Journal

Yahoo's new home page shows promise, but...

I’m a bit suspicious of the tendency to instant judgment on new web services, so forgive me if I’m a little behind the curve in offering an opinion on Yahoo’s new home page. Having played with it for a week or so now, here’s my take on what it means.

From a design perspective, it’s a much nicer place to be. Much more breathing room, the red Yahoo replaced by the return of the old purple logo and it’s a warmer, more considered place these days. Yahoo, to my mind, has tended to place a stronger emphasis on design aesthetics than its peers like Google and Microsoft, and the new home page shows it. From what I’ve heard and read too, the markup behind the scenes is significantly cleaner and lighter.

Out is the clutter of the old home page and its endless list of Yahoo’s confusing (and confused?) service offer, in is user-controlled ‘favourites’, including Yahoo’s own sites, but a whole lot of other integrated cut down interfaces to sites including Gmail, Facebook, and Flickr. You can add others – in fact, any site you want – but without any meaningful content other than a search results type summary.

So, what’s this all about? For Yahoo, it ‘represents the most significant change to our homepage since the company’s inception.’. I don’t know quite what to say to this other than it’s unintentionally damning about Yahoo’s inaction. That said, Yahoo has a difficult game to play: it’s the starting point for a huge number of web users, a disproportionate number of whom aren’t particularly web literate. This home page isn’t threatening, and makes adding content pretty visual and easy (though some have been critical of the huge overlays). But, having played with it a little, the feeling that I’m left with is that I’m not sure what problem Yahoo’s new home page solves. It feels like a defensive design to me: a means of preventing a loss of existing users, rather than attracting new ones: the content aggregation is a nice idea, yet to be fully realised and made genuinely useful.

Perhaps its inevitable, but it’s a shame that it remains a page dominated by celebrity non-news – I don’t want to see it and it will stop me using Yahoo’s home page. But it’s a missed opportunity too: without the ability to personalise this content, Yahoo misses the chance to make this page a more useful starting point but also to promote some of its other services. It is a little difficult to understand why, for example, on a celeb dominated page, Yahoo makes no reference or connection to Yahoo OMG, their site dedicated to this sort of thing it already provides.

Looking forward to seeing how Yahoo develops this over time – despite my reservations, it does have promise – and hope we’ll see two of Yahoo’s much neglected stars Delicious and Upcoming get the love from Yahoo that they deserve.