Hey designerds, figured I'd weigh in on some of the thought process here, you might find it interesting:

• Colors: Totally agree, today's theme is super Dropboxy. There are 32 color themes at MIT's disposal day-to-day plus custom colorways keyed off the daily art. These were all made to be accessible (AA or better), so had to follow pretty strict contrast/value rules to get there. Some are better than others, but they're made to be diverse and impermanent as the site cycles through them each day. Tomorrow it'll be different.
• Search this is where a lot of effort went. MIT is a really diffuse place, and the main problem we saw in our research with users was digital wayfinding. We decided to make search the centerpiece and focused on getting it to be fast and useful (and even fun). One use case we worked on a lot was the mobile interface, as the site is really optimized for mobile sizes and handheld use. It has a custom elasticsearch installation that was heavily tested to make sure it was ACTUALLY useful in the real world. There are a few easter-eggs too ;) Full-page takeover on desktop is a side-effect of some of our mobile choices, which bubbled up to desktop. Try it on your phone!
• Content strategy: the coolest part of the old MIT.edu was that it changed everysingleday. We saw this as a feature, not a bug, and designed around this. Each day the site highlights one small aspect of MIT, or one big discovery, or an interesting person. It tells the story of MIT in the aggregate, but over time instead of across (page)space. Many universities resort to "box-filling" to get all the aspects of their culture and academics on the homepage -- and you get a big huge homepage with each group fighting over page real estate. With MIT this was just impossible. So they made a really bold choice and are telling their story one piece at a time. It's also well suited to a daily email, which is rolling out at the same time.

It's a quirky site, but MIT is a quirky place. We realized from the jump that in order to be "very MIT" it had to be smart, fast and weird. Judging by the comments I'd say we succeeded in the at least a few of those places. It's got a ways to go, but we think it's a great start for their writers, designers and engineers to build a platform for their community.

Nice approach to search. The overall aesthetics feel very Dropbox.com to me.

• I love the colors! Maybe a tad more Chobani than Dropbox?
• My favorite part about the site is the tooltips on hover. A nice accessibility touch.
• It's very confusing to know where to begin navigating.
• The search bar has no reason to take up the entire window once the user starts typing.
• The Spotlight section is an interesting and innovative solution.
• At first glance, the site looks great, but 3 different strong access points are fighting for my attention.

It's amazing how someone can make something so bad in so many different ways while trying to make it good.

Mobile experience is fantastic

What do we call this new color palette that sites like this, Dropbox, and others such as https://www.emcap.com/ are using?

They're kind of earthy and fleshy, and not very saturated.

I'm still trying to decide if I like this color trend. It makes me think of paint?

Positive: Very interesting concept! Love the double scrollbar kind of thing you guys have going on here (even though it's only one scrollbar). It's very well executed and feels natural even though one side is fixed. The concept seems curious and cutting edge — good for the brand.

Not So Positive: Keep in mind I have little context of your users so maybe this has be user tested out the wazoo.

Functionally I find it a tad hard to browse and understand. Under recent spotlight you have Muddy Charles Pub (today's spotlight) gone from the list. It wasn't until I hit tomorrow's spotlight (Parrish Bergquist) that I saw the entry and realized it was a curated list of MIT things—I would consider a way to help people orient themselves in space a bit. I had no idea where I "was" until I put cognitive effort in. Search links take you to external sites but these spotlight take you to internal pages? What's the diff? I read your content strategy above and it helps me out (across time not space/pages) but there's an easy way encapsulate time AND space in a historic format (blogs and timelines do this). I actually like the quirk of the concept overall—think it's neat. So maybe that's the culture and people you're playing to and it works? Functionally a layman is going to need help.

The search bar type-animation draws your attention continually. Consider limiting the amount of times that animation cycles. I also found the transition that happens when you begin typing the search bar very jarring. Was hard to understand the results because of the huge switch in context.

Good luck! It's a neat website overall with some usability kinks to iron out..

Not bad. Interesting search bar. Some behind the scenes launch commentary: http://news.mit.edu/2018/new-mit-homepage-and-daily-email-launch-today-0725

Incredible job! I can't imagine how difficult is to push things like this forward in an institute as big as the MIT. You guys did the first step for all the other colleges to start moving.

No HTTPS? Kinda shocked.

In a lot of ways, this still feels like the soul of the site from the mid-90s still. Design looks solid and flexible as the spotlight rotates on a regular basis.

My primary problem is still that awful logo from the redesign in the late 90's. I get they're trying to be techie and all. But they're MIT. They already are. They don't need to project it.