However, what about the unique features of their websites? What are their comparisons? More importantly, which one is a better product? A consumer can take a look at the comparisons of their homepages, navigation, and consistency. First, Apple differs from Microsoft in its homepage. The homepage of a website is one of the most important pages because it’s the first page that users will see. It is known to summarize and express the information enough to keep the user browsing. Apple’s homepage is set up like an advertising board.
They advertise their latest product as their main ad, followed by three other ads to another three products or news that are important at the moment. If the user isn’t interested in one of the four advertisements, he/she can use the navigation bar at the top of the screen to navigate one of the listed headlines. The website is well organized, making it very simple to find what a person is looking for. Unlike Microsoft, it is well spaced, which helps to grab the reader’s attention. Microsoft’s homepage is setup fairly differently from Apple’s.
Instead of having a main ad like Apple, its site has a set of highlights advertising their information. Highlights do not catch a reader’s attention as well as Apple’s large ad. Furthermore, Microsoft’s homepage is also packed with a lot of information in such little space. The information is broken down into bullet points, but the font is small and there are hardly any images to differentiate between the items. There is little to attract the reader to make him/her want to read through this content because it just appears to be boring. Therefore, the homepage of Apple and Microsoft differ.
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Customers are an asset for any organization and to satisfy and retain them is every organization’s goal. The only way to achieve this goal is to build proper relationships with your customer through providing them appropriate customer service when ever they require. Customer gives you business because it is a cycle, if you fulfill your customer need then he will spread a good word of mouth for ...
Next, Apple differs from Microsoft in navigation. Apple’s website has a large navigation bar located at the top of the page. The navigation bar remains at the top of the site no matter which section the user goes to. The options available on the navigation bar show the main sections of the website and its products. Microsoft has a similar navigation bar on the homepage, but the bar is not consistent across the site. Microsoft’s homepage navigation acts as a site map to the rest of the website’s sections. In a lot of the navigation bars, including the one on the homepage, Microsoft uses large drop-down menus — unlike Apple.
Apple does a great job of keeping everything easy to read. The text is generally small, but never too small so as to be a problem. Their headings are set in font to stand out, allowing the user to quickly get the gist of each section. Apple also makes strong use of white space to separate everything apart and adds images to make each text blurb more interesting. On a typical Microsoft page, it follows the general readability guidelines by breaking things down into small pieces of text that are easy to read. It looks a lot busier than the Apple site because there is more content on one page.
Thus, navigation differs between the two. Finally, the greatest difference in Apple and Microsoft is consistency. Consistency plays a major factor because it allows usage patterns to be developed, which means if the site has a consistent layout, the user will learn how to navigate it easily. Apple does a great job of keeping the layout consistent. All of the product pages are very similar and are structured in the same way. The whole site looks and feels the same throughout and the global navigation bar at the top is always there, on every page.
In contrast, Microsoft struggles a bit when it comes to consistency. There are many different sections across Microsoft. com and they all feature their own look and feel, including their own navigation. Consequently once a user goes to various sections on Microsoft’s site, they will all look and feel like separate websites. Hence Apple and Microsoft differ in consistency. After comparing both websites, which site do you think is the winner? If you’re looking at usability alone, Apple is the one for you. They have a better designed homepage that offers fewer choices, which means the user needs to think less.
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The Evolution of the PC and Microsoft Kasey Anderson 2/21/97 Computer Tech. ESSAY Xerox, Apple, IBM, and Compaq all played major roles in the development of the Personal Computer, or ^3 PC, ^2 and the success of Microsoft. Though it may seem so, the computer industry did not just pop-up overnight. It took many years of dedication, hard-work, and most importantly, thievery to turn the personal ...
They also have consistent navigation across all of their pages. They use a lot of white space and sub-headings to make everything more readable, yet they keep things simple by not overusing too many different texts. Unlike Apple, Microsoft hosts many different sites and sections under Microsoft. com, creating a whole family of sub-sites. Each site is packed with information, but the biggest problem for Microsoft is consistency. Therefore, the two most popular and famous computer software companies in the world differ in their homepage, navigation, and consistency.
