Bing Images = Great User Experience
Since Bing was launched in last June, a lot of articles have been written about this search engine / decision engine. I tried Bing search engine for images and I found 2 interesting concepts for displaying results.
First, if you search Moon (as it’s today the 40th anniversary of the Moon landing), you’ll get from 12 to 40 results depending on your resolution. The good thing is the user is not annoyed by secondary information such as file title, file size, image resolution and URL. The interface is clean and clutter free, much more than on Yahoo images and on Google images. Then the browsing experience is much better for the user. Somebody might say that it’s useful to have information such as the file size before clicking the picture, that’s true, it could be part of the decision process of the user. In that case, Bing have filters and in any cases, users get these secondary information while rolling over the appropriate picture.
Second, Bing doesn’t use the numbering pages concept as Yahoo and Google do (and much every other image search engines that I know – see the image below), it only reloads images as you scroll down:
The user has to click on the wanted page or the Next button. Then, he scan the results page, then scroll down, then again has to click on one of these links. On the Bing side, you get your results and the only thing you have to do is scan results and scroll down, new results will load until you reach the last image. That way, the user experience is not broken by having to click on a link every 20 or something images seen. That’s a pretty good design concept.
Have you used Bing?
Nota Bene: I have no personal interest in Microsoft : – )
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