Microsoft Bing team today announced an updated Bing Image search experience with many new features. This new Image search user experience provides a foundation for Bing to better meet your needs. The new experience is visually rich and adapts based on user’s query, resolution and interaction. It looks great across devices, its touch friendly and is also extensible enough to support the direction Bing team is heading in.
Following are the improvements that are coming as part of this release,
Design:
- Now you’ll notice that image results will expand to the full width of your screen with exploration suggestions being placed dynamically according to your screen resolution. This means an uncluttered first page where images are the hero. You’ll also notice that images have higher fidelity and are cropped and altered less to better inform your click.
- The experience is great with touch. On your Windows 8 device or iPad, try swiping through one of the inline carousels (more on these later) or clicking on an image and swiping your way through more. Everything is touch friendly, responsive, fast and fluid – look out for a post next week detailing Bing’s touch and iPad friendly features. These improvements will soon come to Kindle and Android tablets as well.
Refinements and exploration just got easier:
- Our refinement and exploration suggestions and Pinterest board search have always been among our most popular features and have remained a big focus for this release. We will now intelligently place the right content in the right place according to your query, screen resolution and device inside carousels that you can swipe or click through to see more.
- As we began testing this experience with users, we found that many wanted an always available way to refine their search or find suggestions. To meet this need, we’ve introduced a mini-header that slides in after you scroll down. It’s designed to take about 10% of your screen to ensure it doesn’t detract from an immersive image search experience but still provide you with everything you’d need to change query or topic.
- The suggestions that we display in the mini header will change as you scroll through the inline carousels to give you access to what you last saw. You can always click the button on the right to rotate through the content — the dots represent the each available set of content in the order they appear on the page.
- Finally, we recently released a new hover experience and you may notice that we have now begun showing a link with a search glass icon for many images. We’ve noticed that people often want to learn more about or see more images like an image they’ve found but struggle to formulate the right query to do so. To fix this, we now give you a suggested search link in the pop-out.
Microsoft is now rolling out this experience to all desktop browsers and tablets in all markets in the coming weeks with Kindle and Android tablets following very soon after.
Read more at Bing blog.