A first look at the new MSN

[Guest Brian MacDonald]

For nearly two decades, MSN has been a place where millions of us go every day to discover and connect with what’s important in our lives. Whether it’s a great article that sparks us to think differently or following our favorite sports team, MSN has always aspired to keep us in the know.

 

At the same time, how we explore, discover and interact with our favorite content has changed in profound ways. It’s become increasingly hard to keep up with all of the information swirling around the Internet, let alone do something meaningful with information once we’ve found it.

 

Looking at this landscape, we have rebuilt MSN from the ground up for a mobile-first, cloud-first world. The new MSN brings together the world’s best media sources along with data and services to enable users to do more in News, Sports, Money, Travel, Food & Drink, Health & Fitness, and more. It focuses on the primary digital daily habits in people’s lives and helps them complete tasks across all of their devices. Information and personalized settings are roamed through the cloud to keep users in the know wherever they are.

 

People around the globe can try out the new Web experience today at preview.msn.com. We’re excited to talk about the details here for the first time.

 

Introducing the new MSN

 

 

At the top of the MSN homepage, users have quick access to what we call the Services Stripe. This allows easy access to personal services to stay on top of what’s happening in your life. With a quick hover, you can easily check your email, browse your OneDrive, or even access your OneNote notebooks. We’ve also integrated popular sites like Facebook, Twitter, Office 365 and Skype.

 

Additionally, the new MSN presents actionable information together with content and personal productivity tools like shopping lists, a savings calculator, a symptom checker, a 3D body explorer, and more.

 

A clean, fresh design makes it easy to find and enjoy content that interests you. You can reorder categories and interests to reflect your tastes.

 

 

One of our goals was to make it simple to personalize what you want to see regardless of which device you use. In the coming months, we will release a suite of MSN apps across iOS and Android to complement our corresponding Windows and Windows Phone apps. You only need to set your favorites once, and your preferences will be connected across MSN, Cortana, Bing and other Microsoft experiences. Whether it is your watchlist of stocks in MSN Money, your favorite sports teams in MSN Sports, or your recipe collections in MSN Food & Drink, those things will always be with you at your PC at work, on your iPad in the living room, or on your Android phone when you are on the go.

 

Comprehensive & best-in-class

 

Throughout all of the categories in the new MSN, including News, Sports, Money, Travel, Food & Drink, and Health & Fitness, it is a key tenet of MSN that every experience provide a global, comprehensive perspective from thousands of worldwide, authoritative sources.

 

We’ve partnered with the world’s best to deliver on this goal:

 

• In the US, some of our premier partners include The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, CNN, AOL (including TechCrunch and Huffington Post) and Condé Nast (including Vanity Fair, Epicurious, Bon Appétit).
  
• Worldwide, we’re excited to include The Yomiuri Shimbun and The Asahi Shimbun in Japan; Sky News, The Guardian and the Telegraph in the UK, NDTV and Hindustan Times in India, Le Figaro and Le Monde in France, and many more.
  

 

Every MSN experience includes features to make users more productive and efficient in what they’re trying to achieve. For example, in MSN News, you can set up topics to follow the news you care about. You can track “Game of Thrones” or “Ukraine” or “Obamacare” and MSN will keep you on top of relevant news – creating a newspaper whose sections are personalized for you.

 

 

When you’re searching for recipes in MSN Food & Drink and find one that you want to prepare, you can convert the ingredients for that recipe into a shopping list that roams to your phone in just one click.

 

 

These are just two examples – a brief taste of what’s coming with the new MSN. To try out the whole experience for yourself, head over to preview.msn.com.

 

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