengrab, clear navigation divided by different shades of blue.  Sections of the page are clearly defined with CSS driven boxes.  Important MSN features like Hotmail, MSN Messenger are clearly distinguished with their well know logos in the top right hand corner.  Finally the Bing search box clearly defined at the top of the page. 

We all know that Google’s homepage is iconically simple.  So having the search box at the top of the page is MSN’s way to encourage search without the visitor having to scroll down the page (or making it harder for them to do what is intended).

So lets see what the new homepage looks like:

Well firstly gone are the hotmail and messenger logos in the top right hand corner – however, their position remains the same.  Now please remember that this is a preview of the new homepage it appears to me that there is plenty of room for the logos to be added in the same place. 

The sections are also the same however, this appears to be just a CSS change rather than something more radical.  The sections are no longer easily individually identifiable by the boxes.  There also appears to be some slightly confused sub sections:

For example the “Local” section is labeled with a blue box and the ’sub sections’ are just emboldened and have a very faint line.

I do like the Bing Search Boxes at the top and the bottom of the pages.  This allows visitors to search for items without scrolling back up to the top and perhaps forgetting what they wanted to search for in the first place.  This also allows MSN.com to display more content on the page (despite in the preview version there is very little).

Finally, if you want to launch a new site then don’t decommision or disable the existing one.  It appears that this has been done but no link to the ‘new’ site can be seen easily.  I’ve tried two different browsers several times. 

Conclusion:

In my humbled opinion, yes the msn homepage needed to be changed.  However, is the new version working?  I don’t think so.  For the traffic that MSN.com should generate a change should be far more than a new CSS file.  It should be dramatic, iconic, different.

I hope that MSN.com looks again at their homepage and makes it easier to:

- distinguish between sections

- replace the known icons for services (Hotmail and Messenger)

- put the ‘change your location’ to the top of the ‘local section’

- consider having a sliding search box on right hand side

Related Links:

BBC Article on MSN Homepage

MSN Strategy