Webdesigner Depot, on Apple and Microsoft’s websites:
Which site is the winner? If you’re looking at usability alone, Apple comes out ahead. They have a better designed homepage that offers less choice, which means the user needs to think less.
They have consistent navigation across all of their pages. They use a lot of white space and sub-headings to make everything more readable, yet they keep things simple by not overusing too many different text treatments.
The Apple site is generally more user friendly and offers a much better experience to consumers who use it to check out Apple’s latest products.
Having said this, the Apple website is much smaller in scale than Microsoft’s site. Unlike Apple, Microsoft hosts many different sites and sections under the Microsoft.com brand, creating a whole ecosystem of sub-sites. Each site is packed with information and the Live powered search that Microsoft offers tends to yield good results. The biggest problem for Microsoft is consistency.
Microsoft just doesn’t have a consistent, coherent and unified brand. Every section looks and feels different. There is no global navigation and there are not many visual clues that tell the user that this is a Microsoft site — unlike Apple, where the whole site shares one unique aesthetic that mirrors that of their hardware and software, thus creating a powerful brand.