I’ll say it. I am liking Bing, Microsoft’s new search platform. I mean, I haven’t liked it enough yet to make it my default browser or anything (let’s not get CRAZY), but for my extracurricular searching needs, it quite often does the trick.
However, I do have a suggestion that I think will increase the interface’s ease of use for people who don’t spend more than 3 seconds evaluating all of the features of the search page before using it (i.e. EVERYBODY). Let me illustrate.
The Bing homepage. Immediately, I go for the stark-white search box. Rolling hills of green? That’s nice. Give me SEARCH.
But, alas, I have entire missed the vertical searching options to the left under the title “EXPLORE”. First off, Bing is touting itself as “decision engine” – if I’ve come here to make a decision, calling me to EXPLORE sounds time consuming – time I don’t have when I need to make a decision. Microsoft: change “EXPLORE” to “DECIDE” or “CHOOSE” or, for heaven’s sake, “SEARCH”.
Turns out, I need to make a decision about some Marc Jacobs sunglasses. (For the sake of this post, we’ll say I’m actually planning on purchasing them and not just dreaming about purchasing them.) Enter search: “marc jacobs sunglasses”. Results:
Now, not until I scroll to the bottom of this SERP do I see actual shopping listings: