14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft’s employees are offered the possibility to access a global portal called MSWeb, which has recently got a facelift, it appears.
What’s even more interesting is that the portal appears to have adopted the same Metro-inspired look as many other Microsoft products did lately.
We can now have a look at the said portal courtesy of design studio “If/Then,” which posted some shots on their website.
The company claims that Microsoft contracted them for coming up with the fresh look the internal website has at the moment.
They did not offer details on when the move took place, but placeholder content unveils that this might have happened sometime in 2010, and that the project stretched to 2011.
The Metro visual style had a strong influence on the final result, as you can see in the mockups they published online.
“Microsoft asked us to redesign the interface for its global corporate intranet. The design challenge was to create a visual experience that would be as compelling in Redmond as it was in Beijing,” the design studio explains.
“We took direction from the Microsoft Metro visual style and created clean design that surface region specific information for each user. Employees called the result ‘stunning’ and ‘inspiring’.”
In the shots available attached to this article, you can see that there is a section dedicated to streaming videos, complemented by an archives service, and an internal news publication.
The project took 19 months to complete, and has over 5.2 million monthly page views. This means that Microsoft’s 90,000 global employees are indeed making good use of it. At launch, the redesigned website had a bit over 320k page views.
The design team claims that employees delivered great feedback on their work. They were enthusiastic with the new design, and they also expressed their appreciation regarding the functionality of the website.
