As their blog has so far failed to point out, it looks like MSN Search pushed a new release live today. Unfortunately, I can’t find any mention anywhere on the internet about what’s new.
I very much like the new colour scheme, though. It’s light. It’s fresh. The old blue box made me feel constrained, but the impact goes deeper than that.
When I worked on Encarta, there was a MSN-wide effort to move to the white theme. One of the major factors was perception: people feel that sites with minimalistic palettes load faster. Even if the only change is to the background colour in a stylesheet.
When I implemented this change for Encarta, that was the majority of the work. Here, try for yourself:
[Before]: http://web.archive.org/web/20050331084437/encarta.msn.com/
[After]: http://encarta.msn.com/
Oh, and Robert? Rounded corners are so 2003 :)
Anyways, that’s a digression.
The topic often comes up at work (and online) about how much effort it takes to type search.msn.com. It’s true – no matter which keyboard layout you use, it just feels awkward.
So, here is my contribution to the solution:
http://ouhn.net (for all Dvorak lovers out there – represent!) and
http://sfjl.net (for all of you mainstream types.)
All on the home row, and much quicker to type than Google.