User Interface And User Experience: BingTweets Gets A Facelift (hopefully)

BingTweets is a great idea that lacks a great user interface (UI). This – overall – hinders the user experience (UX). As design-obsessed as I am, I’ve taken the liberty to create a UI of what BingTweets “could” look like. If it were to look like this, then I believe people would take it a bit more seriously.

If you’re not aware of it by now, I’m a twitterholic. So, I wanted to know my followers’ opinions about Microsoft’s BingTweets. After the service was released, I asked my Twitter friends the following question: “What do you think of BingTweets?” I started to receive responses that didn’t make sense to me. One response stated “I don’t have a need for it. Twitter is a better mobile experience to me anyway. I prefer UberTwitter 4 BBerry.” This user isn’t even aware of what BingTweets really is! And that’s a problem. It’s obvious that the point of the site is not immediately clear to users upon first glance. Responding to my question on Twitter, another user stated “[I] Won’t be using it anytime soon.” If the purpose of BingTweets were made more clear, then these users would – obviously – have a different opinion about the product! When a user gets to bingtweets.com, things seem “a bit dizzy” – wrote another respondent.

To get to the chase, users do not see the sole purpose of BingTweets when they get to the site. The user does not see an area for a “call to action,” (except for “search results” – which is not the purpose of the site). Therefore, the site seems a little off and can have a dizzy look associated with it. Some may attribute the service and think that “it’s just Microsoft trying to ride off of Twitter’s coattails to promote Bing.” It’s truly upsetting to me that users think this, because BingTweets has incredible potential that is masked behind 5 content areas of “I’m not sure what the point is here.”

In order to help BingTweets out a bit, I decided to study the design and then mock up a design of my own – using seven key concepts that may help the user experience:1) Upon first arriving to the site, the user is greeted with a logo, which states that the purpose of BingTweets: “fusing twitter trends with Bing insights.”

Problem: Yes, it’s a great catch phrase that includes many hot-button words. But what does it mean to the average user? Nothing. Being such, this is an area where the purpose of the product needs to be shown rather than told.

2) Moving past the logo and tagline, the product has an area that seems to be drawing more attention to itself than it should: “search results.” Being a new search engine, Bing is not (yet) all that popular. So it wouldn’t really make sense to focus the user’s attention to the “search results” content area. I think it would be a better move to also bring as much attention to the “tweets” section. In my design, I’ve emphasised both sections. This way, the user is drawn to the two main content areas of the site immediately, not just to the search results section. Afterall, they have come to “BingTweets” and not to “Bing.” In that regard, the user is expecting to have something related to Twitter and to Bing at the same time. The current design draws more attention to Bing Search results. If the user would have wanted Bing Search, he would have typed six less letters (“tweets”) in the address bar!

3) The inability to scroll through the “tweets” column also seems peculiar to me. Why would a user use the product if he doesn’t have the ability to see what everyone is talking about regarding a particular subject/topic? Don’t you think he’d like to to see more than the real-time four/five tweets? This feature needs to be added, otherwise some of the functionality (and promise) of the site is lost! Yet it needs to be done in a way that’s not obtrusive to the user – something that is taken care of by the arrows I’ve included in my mock-up. When a situation should arise that a user needs/wants to view the tweets of more people, this feature is a must. For example, the reporting of Michael Jackson’s Cardiac Arrest (tweets were flying left and right with reports of the incident). But that’s not all: while reading a tweet that’s located at the end of the “tweets” content area, the user may only get half way before the stream cycles through. Then, the user has no way of retrieving the tweet that he was previously reading, which would lead to a frantic search for a button that would bring the tweet back.

4) I’ve included a few instructional phrases to give the user a better understanding of what the point of the product is:

- Currently, the product has a very useful feature to play a live demo and see the service in action. To me, it would seem that the live demo controls would be overlooked very often. Personally, I discovered the auto-demo feature accidentally, as I was browsing the service while writing this (which is not good). In that regard, I’ve included a “Play Live Demo” button that makes the demo feature more prominent and allows for better placement of the “play” button.

- On a similar note, I’ve also added a prominent call to action with the “learn more” button. Engaging this button would initiate the live demo – serving as a back-up for those who missed the “Play Live Demo!” link.

5) I’ve also enhanced the current colors while keeping within the Bing color scheme. These new colors “pop” and bring more attention to areas of the site to which we want to draw the user (namely, the content areas). The same goes for the small orange link at the top of the design, which subtly insists that a user submit feedback.

6) This is not a major issue by any stretch: the “bing search” content area is side-scrollable. Not a major UX hiccup, but something that can and should be fixed, nonetheless.

7) Besides the UI, I’d like to know how BingTweets determines its trending topics: the topics that are “Popular Now” don’t match what’s trending on Twitter.

Overall, I like the concept behind BingTweets and the direction Microsoft is taking its newly reborn search engine. I’d like to see more information on the front page of the service to let users know exactly what the product is and how useful it can be! Let’s face it, users are not going to read the lengthy description of what BingTweets is under the small and faint “About Bing Tweets” tab. Whoever clicks on that link is not an average user, but rather someone like myself (or a blogger looking to find more information for a story). What do you think of the design (mine as well as the current BingTweets design)? Sound off in the comments!

Posted in Bing, Microsoft, User Interface, User experience