Comparing Microsoft and Apple Websites' Usability 314
An anonymous reader writes 'In the article entitled Apple vs. Microsoft — A Website Usability Study, Dmitry Fadeyev, co-founder of Pixelshell, compares Apple's and Microsoft's web sites from a usability perspective, and Apple is the winner. Scott Barnes, PM at Microsoft, agrees with him and suggests the problem is because various site sub-domains have different management.'
Size of site might affect also (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What browser? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure why browser matters, Microsoft's sites are crap, they always have been. Apple's site is pretty straightforward.
I'd give MS SOME leeway for the fact that they have like 8 trillion products to Apple's, what, 12?
But other than that this is kindof a nobrainer.
That wasn't unexpected. (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple's detractors consider the company to be a bunch of control freaks, which is true, but that's exactly why their user interfaces are so consistent and usability is so high. Their mania for controlling every aspect of the user's experience has an upside and a downside. That the company that's so driven for consistency on the App Store also has a consistent website should hardly be astonishing.
As for Microsoft's website, the company's main product has a number of different interfaces for different things, when there's no sensible reason for it to be different (Office uses the Ribbon, but Internet Explorer doesn't, to take one example). That the company whose main product has a number of different and confusing elements has a similar website is also not astonishing. A finished system's structure tends to mimic the structure of the group that produced it. Read about the Windows Shutdown Crapfest [blogspot.com] and think about the implications for their website.
Re:Maybe try fixing it... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's pretty naive to think anything comes before company politics, be it at Microsoft or Apple or any other publicly traded company.
No brainer... (Score:3, Insightful)
Apple's website is often considered one of the most consitant and well constructed sites on the internet. Microsoft has done a pretty good job, but considering what they're up against, they should be proud to even be in the same sentance (as far as websites are concerned). Apple's unifomity and consistancy in their webdesign is nothing except extroardinary. It's so consistant that sometimes it takes me a second to realize which part of the website I'm at. This is not really a bad thing in an age where with most websites, you have to spend 30 seconds relearning the navigation system for every page. Apple really's design really breathes, with no clutters of information, and everything segrigated to very intuitive regions. In the end, grayscale color schemes ALMOST always win out. After months of use, colors always eventually get irritating, high contrasts lose their "cool" factor, and you're left feeling like your looking at a candy wrapper. OSs and websites should almost always revolve around neutral colors, because you're never sure what's going to clash horribly, or become illegible with the design. That said, I don't think Microsoft has really broken those rules, their low contrast blue is quite appealing... very MacOS Aqua-like, actually... but once again, they're not very consistant with it. Just one page in, "Windows 7" and you're faced with an ugly green stripe across the center of the page that looks horribly out of place next to the wispy blue. Microsoft REALLY needs to work on their color scheme consistancy. They have virtually no universal branding.
Broader product lines and divisions... (Score:5, Insightful)
Consider the case of GE--the website for consumer appliances should be very different than that of jet engines and that of financial services -- all GE products.
Apple has the advantage of a very limited product line; a mini desktop, a pro desktop and a couple of laptops, a phone, a couple of applications, an OS and a music player. Their target audience is 98% consumers.
This is a much simplier case than Microsoft which sell a product range from an OS, search, hardware, games, low-end serves, high-end servers, a wide range of applications (from consumer to heavy-duty data centers). It's target market is primarily businesses, but ranges from micro business to enterprise, but also includes a significant consumer audience.
It's too bad the reviewer didn't consider content or target audiences.
Differences... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Interesting double standard, too. (Score:1, Insightful)
The differentiation is much clearer on the Apple site and you always move forward. The marketing is just confusing and visually noisy on Microsoft.com
It's both the way the contents is titled and the what it is designed.
Re:What browser? (Score:5, Insightful)
None of his points would be changed by changing the browser.
He's not talking about heavy use of IE- or Safari-proprietary plugins or things that would be blocked by AdBlock or NoScript, he's talking about navigation and readability.
No matter what browser you use, Apple's "less clutter" approach and rigid consistency in keeping the banners, colors, and navigation features of the site the same no matter where you are made a positive impression in the study. You go to the site, and the experience remains consistent and predictable throughout. Change from OSX to the iPhone pages, or go to get QuickTime, and you are constantly looking at something that is obviously an Apple web site. They don't even need a logo on the site, though it is always there and always in the same spot looking exactly the same.
Microsoft's inconsistency in terms of page layouts, colors, where the search bar is, where the company logo is and what it looks like, where the banners and navigation bits are, massive clutter, how the data is organized, etc amongst their seven separate subdomains with no central vision fared less well from a "can I navigate this site easily" perspective.
Now, OK, screen resolution - I can see your point. But doing quick comparisons on my 17" laptop screen and my 22" external screen between Microsoft and Apple, I gotta say, I like the way Apple just throws a couple of quick images at me and breaks their product line and common actions down quickly for me.
One place to buy: "Store",
Product line breakdown: "Mac", "iPod", "iPhone", etc.
and a few common actions: "Downloads", "Support"
Microsoft's banner is "Windows", "Office", "All Products", "Buy Now", "Downloads&Trials", "Partner Solutions", "Security", "Training", "Support", and "About".
"Windows" and "Office" are product lines. What is "All Products"? "Buy Now" is an action, not a product line. The rest of the categories are a continued mixed bag of products, types of customers, and actions. There are too many of them, they are poorly sorted.
Then this is overlaid with an annoying popover about upgrading my IE (I'm running Firefox for this test, but the same thing happened on IE6), and a relatively cluttered batch of what I'm sure are important marketing messages and stuff, but are unlikely to be relevant to me on a home page. When I click on "Office", you can tell me about the latest Office, I don't need a marketing blurb about it cluttering up the home page thanks.
Don't get me wrong, I have an iPod and I rarely use it, and I'm a Windows user (that an Linux, but it's been many moons since I fired up a MacAnything). But Apple's web site is simpler, cleaner, and far more consistent.
Trying to find the Microsoft logo on their various sites is like playing "Where's Waldo" when Waldo keeps changing his shirt color and can move while you're looking for him (and sometimes he's hidden by a pop-over ad).
I love popovers. I fill mine with ice cream. But I detest them on websites. Microsoft: I'm already on your site! You don't need to sell me, you need to give me information!
(end rant)
Discoverable URLs (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What browser? (Score:4, Insightful)
Safari on the mac does not render the same as Safari on the PC
I've found a number of instances where Safari/Firefox differ, but I have never tested Safari Mac versus Safari PC -- do you happen to have an example of this?
Re:Broader product lines and divisions... (Score:3, Insightful)
I disagree that Microsoft has a larger range of products than Apple. They may have larger install bases, they may come in more flavors, but for every product that Microsoft has, there is almost always virtually an Apple product that matches up. A website is about marketing and support, of which both companies have to do with all their products. iWork has to have just as good support as Office does. XServe has to have just as good marketing and support as Microsoft's server software. It's the ability of a company to be able to hierarchically subdivide and arrange content that allows for a smooth website. What the hell does cellular phone connectivity (iPhone) have to do with professional audio production software (Logic)... virtually nothing, although Apple is very good about being able to juggle them both, and still keep a cohesive feel to their brand.
What you say might be true if Microsoft was good at juggling their top level of content, but less so in the depths of their website. But simply move from high profile sections like Windows to Office, and you get totally different branding, down to even different versions of the Microsoft logo, and different Microsoft website headers and banners. The PM at Microsoft even said it himself, which means I expect that to improve. So I don't think there's a valid argument here about having to juggle too many different balls.
Also, everyone's a consumer, be it a business or home user. When it really comes down to it, there's no clear marketting dilleniation between the two, maybe demographics, but both companies have to cover ALL of those, so it's kind of a moot point.
Re:What browser? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd like to know what browser and what computer he was using. In other words: what bias if any?
...because every time something microsoft/apple is better than apple/microsoft there must either be some bias or fanboisim, because everyone knows that microsoft/apple is always best at everything.
Re:That wasn't unexpected. (Score:3, Insightful)
There should only be one "off" button?
Yes, because any more buttons and the average consumer gets confused. ...
That said feature anemia is preferred to many over feature creep simply because even if you try to please everyone with all the possible features you are going to confuse and upset the majority of your users when that causes usability problems or in the case of many of Microsoft's projects... "unintended features" ;)
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
GUI Guidelines. (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple understands design and focuses on it. The have GUI design docs and the follow them and enforce them stringently.
If you weren't aware, Microsoft also has very specific GUI guidelines [guuui.com] as well... Guidelines that Apple forces their Windows programmers to not follow. Have you used the unintuitive piece of shit called "iTunes for Windows" that makes zero sense to those unfamiliar with the OS X UI?
iTunes on OS X isn't half bad. iTunes on Windows is Apple's lock-in approved way of forcing the customer to think long and hard about throwing his phone or MP3 player at the wall because he can't understand why his desktop keeps erasing the music he put on it with his laptop without calling the manufacturer.
Re:Could size have anything to do with it? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's kind of the point of the article, actually. You don't get there directly from the home page, and that's the correct behavior for 90% or more of the people who land there. Just because you have a division or resource that is of interest to a small subset of your users doesn't mean it needs front page space.
In answer to your specific question, type 'developer' into their search box. You get an incredibly handy list of common results pre-filled in a drop down list, and actually submitting the search yields a bevy of results. Maybe it's the generally terrible in-site searching of sites around the net and the relative awesomeness of Google that has trained people to not even try, but Apple's site search is pretty good.
I've learned over the years, however, that pretty much anything you want from an Apple web site can be found by typing 'apple/foo' in your location bar. Your browser will autofill the 'apple' to 'www.apple.com' and Apple maps all of their resources to the first part of the path - even if it ends up redirecting you to 'foo.apple.com' in the end. So, try 'apple/quicktime' or 'apple/developer' (or 'safari', or 'macosx' or 'iphone', etc). Very handy.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Differences... (Score:2, Insightful)
What is your point there? That Apple does a few things very well and Microsoft a lot poorly? Since when has bloat been a valid excuse for poor design?
Re:Interesting double standard, too. (Score:1, Insightful)
I'm thinking that the point was that Microsoft has too much advertising (multiple ads for different products all appearing at the same time, rather than one large ad for a single product that randomly changes) and/or popups (too 'in your face' compared to an ad that is already part of the page -- i.e. your presented with a page of information/marketing, and then immediately forced to change focus away from it to view a popup... the popup feels like it is there to block you from accessing the information behind it. It's better to just have one or the other from a UI perspective).
Re:What browser? (Score:4, Insightful)
MS site isn't THAT bad.
Companies are different. Their focus is different. Apple sells its product directly - thus site is optimized with end users in mind. MS orients itself as a partner company - thus its web site is a kind of source of bullets points for PowerPoint presentations which can be reused by its partners when selling MS products. Both serve their purpose.
Frankly best analogy was already made here [youtube.com]. It says it all.
Re:What browser? (Score:2, Insightful)
go to get QuickTime
Go to get QuickTime, and when you run it, find the good UI grounds to a halt.
To be honest I'm not bothered about whether Apple's or Microsoft's website is less crap, when they're both awful compared to many other websites, and I hardly ever visit them. I'm more concerned about the applications I run.
Microsoft's website spams me about IE 8. Apple shove a full screen image with an Ipod advert, meaning I have to click to get to anything else. Microsoft might seem a bit more cluttered. But when you go to one of the Apple sub-pages (e.g., Mac), there's just as much clutter. Honestly, who cares - they're both designed by people who know little about creating decent websites. It's just a shame that with Apple, the bad UI team got let loose on Quicktime and Itunes, and god knows what else too.
"Windows" and "Office" are product lines. What is "All Products"? "Buy Now" is an action, not a product line. The rest of the categories are a continued mixed bag of products, types of customers, and actions. There are too many of them, they are poorly sorted.
Why on earth should the banner only contain "product lines"? And by that logic, "store", "downloads" and "support" aren't product lines either! Indeed, as you list yourself, Apple's banner is also a "mixed bag".
and a relatively cluttered batch of what I'm sure are important marketing messages and stuff, but are unlikely to be relevant to me on a home page. When I click on "Office", you can tell me about the latest Office, I don't need a marketing blurb about it cluttering up the home page thanks.
Yeah, there's obviously no marketing blurb on Apple's website. Not the full screen ad image. Not the "news" that brags "Snow Leopard a software platform for the future", or the claim of "The World's Most Advance Operating System"(!) Or "Why you'll love a Mac".
I agree that Apple have less clutter on the front page, but that's only because they've shoehorned it into all the subpages, and there's still plenty of marketing blurb, on the front page, and elsewhere.
Re:Interesting double standard, too. (Score:3, Insightful)
>Windows and Microsoft isn't about design; they are about marketing and mass consumption.
Oh please. Microsoft is like a marketplace while Apple is a communist state. I like my iphone but frankly its lock in hell if you dont jailbreak it. You can write any shitty app you want for windows mobile without the censors beating you down, not so much in the app store.
As much as I like Apple, I find their dictatorial business decisions are based on profit but defensed as "good design" or "the end users are too stupid to figure anything out." That's not good for anything. Dont let your MS hate turn you into the ally of a company that really doesnt have your interests in mind.
Re:GUI Guidelines. (Score:3, Insightful)
Agreed - that, and Quicktime too. Appalling UIs. Now sure, normally one might say it's unfair to judge Macs here based on their Windows software, but given that "But they are good at UIs" is the one thing we hear about them, and given that there's no reason why Windows is to blame for Quicktime's and Itune's poor UIs (indeed, as you note, they specifically avoid the Windows GUI and guidelines), it makes me very suspicious about the claims of "good UIs" in general.
But apparently, because Apple's website is slightly less cluttered than Microsoft's, I should be basing my decision to buy a Mac solely on that. Hell, even Slashdot's UI beats those two.
Re:GUI Guidelines. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What browser? (Score:4, Insightful)
That's a pretty specific issue compared to the statement you made previously that WebKit renders differently on the Mac and PC. One wonders if it's actually an issue with Silverlight.
Re:It is harder ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Apple's site has three decades worth of hardware and software documentation on it. The Apple site still has manuals and system software for Apple II series machines, if you go looking for it.
Are all these things findable from direct links? And that doesn't negate the point - just because a company's been around for as long, doesn't mean it has as many products on its website.
Even using their search, the UI is so bad I can't find, e.g., downloads for System 7 (is it in products, or downloads?)
Re:GUI Guidelines. (Score:5, Insightful)
What's wrong with QuickTime's UI?
It's a program designed to play videos, and that alone. IMO, it seems to do a pretty good job of that (resource bloat in the Windows version notwithstanding). QuickTime Pro has some rudimentary editing capabilities built-in as well that are extremely useful if you just want to trim or combine a few clips (Apple finally started including this for free with Snow Leopard)
Windows Media Player has feature-creep out the wazoo, while VLC seems doomed to be forever rough around the edges (despite being otherwise fantastic)
Even the iTunes Windows UI isn't *that* awful. It could use some improvement, though it certainly seems to remain far more faithful to Microsoft's UI guidelines than Windows Media Player does.
Re:Interesting double standard, too. (Score:4, Insightful)
"Though who really cares about site navigation anymore?"
People who design usable websites?
Re:That wasn't unexpected. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Broader product lines and divisions... (Score:2, Insightful)
High performance
lol
Re:They both SUCK (Score:1, Insightful)
a) I shouldn't have to use a different browser to use your site. I should be able to use my browser.
b) I shouldn't have to install flash, silverlight, other-crapolla to use your site.
c) I'm the user. I'm right. Get over it Apple and MS.
Good luck to you.
Re:What browser? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Try each site with Javascript OFF (Score:3, Insightful)
As a web developer and Mac user I've always found the evolution of the Apple website interesting. Not surprisingly, they keep use of Flash to a minimum (actually, I'm not sure that they use Flash at all on their site) and things are fairly neat and tidy.
You can tell who understands usability and web architecture by looking at the comments in this story. Apple gets it, Microsoft doesn't, despite people's efforts to defend them.
Re:Interesting double standard, too. (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't give a crap about appearance and marketing.
The comparison was on usability, which can be affected by appearance, but usually is not significantly so. Marketing is considered when it detracts from usability.
What I want is to find the fix or download I need. If I google (or even live search) an error code from Microsoft 9 times out of 10 I'll get a link to a KB. If I google an Apple error code I'll get nothing, thats after I've gone into the command line to find out what the actual error code is because Apple thinks displaying the actual error is a bad idea.
What you find in Google has no bearing on the usability of the sites being compared. You seem to have completely missed the point. As for errors, what kind of errors are you having trouble finding out about? You're a bit vague on the topic. Can you provide an example?
An MS fix is often found in under an hour...
It's funny, I don't remember having to look up fixes for OS X ever. I have to look up configuration settings when I'm doing something unusual, like installing a specialty kernel module, but not really fixes. What fixes have you had to look up?
Trying to find a fix for OS X or updated firmware is not the easiest task because this is not Apple's modus operandi.
Umm, firmware updates show up automatically in OS X, via the update mechanism. If for some reason that did not work (I've never heard of this problem) you could run the firmware updater and it will pull down the updates from the server. I'm still not clear what fixes you need to look up.
Where most Mac fanboys fail is comparing everything to Apple's goals rather then the organisation in question's goals.
Umm, this was a usability test of Websites, not a comparison of organizations. Are you calling a Microsoft exec you thinks the MS Web page is less usable a "Mac fanboy"?
MS's site is entirely designed entirely for professionals, people who know what they need and can easily figure out how to get it, with this goal in mind MS's site is very well designed.
Not really. I'm a professional. The MS exec is a professional. The usability engineer is a professional. As a usability tester myself, I certainly see where MS has violated some basic design principals that will make their site more difficult to use for anyone, simply because it is ambiguous. You seem to be defending MS's choices, but I'm not sure why and you have not addressed any of the specific mentioned. Frankly, I think you are just emotionally invested in your opinion.
Nonsense like Apple's primary business being marketing does nothing at all to make your argument more persuasive, it just makes you look hopelessly biases to the point where you have no credibility. I have an idea for you. Go read a good book on usability and Web design, then go look at the two sites and try to apply what you learned impartially. Then, get back to all of us with specific points of UI design and why you think MS's site is more usable and in what specific way.
Re:Interesting double standard, too. (Score:3, Insightful)
Hello Mr Pot? This is Mr Kettle calling.
If you actually gave a shit about lock-in, you'd be talking about the virtues of Linux... not Windows. Besides, at least with Mac, I can get to the underlying BSD backend and the actual code behind the machine. On Windows you have to wait until 'Mr Bill' gets off his ass to fix it. So don't try to claim lock-in is the problem with Mac's because Windows has more lock-in than anyone.
Re:What browser? (Score:5, Insightful)
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/games/ [apple.com]
What's so hard about that- even the URLs are clean and logical. Not to mention iPods, iPhones, Airports, Displays, Laptops, Desktops, Network Backups, Keyboards, Mice and Software of all kinds, both by Apple and 3rd parties.
It's just that Apple started with a plan.
Re:That wasn't unexpected. (Score:2, Insightful)
When I was 7, I understood what the "choke" was on a car. It was the knob that you pulled out before you started the car in the morning. Probably most people's knowledge of what a choke is stopped there. Over the years I learned that it changed the mixture of fuel and air in the carburettor.
Should the car manufacturers have kept chokes because 7 year olds understand them, and because it's better to have the option?
Of course not. First manual chokes became autochokes, and so removed the need to remember to use it from the driver. Then fuel injection replaced carburettors and chokes were obsolete - engine management systems constantly varied the mix as required.
Back to computers, your 7 year old has learned (at same level) what hibernate is because it's there. So what? It doesn't have to be there. It's an unnecessary implementation detail every bit as much as the choke of a car was. In the 1970s, car geeks would argue that a choke was necessary, and discuss when and how best to use it. Now we've mostly forgotten they were ever there. And that's a good thing.