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Hotmail Gets a Face-Lift

Redesign focuses on easier navigation, speed, and reliability.

By Tom Spring, PCWorld   

Microsoft's Hotmail service has undergone an interface overhaul designed to make it faster, more intuitive, and more reliable. That should come as welcome news to the 40 million Hotmail users who've been coping with chronic service problems as Microsoft scrambled repeatedly to fix the service.

Hotmail's new look, unveiled Friday, more closely mimics Microsoft's MSN family of branded sites. For instance, the navigation bars have been moved horizontally to the center of the page, providing easier access to commands and utilities such as Compose and the address book. Hotmail features, including links to MSN services and shopping sites, are now placed vertically to the left.

In an effort to make the site faster and easier to use, Microsoft has pared down its use of high-resolution graphics. You get more screen real estate for reading and composing messages, and Microsoft says the redesigned site loads pages nearly twice as fast.

Gone also is Hotmail's reliance on HTML frames. Hotmail's new approach is to center most of the form fields and navigational buttons that were buried layers deep in the site.

The Hotmail upgrade also applies to the French, German, and Japanese versions of the service.

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