What is it with home.live.com?


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Okey... I'm pretty fed up with the ugly and NOT useful design of the live services. What is it with the live and the design? Is the live team from another planet or something? I just saw the new home.live.com page and man how ugly. A huge area on top with bad weather graphics and the date in the largest font avaiable :( Take a look at the windows button and how guly the graphics are. And what are you supposed to do with the home.live.com page? Is NOT useful at all! Take a look at the iGoogle page instead. Has everything AND the great looks! home.live.com lacks the news and stuff so are we supposed to switch beween the live.com page and the home.live.com page??? By the way, the live.com personalised page is so awful and ugly to use that someone should loose their job! Come on MS. Windows Vista looks so stunning beautiful so why can't the live services look good as well? I really want to only use MS products, but i can't. Still using iGoogle.

What is it with live services? Is it coded by aliens or something? It's not typically MS style :(

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Okey... I'm pretty fed up with the ugly and NOT useful design of the live services. What is it with the live and the design? Is the live team from another planet or something? I just saw the new home.live.com page and man how ugly. A huge area on top with bad weather graphics and the date in the largest font avaiable :( Take a look at the windows button and how guly the graphics are. And what are you supposed to do with the home.live.com page? Is NOT useful at all! Take a look at the iGoogle page instead. Has everything AND the great looks! home.live.com lacks the news and stuff so are we supposed to switch beween the live.com page and the home.live.com page??? By the way, the live.com personalised page is so awful and ugly to use that someone should loose their job! Come on MS. Windows Vista looks so stunning beautiful so why can't the live services look good as well? I really want to only use MS products, but i can't. Still using iGoogle.

What is it with live services? Is it coded by aliens or something? It's not typically MS style :(

If you actually cared about MS's services, used your eyes and your brain, AND did your research, you would realise that http://home.live.com is actually in BETA stage (meaning it has not yet been released!) and is not complete!!

There WILL be slight changes to the user interface (the user interface is what you refer to as the "design") and there will probably also be the inclusion of feeds (what you call the "news and stuff"). Gadgets and pages will also more than likely be implemented.

http://www.live.com (Live.com) will be replaced by http://home.live.com (Windows Live Home). Again, you would have known this if you had read articles on the Internet!!

^^^ All this means that when the final version of Windows Live Home is released, it will be much better than Live.com in both looks and functionality.

How can you say iGoogle is better when the UI of iGoogle is ugly and bland!?!?! The new Windows Live Wave 2 UI is absolutely brilliant, modern and professional in my opinion! As are the graphics they use for the weather feature on Windows Live Home.

Did you happen to notice that the colour of the Windows Live Home BETA UI changes with the time of day (e.g. becomes darker when it is night)?? If you didn't notice it, check it out and then come back and tell me that it is poorly coded by aliens from another planet!!!!

Bloody n00bs!!

If you actually cared about MS's services, used your eyes and your braAND did your research, you would realise that http://home.live.com is actually in BETA stage (meaning it has not yet been released!) and is not complete!!

ThWILL be slight changes to the user interface (the user interface is what you refer to as the "design") and there will probably also be the inclusion of feeds (what you call the "news and stuff"). Gadgets and pages will also more than likely be implemented.

http://www.live.com (Live.com) will be replaced by http://home.live.com (Windows Live Home). Again, you would have known this if you had read articles on the Internet!!

^^^ All this means that when the final version of Windows Live Home is released, it will be much better than Live.com in both looks and functionality.

How can you say iGoogle is better when the UI of iGoogle is ugly and bland!?!?! The new Windows Live Wave 2 UI is absolutely brilliant, modern and professional in my opinion! As are the graphics they use for the weather feature on Windows Live Home.

Did you happen to notice that the colour of the Windows Live Home BETA UI changes with the time of day (e.g. becomes darker when it is night)?? If you didn't notice it, check it out and then come back and tell me that it is poorly coded by aliens from another planet!!!!

Bloody n00bs!!

You been haveing a bad day or something? Lost your girlfriend? My god you are angry.

PLEASE read my post before you attack me with stupid stuff. Of cource i know it's beta. Like 80% of the live stuff. B E T A! But it doesent take years to make a design man. Coding and gadgets 'n stuff takes time. Make the windows button nice DO NOT take years. And please read my post and say something about the live.com page THAT IS NOT IN BETA! Ugly. Compare it to the iGoogle page.

Wow... the home.live.com page changes with the time of day. Big deal! iGoogle changes with the day too if your brain is big enough to see that. If that is proof of good coding then the live team have to be from another planet. Because it's not very hard to code different graphics at different times of the day. Man get a grip!

I would suggest you go to your doctor and perhaps get yourself some anti-depression pills or something or talk with your girlfriend. Good luck to :)u :)

EDIT: the word noob says somethnig about your age too. Perhaps you are not old enought to have a girlfriend. Poor guy.

@ <-cJr->: Unfortunately, the target audience of these sort of portal pages are for the technological proletariat. You can safely assume that none of them are going to do any research, and what really matters is the first impression.

You've probably noticed that the content box doesn't use up the entire screen. Why is that? Why does the live.com page (and the iGoogle page) take up the entire screen? Is that better?

Does the page being bland really matter? Personally, out of the three portal sites (home.live.com, live.com and iGoogle) I find the iGoogle "default" view the most useful. The Live.com look is probably the best (albeit probably too 'clean' a look; too much white), but the initial gadget frames that they provide are of little consequence.

Hmm OK, sorry, maybe I shouldn't have been so harsh to you nero78. I just hate it when people bash MS services when they're in beta and not complete.

I find the Live.com interface boring now, but I still think Live.com looks better than iGoogle. I don't know how anybody can like the iGoogle user interface tbh, it's too simple in my opinion.

I actually like the Windows Live Orb logo, how do you think it could be made better?? 'Cause I can't possibly see anything wrong with it (in my opinion).

Anyway, I'm just looking forward to the final release of Windows Live Home, when we are able to have feeds, gadgets and pages and when it replaces the already boring Live.com

@ <-cJr->: No probem! :) I have attached the start orb from the home.live.com page and the start orb from the vista. It's a small thing i know, but it just seems so lazy to use poor graphics on a so small thingy when they have a perfect one in the vista system. The other thing that they must have released this homepage to show off their new design. Why didn't they use a little bit more time to perfect the images and the graphics? It's not very hard work for a web designer...

post-202107-1187017314.png

post-202107-1187017321.png

The thing that lets the WL orb down is the poor quality save. The orb itself is cool. I think the reason it's not the Vista orb (white instead of dark blue) is to differentiate the products a bit :)

On a related note, the Windows Live Team just blogged this...

First of all, we hear you on the question of customization, but for now, Live.com is still the place for your customized gadgets and feeds, while Windows Live Home fills the need for an at-a-glance status page with quick links to all of your Windows Live services. Consider adding both as your Internet Explorer home page (in IE 7, you can have multiple tabs as your home page). We?re working on adding better navigation between these pages, and we will continue to explore whether or not merging their functionality is the right thing to do for all of our customers.

As far as the overlap between My MSN and Windows Live Home, we see these as different sites with different goals. MSN is a portal to content on the Internet, whereaWindows Live Home is a portal to online services like e-mail, social networking, and file sharing. That said, we?re working to create seamless connections between all these sites and services, so no matter which one you start with, you can easily find what you?re looking for. .

Thanks for all of your feedback so far! We?re building Windows Live with you in mind, so your comments will help shape how we serve you in the future. Please keep them coming!

One last thing, is home.live down for anybody else right now? I keep getting the message...

The Windows Live Network is unavailable from this site for one of the following reasons:

This site may be experiencing a problem

The site may not be a member of the Windows Live Network

You can:

You can sign in or sign up at other sites on the Windows Live Network, or try again later at this site.

You been haveing a bad day or something? Lost your girlfriend? My god you are angry.

PLEASE read my post before you attack me with stupid stuff. Of cource i know it's beta. Like 80% of the live stuff. B E T A! But it doesent take years to make a design man. Coding and gadgets 'n stuff takes time. Make the windows button nice DO NOT take years. And please read my post and say something about the live.com page THAT IS NOT IN BETA! Ugly. Compare it to the iGoogle page.

Wow... the home.live.com page changes with the time of day. Big deal! iGoogle changes with the day too if your brain is big enough to see that. If that is proof of good coding then the live team have to be from another planet. Because it's not very hard to code different graphics at different times of the day. Man get a grip!

I would suggest you go to your doctor and perhaps get yourself some anti-depression pills or something or talk with your girlfriend. Good luck to you :)

EDIT: the word noob says somethnig about your age too. Perhaps you are not old enought to have a girlfriend. Poor guy.

first off, please be a bit more respectfull. Theres no need to start a flame war. you say so your self you don't want to be atactked, but your doing the same thing. second, i do belive this came out a few days ago so thats why its worse them most of the betas that have been pout for months

The windows Live orb and the vista orb are diferent because they are DIFERENT PRODUCTS! Thats why msn had the butterfly and windows had the flag. I personly like that they have diferent orbs. Look at media center, it has a green orb.

@ <-cJr->: No probem! :) I have attached the start orb from the home.live.com page and the start orb from the vista. It's a small thing i know, but it just seems so lazy to use poor graphics on a so small thingy when they have a perfect one in the vista system. The other thing that they must have released this homepage to show off their new design. Why didn't they use a little bit more time to perfect the images and the graphics? It's not very hard work for a web designer...
The windows Live orb and the vista orb are diferent because they are DIFERENT PRODUCTS! Thats why msn had the butterfly and windows had the flag. I personly like that they have diferent orbs. Look at media center, it has a green orb.

To gonzoislost:

I have already appolgised to nero78, my disrespect was out of order, I know that now. I think what nero78 is saying is that the quality of the Windows Live Orb is rubbish compared to Windows Vista's. I don't think he is saying that the colour is different so its bad.

If you look at the current Windows Live Hotmail Orb and then compare it to Vista's it is the same quality and looks nice. Hoever, if you look at the Wave 2.0 Orb and compare it to the old one thequality is very poor.

I have only just noticed that myself, but look at the screenshot below to see:

test.jpg

Am I right nero78?? Is that what you mean? I never noticed it before but if that's what you mean you are completely right.

In relation to what the WL Team posted on thier blog:

I am not happy! What is the point in having both Live.com and WL Home?? They should incorporate feeds, gadgets and pages into WL Home (just like the screenshot last week showed) - that would be much better!!

  • 4 weeks later...

I totally understand Nero78. The overall design seems generic and hardly innovative. I can tell you why Live won't fly -- it's not cutting edge, it's not "young" or "sexy", it's not going to attract attention of the web's most saavy users: everyone under 30 years of age!

It makes no sense to create another web portal when MSN already has broad brand recognition. Alienating users is a recipe for failure when brand confusion between MSN and Live is rampant. Moreover, Windows is thought of as an OS, so adding the word Live to the mix only creates more misunderstanding.

As an instructional designer who deals mostly with e-learning for adults, I would never attempt to publish something that does not capture the eye or does not mesh well with already established services, namely competing services like MySpace, AOL, or Yahoo.

I don't doubt Microsoft has a team of extremely talented programmers, but these people clearly aren't "in" when it comes to UI innovation and tie-ins with existing services people already use. I play with mock-ups all the time with what MS ought to do with MSN and IE -- perhaps I'll share them some time.

Guys the Live Home project just started recently.

It's not a beta that has been cooking for years as Nero78 mentioned here.

It's brand new and is being built with input from the beta testers.

Does anyone even remember what Live looked like in the beginning?

It was called start.com and looked something like this

http://web.archive.org/web/20051226051415/.../www.start.com/

So as you can see things change.

Now the idea for the live.com vs. home.live.com is akin to the msn.com vs my.msn.com pages.

Something slightly more personalized for each person.

I'd also prefer to have the feeds and info on one page, rather than having feeds on one page and general at-a-glance info on another page. I'd like to have one page I can customize to show the feeds and info I want, and remove what I don't want. Just my opinion. However, I'm not passionate or angry or OMGWTF about any of it.

But WHY is MS building another portal brand separate from MSN? What is MSN lacking that requires MS to create a new online brand?

This was explained by several posts before didnt it? :

As far as the overlap between My MSN and Windows Live Home, we see these as different sites with different goals. MSN is a portal to content on the Internet, whereas Windows Live Home is a portal to online services like e-mail, social networking, and file sharing.

If you've been following Windows Live, a distinguishment is made at its early announcements, that MSN will be more content-based, whereas Windows Live are more service-based.

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