Great UX Design, Bad User Advocacy

[ernceccodortona]

As a professional UX designer I think Edge's general UX is quite superior to Chrome's and I can clearly see where Microsoft studied to improve the "browser" to make it a more useful end product.
I love Edge and happily thrown Chrome to the trash.

But, what a pity :crying_face: let me explain:

After a month of heavy and satisfying Edge usage I felt forced to switch back to Chrome just because Microsoft still wants to deny a basic feature to the users (setting a custom new tab URL) https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/edge/forum/all/opening-new-tab-with-specific-web-page-in/7e29ec3...

To me this looks much like the typical dark pattern approach that Microsoft always put in place in order to try forcing adoption of their products (Bing in this case): has it ever really worked in the long run? Or you just always collected crumbs of audience to then disappoint them at a given point/time like it always happened to me with Microsoft products? No wonder the users go back to mother Google which actually respects their freedom of choice.

Sorry for the harsh feedback, but I'm writing because I care a lot: this current Edge is a badass product.
The company is just missing out on respecting users freedom (e.g., very easy to import settings and passwords from other browsers, very hard to export them back). Technically: great product UX, very bad user advocacy, as always.

Why not respecting users? Honesty is will pay off in the long run, the concept has been proven and proven by other companies and what you doing is just demolishing users trust every time. You care about the long term goal, right? Has your strategy ever worked? The last time you led the market with a consumer product was with IE and Messenger when there was no popular competition, wake up guys, I want to love you and I can't.

I could go very long on the topic, I thing this can be enough btw :upside_down_face:

[#2]

@ernceccodortona Thank you for taking the time to provide us with such detailed feedback; it's clear that you really care about this product, so we're grateful for your honesty. We also appreciate your patience in getting a response, I wanted to wait to respond because I knew something good was coming down the pipeline.

So here's the great news: the New Tab Page team just let us know that they are now planning the customizable URL feature for March! (You can track its progress, along with the rest of our most requested features, here: aka.ms/MSEdgeTopFeedback.)

Hopefully that addresses your concerns, and thanks again for sharing your feedback; this community's voice has tangible impacts.

Fawkes (they/them)
Project & Community Manager - Microsoft Edge