Marissa Mayer Rolls Out a New Yahoo.com

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-02-20/marissa-mayer-rolls-out-a-new-yahoo-dot-com

by ot • 13 years ago

147 135 13 years ago

efbenson• 13 years ago

It's cleaned up, but looks like its missing something. I waited for a while after the page loaded expecting more style/design. I would think they could come up with something a little more exciting.

ngokevin• 13 years ago

Good design takes iteration. I always find new design launches are underwhelming and have many flaws, but they always get fixed up nicely.

rscott• 13 years ago

I'm getting redirected to Yahoo's mobile site for some reason. Chrome 24 on Ubuntu 12.04.

pgrote• 13 years ago

Are you at a hotel by any chance? Anytime I stay at a hotel and access any Yahoo property it pushes me to the mobile sites.

pacian012• 13 years ago

no at home in my house useing my computer

kochb• 13 years ago

Confirmed here, Ubuntu 12.04 Chrome Version 24.0.1312.70.

forgueam• 13 years ago

Same here. Same setup (24/12.04). For a minute I thought the mobile version was the new front page.

pacian012• 13 years ago

I have the same problem, work ok on Firefox

bpatrianakos5• 13 years ago

"Overall it was important to me that the page be dynamic, that it feel very fresh, and that it be very intuitive, and that it really tries to embody beautiful design"

Is that really supposed to mean anything? It sounds like buzzword soup. It should kind of go without saying that she wants the site to be fresh, intuitive, and beautiful. I don't think anyone wants a stale, frustrating and ugly website. That said, news feeds, AJAX, and oAuth don't necessarily make the site all 3 of those things.

I'm really rooting for Mayer but I couldn't let that quote go.

prezjordan• 13 years ago

She's the face of a large corporation, is that really unexpected? I figure anyone in her position would throw around marketing lingo - seems like it's part of the job.

bpatrianakos5• 13 years ago

I know that. I'm being a little harsh and I am kidding a bit too. I usually don't go out of my way to say anything about these sorts of things because of exactly what you said but this one just struck me so hard I could not let it go.

untog• 13 years ago

It's an interview with BusinessWeek. There is such a thing as playing to your audience. She's a techie, we know she is, BusinessWeek's average reader doesn't know or care.

obstacle14• 13 years ago

This is a fluff piece aimed entirely at nontechnical readers. "Beautiful", "intuitive", "dynamic", "personalizable", and so on are exactly the words this audience wants to hear. They wouldn't understand anything more jargon-y and don't care how the site was built, they just want to know how they're going to feel while using it.

jrockway4• 13 years ago

How can someone tell me what I will find beautiful or intuitive?

It's buzzwords, not a meaningful reflection on the changes. People that aren't professional writers think that stringing positive-sounding words together in a way that is grammatically correct will result in a good sentence. The result is corporate speak.

"The synergy of the positive verbiage results in a dynamic reading experience." No, it makes me want to hit my head on the desk until my eyes get too watery to read the text anymore. Or post an angry comment on HN. One of those.

bpatrianakos5• 13 years ago

I wasn't looking for an explanation of how the site was built at all. I really think she could have came up with an explanation of the goals of the redesign that actually meant something. For example:

"We wanted the site to feel fresh, intuitive, and beautiful which why we put a lot of work into the new real-time news feed, gave the homepage a simpler, less cluttered design, and took inspiration from designs that are both modern and timeless".

What was really lacking in the original quote was substance. She could have used the very same first half the quote then pointed at one thing that qualified the redesign as being each of those adjectives and it would have went from buzzword soup to a meaningful statement.

wmeredith• 13 years ago

She's not going to rattle off jargon from the technical requirements document. If she did, the Business Week audience would respond with, "What's that supposed to mean? It just a bunch of acronyms and industry jargon."

This is a marketing and PR piece.

dfxm12• 13 years ago

Aren't buzzwords like this just as alienating as tech jargon? I know everyone does it, but why does she have to speak in marketing/design jargon, and not plain English?

Evbn5• 13 years ago

The same crap gets blasted around internally by the disconnected execs, "magical" systems, etc.

ed2092• 13 years ago

Actually, you should always define some "buzzword soup" as you put it, or as others put it "define the tone".

Picking out opposites to words she says is a cheap shot. Of course no one would ask for "stale, frustrating and ugly" websites.

However, she could just as easily have said "robust, bold and permanent" which would have resulted in a site better suited for obituaries.

I often encounter people who put these very high level definitions down to project management fluff, but the truth is the stuff makes a difference on it's way down the development chain.

bpatrianakos5• 13 years ago

Everyone seems to be misunderstanding what I meant. I understand that those words have meaning in some contexts and I get that this is a Business Week interview and they're playing to the audience. All I'm saying is that if she would have added in just a couple of specifics in there the quote would have had meaning. What she said would have made sense if she were saying it to her design department but in this context it still stands as meaningless.

biot• 13 years ago

The page used to be relatively static, a bit outdated, not as intuitive as it could be, and with a design that was aging. Her explanation is perfect for conveying what they've focused on changing without dwelling on the old status.

lotso• 13 years ago

The page is dynamic and fresh = the content is changing and up-to-date.

Intuitive = easy to use, especially important for Yahoo's demographic

Beautiful design = nice to look at.

I think that sentence covers the redesign pretty well and isn't just "buzzword soup."

pacomerh• 13 years ago

Here we are at HN, a community of "smart" people, and yet you still don't understand that those words are for targeted for everyone, not just you, the nerd. Of course it's fine if she says the "obvious", it's not obvious for everyone.

tn132• 13 years ago

She clearly missed the following words. "leveraging the cloud, mobile optimized, touch friendly"

Evbn5• 13 years ago

She is trying to slowly step away from her "just be Google" strategy of 2012.

miles_matthias• 13 years ago

I've only looked at the mobile site on my iPhone, but it looks great. One of my complaints about Yahoo's homepage has always been their gossipy headline news stories in big pictures on the front page. I'm sure that got them lots of clicks with most people, but for me it just made me despise going to Yahoo's website. It looks like they've replaced that with actual news so far.

danso• 13 years ago

Really? The top two stories on the news carousel for me are:

1. "Nonstop shouting" at Pistorius home

2. Bruce Lee's mystery fight (which was interesting, but not exactly big world news)

Interestingly, I got the results above when logged into my Yahoo account, which I only use for Flickr and nothing else.

When I visited Yahoo from a blank browser, the Bruce Lee story didn't show up. I wonder if Yahoo guessed that I was Asian and thought that I would like Bruce Lee (well, I guess they were right on that one...)

* The most egregious part of this Yahoo carousel headline was that the story was about how the investigating officer in the Pistorius bail hearing did terribly during cross-examination. He had to admit, among other things, that the "witness" lived 600 meters away from the Pistorius home...which is quite a contradiction to the headline. Whatever merits Yahoo.com's facelift has, this incredibly bad editorial judgment left a terrible first impression with me.

noahm• 13 years ago

Assuming they use the same data for story targeting that they do for ad targeting, you can see the profile they've built up around you (your account + your current browser) at http://info.yahoo.com/privacy/us/yahoo/opt_out/targeting/det... It might help to explain why you're seeing some of the stories you are.

wjk• 13 years ago

Looks like only the american site was updated so far. The swedish page still looks like something from the late 90s. Even with the newer look i have a hard time seeing myself actually using it though. I'm not really impressed to be honest, mostly because its long, long, long overdue.

nwh2• 13 years ago

I can't understand why they have two headers and search boxes, right on top of each other.

http://i.imgur.com/muXk97p.png

ED: The Australian redirect is to a completely different website than the American one. That's confusing.

freehunter• 13 years ago

Which page are you seeing this on? When I go to Yahoo!, I'm seeing something completely different.

http://i.imgur.com/OyOvL67.png

Edit -- Going to the Australian site as linked below gives me the search box at the top, and as I scroll down it rolls out a search box stuck to the top of the page. Looks like you might be seeing a rendering glitch where both are visible at the same time when they shouldn't be.

DougBTX• 13 years ago

Going directly to http://au.yahoo.com/ doesn't show the upper search box.

Rovanion• 13 years ago

Odd, it does so for me when I click your link.

itsybitsycoder• 13 years ago

I see the upper search box at first, and then it gets covered up by one of those full-page background ads. Might depend on adblock settings.

venus• 13 years ago

Mine's even worse: http://f.cl.ly/items/3v2U1h1k1v1T3p453J3t/Image%202013.02.21...

deepuj3• 13 years ago

Y U no responsive design?

LinaLauneBaer• 13 years ago

There are plenty of people who dislike responsive designs for good reasons. It is not the fault of responsive designs itself but the fault of many mobile browsers like Mobile Safari and Chrome for iOS. Here is what I mean:

Responsive websites usually don't let you zoom in by panning. Everything is fixed. If you want the text to be larger you are out of luck on the browsers mentioned above. On iOS you cannot make the font size bigger in Mobile Safari. You can only turn on zooming in the accessibility settings which has its drawbacks as well. I like to zoom in to the relevant parts of a website myself - manually.

If most mobile browsers were capable of letting the user pick a different font size then I would be all for it.

harlanlewis• 13 years ago

Disabling zoom is done independently of CSS RWD, and should generally be avoided for the accessibility reasons you state. Preferring zoom-and-pan to scrolling is a separate issue, but I haven't seen or heard much to indicate its a common sentiment.

It sounds like what you dislike is poorly done RWD, which only addressed the aesthetic of the small viewport and not the unique navigation & content challenges (unfortunately common).

deepuj3• 13 years ago

Disabling user scaling (zooming) is a choice made by the website itself and not by the browser. So even though it is a bad usability-wise, it cannot be regarded as a problem with responsive web design.

benburleson• 13 years ago

I must be missing something. I haven't been to yahoo.com in a long time, but this looks very similar to what I remember, just slightly updated for last year's style.

http://i.imgur.com/Z0EH12W.jpg

xtreme• 13 years ago

Looks like they are still rolling out the new version.

pfraze• 13 years ago

As a piece of web software, I find it pretty dull, but when I think of it as a replacement to a newspaper for my parents, it makes a whole lot of sense.

First of all, it is actually a major boost in organization and clean design. The options on the left have been reduced to a smaller and easier-to-read list. The center feed is evenly paced and better at snagging your interest while casually scrolling through. The right has been turned into a set of info widgets-- weather, stock quotes, sport scores, some appealing photos and videos if you're just clickin around, coming birthdays if you're hooked up to FB, and horoscopes. If I'm thinking about a modern newspaper, that's about it.

I'm not a huge fan of the aesthetic, but it's familiar to its userbase, and almost entirely uncomplicated. I think Yahoo should call it a win.

rdtsc• 13 years ago

> I think of it as a replacement to a newspaper for my parents, it makes a whole lot of sense.

Exactly how I feel. I stopped going there, I stopped checking my email there in years. It is a site used by grandparents. Even my mom in her 60 uses google (gmail, google news, search). A lot maybe has to do with yahoo.com just being there first and those that got computers back then just never switched (kind of like people still paying for AOL dialup).

And even though many criticize it for being dull it is exactly familiar and doing something crazy and outlandish would have driven away their remaining user base.

Now there also an aspect that yahoo has a better audience for certain ads, they also might be receptive to ads in general. So in that regard Yahoo can keep staying afloat. But in the long run I am not sure how they'll attract new users.

Come to think of it, Yahoo is like the Buick of web industry. The only people I see buying and driving those are elderly folk. When they can't drive there is a risk the brand will just go away.

sagarun• 13 years ago

You have to go to the us homepage try http://us.yahoo.com/

AdamTReineke• 13 years ago

I'm seeing the exact same thing as his screenshot.

vitorarins• 13 years ago

it shows me a mobile page.. WTF??

rohitnair• 13 years ago

Yeah, they're still rolling it out I suppose. Try http://www.yahoo.com/?p=newyahoo (I think that forces you to the new version, or at least did for me)

htp• 13 years ago

Worked for me, too.

mikeryan• 13 years ago

This is a refresh not a redesign.

She only took over about 6 months ago, properly redesigning something like the Yahoo home page is likely a year long process. I have no doubt that this is a temporary step to get a little bit of forward momentum for what has been perceived as a stagnant company.

saraid216• 13 years ago

So, I looked at it 3 hours ago and didn't see anything new. I just looked again and it's definitely different. You might try refreshing and stuff.

conradfr• 13 years ago

Where is the yodel when you click on the exclamation mark ? :)

stevewilhelm• 13 years ago

The Yahoo! properties I actually use on a regular basis, My Yahoo!, Finance, Sports, and Flickr (which already looks pretty good but totally different than the other properties) seem to be unchanged.

thoughtcriminal• 13 years ago

How sad. Yahoo is still fixated on "fresh" and "beautiful" design when it's the content that needs to be completely overhauled.

Leave fresh, beautiful and intuitive design to Smashing Magazine. Yahoo needs to make brave changes and Marissa isn't making them.

taligent3• 13 years ago

She's been in the job 6 months and a lot of changes have been made already.

Maybe a little patience is in order ? It took years before Apple could be turned around.

nonamegiven• 13 years ago

I don't like infinite scroll, and I don't like automatic reloads.

I haven't been to yahoo in awhile; it looks mostly like I remember it, which i suppose is a branding success. But I don't feel compelled to go, they don't do anything unique. That said, if you want what they and others do, you have to go somewhere to get it, and they seem to be doing a credible job doing it, so it's as good as any other portal.

jwwest• 13 years ago

It's disappointing that Yahoo = Mayer now in the media. I'm sure that plenty of talented people spent a lot of time on this, only to have it sound like Marissa Mayer coded the whole damn thing herself.

deepuj3• 13 years ago

Oh boy, then you must feel real pity for the guys at Apple.

simias• 13 years ago

How is it different from any other industry ever?

inerte3• 13 years ago

What?

Do you get news saying a new Prius was unvelied by 豊田章男? Or Leo Rafael Reif released a lunar robot vehicle?

alayne• 13 years ago

Yahoo! needs to regain credibility after Bartz ran it into the ground amid claims of overcompensation. Having someone like Mayer as a public leader with accountability will be a positive thing.

danilocampos2• 13 years ago

Much as I hate to rain on someone else's sanctimonious parade, I think that the average Yahoo is more than happy to have a credible figurehead. Especially after the bean counting clowns who came before.

For one thing, it's at last possible for Yahoo to recruit decent talent again. That's largely a credit to Mayer's track record and her shuffling of the executive leadership.

They're getting food.

They're getting modern cell phones.

They're seeing progress in long-stagnant products.

Like it or not, Mayer is a substantial center of gravity in the product decisions of that company, and they really needed a product person. Giving her the headline is more than fair.

bluethunder• 13 years ago

This is as long as Yahoo CEO's last. If this is all what she has to show for it, I'm guessing the search for the next has already begun.

Riding the Google roller coaster can alter the hard realities for anyone. The heat is only felt where the rubber hits the road though.

danilocampos2• 13 years ago

The stock is up 34% since she took over.

So, nope.

theklub• 13 years ago

I wonder if the story quality on the front page will change. I went there yesterday and was blown away by the degree of "tabloidism" that I almost took a screenshot of how laughable it was. Using yahoo for searching the web isn't even a thought anymore, I honestly feel bing comes to mind before yahoo. And as for a news source, forget it.

jedberg• 13 years ago

Infinite scroll breaks the metaphor of the sidebar! The indicator no longer tells me how much more content there is on the page. I've hated it ever since Facebook started doing it with photos.

jawns• 13 years ago

Well, it DOES, strictly speaking, tell you how much more content there is on the page. It's just that more content will be dynamically added as you scroll down.

cpressey• 13 years ago

The scrollbar (which I assume what is you meant by "sidebar"), as a UI element in general, seems to be getting increasingly less coherent. Like several other sites I've seen recently that are getting "creative" with scrolling, the top header on the new Yahoo page doesn't scroll, but the scrollbar still extends to the top of the page.

smackfu2• 13 years ago

Seems like the next step is to put the scrollbar under programmatic control.

foobarqux2• 13 years ago

Infinite scroll is stupid for many of the same reasons why it is stupid to use physical scrolls instead of pages bound into books.

dualboot• 13 years ago

I wish she would get rid of the incredibly tacky "from Yahoo!" that someone cut and paste on the the Flickr logo.

seunosewa2• 13 years ago

They need to do country-based personalisation, just like Google News does, since their audience is international.

Roboprog• 13 years ago

Yahoo has their own reporters? Maybe they could resurrect the art of investigative journalism and get people to come to the site to find something out about the world. Just a thought...

rothlis• 13 years ago

It's still very busy, but less compare to the prior design. The low resolution headline images on the landing page degrade the experience in my opinion. It definitely looks like a news portal, not a search engine.

127001brewer• 13 years ago

By coincidence I had the Today Show on (while getting ready for work this morning) when Marissa Mayer announced the improved home page.[1] In my opinion, I thought the announcement was underwhelming and slightly awkward.[2]

[1] http://digitallife.today.com/_news/2013/02/20/17028847-the-n... [2] http://www.businessinsider.com/marissa-mayer-on-today-show-2...

webwanderings• 13 years ago

I like the new page. The middle of the screen small toolbar where you can drop-down selected links is a nice and easy to way to quickly scroll through the news items.

I have Ghostery and Adblocks enabled, so I don't know if others see Ads and how it impacts the experience.

RivieraKid• 13 years ago

It's not bad but...

1. Some elements of the design look "Googley", and that's not a compliment. Specifically: light gray borders, link color, low contrast, sterille, cold, boring, lacks personality.

2. Unpolished. Buttons don't change style on hover or press, title bar shadow looks odd on an overall shadowless page, the "More" menu blends with the background.

acabal• 13 years ago

Looks like the web has gone full circle. Back in 2000 frames were all the rage; in 2005 frames were the bane of good designers everywhere; now in 2013 we're back to frames again. Here's hoping the frames trend dies a swift, permanent death sooner rather later.

Andrex2• 13 years ago

I can't find any evidence of frame or iframes on yahoo.com, what are you referring to?

adorable• 13 years ago

I guess he refers to the search bar at the top and the left navigation menu that remain fixed when scrolling (i.e. acting like frames even though it's just css / js)

jsnk• 13 years ago

Can you specify what frames you are talking about? I am asking because I don't see any trace of html frames (http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/present/frames.html)

melvinram• 13 years ago

What I love about this new version is that they implemented an idea that I've wanted for a long time: filtering the site to not show you stuff you don't want to see. I even wrote on HN about it 75 days ago http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4884902 :)

For example, there is a news story currently in circulation about Clive Davis and Kelly Clarkson. I personally like Kelly's music but I don't care about this feud so I just ignored it in my yahoo so hopefully it won't show up again.

jusben1369• 13 years ago

I guess I'd be surprised to come in here and find overwhelming praise for Yahoo :-) My wife uses Yahoo as her primary site for email/news etc. I took a quick look and think this update is substantially better. Honestly it does look "fresh" and "more intuitive" to me than before via an emphasis on a better design.

One thing I've noticed with the media and financial world is that, when they've been critical of Marissa, it's been because she hasn't made a substantial, dramatic announcement about an all encompassing new strategy for Yahoo. I suspect that's because she doesn't have one and doesn't really need one. Yahoo still has a tremendous amount of popular services and traffic. Make it less of a laughing stock so you can retain good talent. Do some good acqui-hires so you can obtain new talent and just do good smart clean iterations like this. I think that's half the battle for them. The other half is hitching yourself to a growth engine around mobile or content.

foobarqux2• 13 years ago

> Yahoo still has a tremendous amount of popular services and traffic.

Which of these services are not witnessing substantial decline and will likely remain relevant (never mind dominant) in the next 5 years?

edit: Yahoo Finance is the only candidate I can think of and I don't see it as having a very dominant position.

marknutter• 13 years ago

All those fixed elements on the page make the whole site feel incredibly cramped. Very claustrophobic.

alan_cx• 13 years ago

No idea about any one else, but I got an email from google telling me that iGoogle was going to be shut down. Not happy as that is my home page. So, I for one will be going back and using My Yahoo in its place. Couldn't care less about new staff or redesigns, its just going back to what I know. So, I wonder if this will attract users back, or new users.

mindcrime• 13 years ago

Can you add any arbitrary OpenSocial app to the My Yahoo thing?

davesims• 13 years ago

One way to lose the late-nineties/early-oughts associations with Yahoo: kill the toolbar once and for all. Who uses those things? Is that really a revenue-generator for them? And if so, at what cost to their image as a holdover from a bygone era?

eqreqeq2• 13 years ago

I know this may not be appropriate but wow is she cute [1] and hot [2] at the same time. And on top of that she is brilliant, regardless of how her gig with Yahoo! turns out. Which makes her even more attractive.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Marissa_Mayer.jpg

[2] http://www.glamour.com/images/women-of-the-year/1103-marissa...

smackfu2• 13 years ago

may not be appropriate???

venomsnake• 13 years ago

Calling someone in their 30-s that you are not into intimate relationship with or hitting on them cute is indeed inappropriate.

Also her looks are irrelevant - they won't help her save the company and many of yahoo shareholders will gladly kiss Medusa if she able to increase the share price 3 fold.

I am much more worried that there is not much of her brilliance shown yet. The new yahoo homepage, while improvement doesn't seem to be able to get new demographics or fix the major problems that made me abandon yahoo years ago.

jiggy2011• 13 years ago

It's probably good for PR to have an attractive woman in an important position, especially in a tech company.

The press like publishing pictures of attractive people.

I'd wager more people have heard of Mayer than sergey brin for example.

orangethirty• 13 years ago

Their search looks like Google looked some years ago. Not bad, though. The design is now a bit more clear to navigate. But I still don't know what Yahoo is about. Is it a search engine? Is it a news page? Is it for email? What is it? Too much stuff at the same time is confusing. I have been using Yahoo since 1997 (I think), and I still can't answer that question. Its like AOL.

jeggers5• 13 years ago

The different shades of purple are quite annoying between the logo and the lighter purple used elsewhere.

Also, surely they could've made it more coherent and made the actual search results page have the same design as the new home page?

harshreality• 13 years ago

Dear Yahoo/Mayer,

I like purple too, but how about SSL-always and TOTP 2-factor auth?

shreeshga• 13 years ago

New Yahoo: Google News dipped in Purple.

Tycho• 13 years ago

I would suspect that the homepage wasn't really what they needed to focus on. It's always had a strong standing as one of the 'portals' people visit when they fire up a web browser. I don't know if the stats back that up.

thezilch• 13 years ago

Correction; "a New Yahoo.com [Homepage]"

It's not bad, but if I leave the page for any other Yahoo.com path, I lose the experience; even worse, "top-level" paths can be very different themselves.

ForFreedom• 13 years ago

It looks more like an online ladies store or a Microsoft website.

niix• 13 years ago

Static navbar and infinite scroll all the things!

adrianwaj• 13 years ago

Like dying the hair and eyebrows blonde all over again for acceptance and promotion.

AtTheLast• 13 years ago

I like the direction Yahoo is going with the new design of Yahoo.com page. I can go to Yahoo and in a few seconds get a snapshot of the stocks I follow, the weather, and important news stories.

Mayer seems to understand how a product like Yahoo fits into the life a person and then designs around that.

pnathan• 13 years ago

Yahoo.com Feb 2013 looks pretty sharp compared to how it looked a few months ago. It's muuuch cleaner and doesn't look like a barely maintained derelict. I could pick a few beefs with it, but, whatever.

It looked good on the iPhone and on the desktop.

o0-0o• 13 years ago

Key words from their new site.

Kardashian Starbucks Kissing girls.

There is really nothing beautiful, new, and fresh about any of that turd sandwich.

bill1982• 13 years ago

Terrible new homepage. I switched to MSN after 15 years with Yahoo. buh bye!

Marissa Mayer Rolls Out a New Yahoo.com

Related Stories