14 DAY TRIAL // After launching Windows Live Academic Search, aimed at finding and accessing academic essays and articles, Microsoft recently announced the availability of a new sign-in for Live.com.
As the Live.com development team blog says, the new sign-in offers a new experience for Windows Live sites like Live.com, Ideas, Mail, Expo, Favorites and Custom Domains.
The Redmond company has given up on its usual webpage design and adopted a simple and intuitive design, which has led to a significant decrease in the loading times.
Instead of creating new Live accounts, Microsoft preferred to allow users to employ their old Hotmail MSN and Passport accounts; in fact, those who will try to create new accounts will be redirected to MSN.
The Live.com team emphasizes that the new sign-in will significantly improve the experience and accepts the fact that in the past, the procedure was cumbersome.
"When our team first started working on Windows Live ID, we were really excited because it gave us an opportunity to rethink the sign-in experience. In the past, signing in has been cumbersome for users. The user knows that they are who they say they are, but they have to prove it by remembering an ID and password and typing them in. When you have a service that operates at such large scale as Windows Live ID, delaying users even a few seconds with a poor experience can result in a net loss of thousands of hours wasted across the world per year," the Live team writes.
Despite the new interface, because users can create several accounts with the same nick/name, but at different Microsoft services (Hotmail, MSN etc.), users are forced to type in the full account, and not just the part before ?@".