Yahoo Makes a Smart Move Toward Users
To know what people think, you have to ignore their words and see what they do. There's been lots of speculation about Yahoo's strategy and how the company would get itself unstuck. Its most recently announced changes -- changing the home page design and opening it to outside content -- tells a world about what the company is planning. Instead of trying to directly fix its online advertising sales, Yahoo is doing what any content-related company must do, which is focus on the audience.
The most recent news comes from Kara Swisher (via VentureBeat), who saw the new Yahoo home page redesign. Or, more specifically, versions of the home page that the company is now testing:
The redesign is a huge and complex endeavor. According to comScore's July stats, Yahoo has about 82 million daily U.S. visitors to its homepages. Most of those visitors use the Yahoo main homepage, which is fully programmed by the company. Making such a shift will also be a big perceptual deal for Yahoo, which needs to prove it has remained current and open, especially compared to faster-growing rivals like Facebook.The homepage will be shorter (far less cluttered, if the three examples she shows are any indication) and have links to both other email providers such as Google and AOL as well as applications, whether Yahoo-provided or third party.
The redesign clearly ties in with Yahoo's efforts to open its doors to developers and let them create products based on Yahoo technologies and services.
During the hack-a-thon, we'll give developers a sneak preview of the first Y!OS components. Back in April, we announced the Yahoo! Open Strategy (Y!OS), a set of tools and platforms that will fundamentally change how Yahoo! works, opening Yahoo! up to developers to take advantage of the social aspects of our most popular products. With Y!OS, developers can create applications and features (many we've never even thought of) for our network and our consumers.The Y!OS sneak preview will include the ability for developers to check out what their new applications look like in Yahoo! Mail and My Yahoo! and take advantage of social connections on Yahoo!. These components will be available only for the weekend â€" giving developers a taste of what they will soon be able to build and share with the world. Stay tuned for their public debut in the coming months.Certainly Google has been making its services available to developers for a while, but I think Yahoo has some potential advantages. One is that it has a superior grasp of how to manage and present information. Google's page is clean, but it also assumes that the major thing you want to do is search. Interesting in news? Head to another page. Interested in blogs? Another page. It's the Spartan look of an engineer who equates function with design and usability.
But Yahoo gets that today a landing spot for the general public needs to do more than provide a menu of different buckets. What makes information powerful is not its existence, but the chance to integrate it into something bigger, like knowledge or understanding. The connections between items is as important as the items themselves, if not more so. IDC analyst Caroline Dangson has a good summary that landed in my inbox as part of an opinions piece (sorry, no link that I can find for non-subscribers):
The ever growing long tail of content on the Web today makes it all the more difficult and time-consuming for consumers to navigate and efficiently use the Web. Many consumers have multiple personal accounts -- email, IM, social networking, ecommerce, etc. There is a need to aggregate these online accounts for quick and easy online management. Yahoo! Open Doors will eventually allow for this. With an open platform, users will be able to add their non-Yahoo accounts to their personal Yahoo! account dashboard that will preview activity on each of these accounts all on the home page. This will allow users to quickly asses which accounts have updates requiring their attention and be able to prioritize the management of these updates in today's time-starved world. Of course, the user has to have an active Yahoo! account and be signed into the home page in order to benefit from this service.According to Dangson, AOL and Microsoft Windows Live have already been rolling out their redesigns, though Yahoo's may have a more fundamental breadth. Interestingly, Google has apparently been working on user tests of a "more personalized iGoogle page," only without mention of plans to bring new design to the home page.
There is something appealing about that clean Google look, with nothing assaulting the eye, but there has to be some middle ground that keeps the user in mind. If Yahoo finds it, then the company might end up having the last laugh after all.