This post is a part of the Yahoo! gets Microsoftified series – where we cover the facts, points of view, and details of the Microsoft-Yahoo! deal. To see all posts of the series, click here. More posts are coming soon!

This morning, Yahoo and Microsoft announced a 10-year search deal that will see the two companies join forces to take on Google. Basically, Microsoft’s technology will power Yahoo’s search results, while Yahoo will be charged with selling ads for both companies’ search sites. Here are the facts:

Basics:

• Yahoo is outsourcing search on its web properties to Microsoft
• Microsoft is providing the technology (Bing), while Yahoo will deliver the worldwide sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers
• Ad sales will be handled by Microsoft’s AdCenter sales tool
• Microsoft is getting the reach (scale) that Yahoo has with its web properties while Yahoo is getting superior technology and the ability to save by not having a dedicated search team
• The companies will share resources and combine engineering efforts
• Combined, the two companies make up 30% of the search market, compared to Google – which still controls more than twice that amount
• The deal is for a time period of 10 years

Financials:

• There is no upfront payment of any kind exchanging hands (as previous negotiations would contradict)
• The deal will increase Yahoo’s profitability (less expensive search). It will not have an affect on revenue
• Once fully in place, Yahoo expects the deal to boost its annual operating income by about $500 million, reduce capital expenditures by $200 million, and increase operating cash flow roughly by $275 million
• Majority of search advertising revenue generated on Yahoo will be awarded to the company. Microsoft has also offered revenue guarantees to Yahoo
• As of market close on Wednesday, July 29, 2009, the stock price of each company is as follows:
• Yahoo: -2.08 points (-12.09%). $15.14 per share
• Microsoft: +0.33 points (+1.41%). $23.80 per share

Privacy Concerns

• Aspiring to stave off privacy concerns, the two companies noted that “the agreement protects consumer privacy by limiting the data shared between the companies to the minimum necessary to operate and improve the combined search platform, and restricts the use of search data shared between the companies.”

Other notes

• The deal must still pass regulatory requirements
• Two years after regulatory approval, the companies expect to have the partnership up and running in full force
• The collaboration is strictly limited to search, with both companies noting that “The agreement does not cover each company’s Web properties and products, e-mail, instant messaging, display advertising, or any other aspect of the companies’ businesses,” they said. “In those areas, the companies will continue to compete vigorously.”

BingTweets: after

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!

BingTweets: before

BingTweets: after

Sometime late last evening, Microsoft launched its latest addition to its Bing decision engine.  Dubbed Bing Tweets, the new destination is a mash up of real-time Twitter search with Bing web results (something Microsoft apparently calls Bing Insights).  Interestingly, the site is a second series of partnerships between Microsoft and Federated Media – the first being ExecTweets.  And while there is a plethora of real-time search engines cropping up (seemingly left and right nowadays), Bing Tweets may be that one place that takes real-time search mainstream.

Bing Tweets is described as combining “Twitter trends with Bing search results, enabling you to see deeper, real-time information about the hottest topics on Twitter. You can also search for anything in the BingTweets search box (at the top right of every page) and see Bing search results alongside the most recent related tweets.”

Design

The design is very attractive, user friendly, and fairly straightforward.  It takes a few seconds and a few clicks to get used to the layout, which consists of five main content areas and one search box.

In the upper right corner, above the four main content areas, Bing Tweets displays a search box.  This is no ordinary search box, since using it will deliver a combination of Tweets along with search results from Bing (the decision engine we’ve all come to love).  Here is a brief description of the five content areas:

Trending topics on Twitter: this is where I anticipate most users will interact with Bing Tweets.  This section currently consists of four main categories: Popular Now, People, Places, and Products.  Clicking one of these categories reveals the appropriate subset of trending topics on Twitter.  A really cool feature here is the ability of trending topics to grow and shrink.  If, for example, the trending topic for the Palm Pre became more popular, the size of the font would grow.  The reverse effect (shrinking) is also true if the trending topic loses its popularity.  Over time, I see the headings being expanded into other categories: politics and sports spring to mind.

The Tweets content area (column) is immediately below the trending topics on Twitter content area.  It displays a self-updating stream of tweets about the trending topic selected in the above content area.  When a user clicks a tweet in this stream, the updates pause for a few seconds and resume again.  Interestingly enough, the tweets displayed here aren’t exactly real-time: in my tests, Bing Tweets first began displaying tweets from a few days ago and upon running out of new tweets to display, the stream stopped moving (I searched for an unpopular topic).  One interesting tidbit is that this stream doesn’t seem to take hash tags into account when displaying tweets.  When I searched for TechNest Report and included #TechNestReport in my tweet, the stream didn’t display my update with the hash tag at all.

Search Results: this is the area of the site that needs the least amount of explaining, since it’s a direct Bing search result, down to the T.  It’s actually an iFrame of the Bing search results page and allows one to scroll left and right outside the intended viewing area.  Perhaps this is why Lizette thought the site was rushed to market: the Bing team could have integrated a real Bing results page and not just an iFrame.

Share this result: this content area is directly to the right of the trending topics on Twitter content area and above the search results content area.  It’s prefilled with the following text by default: “Check out BingTweets about your search query,” (emphasis – mine) followed by a bit.ly URL and a #bing hashtag.  The user has the option to Tweet this or ShareThis.  Tweeting this takes the user directly to his web-based Twitter account and prefills the compose Tweet box.  ShareThis is actually a ShareThis button (the company) which allows the user to email, text, or post the web page to a myriad of social networks.  By using the ShareThis button as opposed to a custom-built social sharing solution, the service may give off the vibe of being rushed to market, although I think only the hardcore tech geeks will notice this.  The ShareThis button is quite common throughout the web, so it actually might decrease the learning curve for mainstream users – increasing the chances that the user has seen and used the button on a different site.  For example, our blog also uses the ShareThis button.

How do you decide? The last content area of the service is located at the bottom of the page.   It asks visitors: “How do you use the Internet to find the answers you need to make faster, more informed decisions?”  The question is followed by an invitation to Share Your Ideas, which – when clicked – takes users to a page with a form that asks to fill out the name, email, title, and idea.  The submit button is preceded by a check box that reads “I have read and agree with the Terms & Conditions of contributing to the White Paper.”  This content area collects the submissions and then divides them into Featured Authors and Recent Ideas.  It’s unclear exactly what the process is that would take a submission from an idea to a featured author spot, but I’m guessing that’s the part that Federated Media takes care of.  Current featured authors include Anita Campbell, Harry McCracken, and Xeni Jardin, among others.

Overall, Microsoft got it right with the user interface.  It’s very easy to use for such a powerful real-time search engine.  My only suggestion for the site would be to unify suggested terms.  If I search for TechNestReport (one word) using the top-most search box in Bing Tweets, the Bing search results content area would present its suggestion: TechNest Report (with a space between Nest and Report).  It would be nice to see the suggestions unified across the entire service.  The site is built using Java components and thus uses absolutely no Flash to display its dynamic effects (read: auto-updating Twitter search).  As such, it is extremely mobile friendly: my Flash-less iPhone displayed the web page without a hitch.

Goals: mainstream or whalestream?

So what’s the target market here?  Currently, real-time search is a popular topic among web geeks and has not yet received the proper attention from mainstream media that it deserves.  Nevertheless, Microsoft has its own battles to fight on the search front.  It currently has two major goals with Bing: increase consumer awareness (brand awareness) which – eventually – should translate to taking search share away from other players.  Bing is doing its own thing on that front and initial reports are showing signs of success.  Bing Tweets might be Microsoft’s second phase of assault on Google, delivering real-time search before the incumbent is – after all – what any underdog would be proud of: beating Google feature-by-feature.  At the present time, Bing Tweets does not display any ads whatsoever, so it seems that the purpose is to drive usage of the service and build awareness of Bing as an innovator and as a viable alternative to the oh-so-popular Google.  That is, until Google releases its own a real-time search product.