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November 11 Welcome to the Homepage BetaBased on your feedback, we're testing new versions of msn.com. We've received a lot of great ideas about how to make the page better, and we know you want it to be Simple, Fast, and Personal. Try logging into the page. We'll use the information you gave us in your passport to let you know if you've got mail and to personalize your weather and the stories that appear in the big picture (left side of page). We hope you'll like it.
A note on mechanics of the beta: We randomly selected people from msn.com to try beta.msn.com. This is so we can see what people do on and say about the new page, and rapidly achieve statistical significance in the test. We're sorry if you miss the old msn.com, and appreciate the help testing the new versions. One of these versions looks pretty similar to Yahoo! Last year they tested a page that looked a lot like MSN. I guess we're both just curious about how our audience reacts to a competitor's page. Remember, this is is just a test. Thanks for the help :)
You can post a comment or send us feedback here.
Neal Freeland
Group Planning Manager November 10 Firefox and other browser support coming soonWe've noticed a few comments about Firefox support so I wanted to address that quickly. Currently we've released this beta with IE6 support only. We want to gather user experience feedback before we go live to the rest of the world. A very small portion of IE6 homepage users are being directed to the beta page, so if you're one of the few who were automatically pointed to the beta page, welcome. We'd love to hear what you think of our new page.
We're anticipating full support for Firefox soon, including all interactive options. Other older browsers likely won't have the full functionality supported because of limitations in their javascript support. We'll also have a downlevel page with all the default content, but no ability to expand/collapse modules or add stocks and weather or other modules.
Please leave comments if you have thoughts or suggestions. We'd love to hear what you think.
Thanks,
Kerry D. Woolsey,
MSN Portals PM
PS: This is my favorite theme . . . LIME! November 04 MSN.com BETA is Live!!Its live! We've now got the new page live with all our services hooked up. Go take a look at the link below. We are still working through a few minor issues before we start sending real traffic to this page, but all in all it looks pretty good. Here are a couple of the things you will see with this page:
Currently, we've optimized this for the majority of our users which run IE on XP, and haven't completed work for alternate and downlevel browsers. We're working on support for all major browsers, so stay tuned. We've also dramatically reduced the number of ads on the page. WHEW! (been working on that one for a while) We're also using AJAX quite extensively, so you'll see the page load and data pop in after the page is usable. We'd love to hear from you about what you think. Ad a comment or give us a trackback. Tell us what you like and what you don't. We're interested in hearing your opinions. Thanks, Kerry D. Woolsey, MSN Portals PM
PS. This is the "butterscotch" theme August 30 Launching The Dogfood pageSome folks out there may have had a chance to see the partially complete dogfood version of beta.msn.com that was available for some time last week. Its mostly turned off now, since we are still building and testing out components as we experiment on a new design. The new design for MSN.com incorporates some of our start.com features with the traditional homepage. If we can get this all to play nice together, we are hoping to have something that is far more relevant to the daily user than our current newspaper style page.
Lots of folks out there noticed that the page didn't work in browsers other than IE, (most notably Firefox). That's because this early in the development process we are just playing with features and seeing what works together, but don't go through full browser compatability passes. (it's a bit of a waste when you throw chunks of code away).
And what's with the lack of capitalization the other posters on are site are doing? That was the style in the '70s.
The Medium is the Massage, I guess.
Mark Hancheroff
Program Manager MSN.com version 10 under constructionAs you may have read from various blogs and news articles, work is underway for a new verison of msn.com. Yes ,it's true we're incorporating a lot of our learnings from our efforts with start.com/3. But msn.com is a unique experience to start. Our goal will be to take the best of both worlds and deliver a compelling experience. Recently we launched a pre-alpha glimpse of this offering at http://beta.msn.com. We read concerns about browser support and other funcitonality issues. Rest assured, we plan on addressing all of those issues. Most of the functionality of the page never appeared on beta.msn.com as it was literally a live test. We'll continue to make revisions - though we've limited who can see the new page to avoid confusion to our userbase. This blog will contain postings of our latest thoughts and is a great place to see what were thinking from the folks that work on the product. At various times, several of us will add our thoughts. Please let us know what you're thinking. We want your feedback.
Kris Barton
Group Program Manager |
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