Bing Gets a Fresh Look

Bing is getting some exciting enhancements today as we roll out our spring wave of features. Our user research guided us to make an investment bet in entertainment, built some great new decision-making tools in areas like autos and finance that continue our journey toward a better understanding of your search intent so we can match it with more effective and relevant tools and information.

In this post, I want to share some specific changes we made to our design and experience.

First, you’ll notice our Quick Tabs have moved from the left pane to directly below the search box.

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Sitting at the top of Bing pages, our Quick Tabs highlight the best query relevant search results available on Bing. It creates a tab for each category of results that best matches your query. If you see a tab up there, you can be sure that the results on that tab are more visual and great. Give it a try.

Secondly, you will see a new design aesthetic applied to Bing. We have tried to bring you an experience grounded in clear readable typography that helps you find your way and organize information. With the new design the rich content in Bing really stands out from pages that are clean, light, open and fast. Result pages are not presented in a one-size-fits-all-layout – instead, Bing results pages are richly and visually organized, making the whole search experience feel dynamic and alive.

Why did we do this?

We remain committed to a beautiful visual experience and since Bing’s launch we have been running experiments and design tests with the goal of better understanding how our customers were interacting with Bing, ultimately increasing engagement and more importantly customer satisfaction. One of those experiments was the tab-based metaphor we call Quick Tabs.

This new dialog-type approach was a big hit, with an increase in engagement with our verticals, as well as increased use of other tools that used to be less visible, namely related searches. Finally, we saw a decrease in the number of manual re-queries which means users are getting the help they need to make their decisions.

Here’s Bing GM Derrick Connell talking about the development of the feature.

Delivering a more visual experience with Bing in a way that is specifically designed to help you complete tasks and make decisions is our long term goal. We take design changes very seriously, and put lots of thought and customer feedback into this decision, but we believe this new interaction model, which is more of a two-way dialog between you and Bing, is a powerful way to help you get more out of search.

We hope you like it, and as usual, look forward to your feedback.

Brian MacDonald, Corporate Vice President, Bing

Other posts of interest:

Investing Decisions Simplified with Bing

Bing Updates up Close

A New Entertainment Experience for Bing

Bing Gets a Fresh Look

Bing for iPhone Update