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Yahoo began what may be its biggest overhaul of its home page. But if you are among the roughly 100 million Americans who stop by Yahoo.com every month, the odds are that you haven’t noticed any changes. That’s because the job of revamping the Web’s most visited portal page is fraught with risk. If even a small fraction of Yahoo’s audience doesn’t like the changes, the company could lose millions of users and millions of dollars in advertising. So Yahoo is introducing changes in small stages and to small segments of its audience at a time, all while soliciting feedback from its users.You could call it stealth innovation. The company’s goal is to end up several months from now with a completely different, and presumably better, front page — with its audience intact. The effort is as much art as science and seeks to balance the company’s desire to innovate with its fear of alienating users. And it offers an example of how online services are designed and improved in a world where a rival’s offering is just a click away.
If even a small fraction of Yahoo’s audience doesn’t like the changes, the company could lose millions of users and millions of dollars in advertising.
I’ve always been under the impression that people don’t like layout changes. I know I don’t so I wonder if Yahoo can pull this off.
And the outcome is always the same, "We spent too much time and money on this redesign and fought too many internal battles to get it just how it is so screw you and deal with it."
Maybe twice in the last five years have I done an outright design change for a site. The rest of time incremental improvements are best. Year to year snapshots would be 80% different, but with a few key elements that almost never change (logo, fonts, etc.).
With the troubles they have, THIS is what they have people working on, and are spending their resources on.
Will it get them more users? Nope....Will it enhance the experience for their current users? Nope
IMHO = The worst part is no degree holding marketing director will ever listen to a "earned my job" through experience player until they need their umm assets covered with complete recovery strategy.
An applaud to Yahoo for testing new ideas, step by step, maybe now the fancy pants designers will figure out how to morph their "babies" slowly rather than force their will upon the world... ($orry burnt recently)
Will it get them more users? Nope....Will it enhance the experience for their current users? NopeI bet Yahoo is wasting resources.
Innovation := NOT (Yahoo!)
Wow... No love for the Yahoo folks.
I won't be so quick to judge their efforts as wasted or ineffective. I think their approach is very intelligent and diligent. There are so many good reasons to take it easy launching new ideas and I'm glad to see their approach is a conservative one. I look forward to seeing the end-product and evaluating what all the changes were about. If they were to overhaul everything all at once they'd likely throw out the baby with the bath water.
Kudos to Yahoo for taking a conservative approach even in the face of trying times.
LOL...yep. But the old timers really got burned by Yahoo/Goto/Overture being forced to advertise on their quality (cough cough) partner sites back in the day.
Actually, I'm hoping for them to pull it out. I'd like to see them actually USE the directory and dump their search engine (at least they could keep spam out of the directory, and it's what made them DIFFERENT)....a portal for everything with relevant search (from the directory) results.
Why they instead chose to jump into the game of trying to index all of the spam on the internet, I will never understand.
They just completely lost focus somewhere along the way....engines/portals used to be compared to Yahoo....now Yahoo is compared to everything else, and simply isn't measuring up.
