Friday, October 08, 2004

Yahoo's clutter

Jerry Yang (co-founder of Yahoo) was asked at Web 2.0 about the cluttered Yahoo home page. His response:
    Our biggest challenge it finding ways to let users know what we have. The home page needs to offer users more control. This isn't about broadcasting what everyone wants. But we still need a way to inform users about what is new at the same time. And we're trying to figure out how to unclutter. Everyone uses Yahoo differently. The UI may change in this broadband world.
By looking toward broadband, I hope Jerry isn't suggesting a graphic-heavy UI.

There's another approach: show the content that matters. In an earlier post, I suggested that Yahoo users should be shown a combination of favorites -- the Yahoo features that you use frequently or that are very popular -- and a rotating selection of features I haven't seen -- helping me discover useful new functionality. I don't need to see everything every time I come to yahoo.com; I just need to see what I need to see.

Update: Yahoo is currently testing a minor redesign of their front page. [via InsideGoogle]

2 comments:

Greg Linden said...

Interesting. I'd love to see that.

But I want to be clear about what I'm proposing. I'm proposing providing focus on the main Yahoo page, showing only the features you need plus a few new features to discover. One click away should be a page that lists all of Yahoo's features.

So the full suite of functionality isn't hidden; it's deemphasized.

Anonymous said...

That's why i like google classic and google Personalized Home.