May 16, 2006
New Yahoo Homepage
Yahoo has finally released a preview of their new homepage.
The new yahoo.com marks a significant new look for the most trafficked website in the world. There’s plenty of AJAX magic to make the Yahoo homepage more interactive - and Yahoo has made a big effort to make the user the primary focus of the new homepage. It has a larger search box, in recognition of the big role that the search interface plays in today’s Web. There is also more emphasis on personalization, news content and community - moving away from the 90’s ‘everything under the sun’ portal to a more user-focused homepage for the user. Indeed upon visiting the preview page, you’re greeted with a banner that shows just how important personalization is to this re-design: “Welcome to the all-new Yahoo! It’s made for you.”
In the podcast we also discussed how the yahoo.com homepage has added more multimedia links and content, in line with Yahoo’s status nowadays as a media company. This trend for more video and audio content on the homepage will only increase over time.
From a design point of view, the most noticeable feature is an increased use of AJAX in the new layout. Also the page is wider, recognizing that the average PC monitor size has increased over the past few years (nb: there is an option to switch to a “narrow page”). The visual design employs the famous web 2.0 technique of faded colors - and there is more use of tabs too. In the podcast, VP of Front Doors Tapan Bhat explained some of the scaling challenges of implementing AJAX in a mass market website. He made it clear that the move to a more AJAX-heavy user interface required a lot of testing and optimization before it was ready for prime time. For an example of the AJAX touches, check out the “Personal Assistant” in the top-right corner
My opinion: Appears to have a lot of nice features…but it is very busy and, for some reason, reminds me of news sites. At least all the javascript and AJAX modifications aren’t significantly slow (I’m in the Mai Beta…it looks and operates a lot like MS Outlook…but it, like Zimbra is VERY slow).
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