One of the internet's oldest destinations is new again. Yahoo launched a new homepage on 20 February, with a design intended to deliver a consistent experience across the desktop, tablets, and phones that gives users a bottomless, personalised well of news and information. Oh, and it has a way to deliver targeted ads across devices as well.
Since arriving at Yahoo as CEO, Marissa Mayer has shown an intense focus on product; on making everything simply work better.
The homepage redesign follows big design and function changes to Yahoo Mail, and a new Flickr app. Yet it presented different challenges.
Yahoo's front page is one of the most visited sites on the web, but its numbers have been in decline and a refresh has been long overdue. Yet given its popularity, and the tendency of people to use it as a gateway to the wider internet, any changes needed to be evolutionary rather than revolutionary to prevent its existing user base from bailing in an apoplectic fit. It's a tricky balance.
Yahoo needs to set its homepage up for the future, but anything it does is bound to piss people off and it needs to minimise that as much as it can. "First and foremost it's a fresh foundation for a new Yahoo experience," says Yahoo design director Jackie Goldberg. "Overall the design is streamlined for everyday use and focused on what matters most to our users -- which is the content."
So the new page keeps some of the old elements and retains much of the look and feel of the previous site -- like the graphic-heavy feature module where editors place top stories, and the core navigation sidebar that's a conduit to other Yahoo properties. But it brings in more social cues, and aims to be consistently fresher and deeper.
This is most notable in the new newsfeed, which automatically and continuously refreshes as you scroll through it so that you're always getting more and more content as you dive down into it -- it's similar to the action on a Facebook or Twitter feed. In addition to the main feed, you can build sections for sports or politics or automobiles, for example, so that you have multiple streams on the same page. Each story has built in sharing functions to share links via Twitter, Facebook or email.
The new Yahoo homepage also uses your preferences to build those feeds. The more stories you click on or share about golf, for example, the more golf stories you're likely to see. Similarly, if you share a story about a certain topic, you're more likely to see more stories on the same subject. The new page has Facebook integration, and uses cues from that network to select the stories you'll see. If you (or several of your friends) like Barack Obama on Facebook, expect Obama news in your feed. All this happens on mobile as well as on the desktop. Look at the page on your phone, and you can swipe across a story to share it or banish it from your feed.
For a company that developed a reputation for moribund products, the re-engineered newsfeed is one of the smarter news delivery systems in recent memory. Increasingly people are turning to sources like Twitter and Facebook for news, and relying on apps like Flipboard or Pulse to deliver it. The newsfeed takes that same principle and distils it down to the story level, for an information dense stream of interesting stuff. All of this seems to point towards a new strategy, one that brings Yahoo's products into the modern era with personalised, real-time content designed for mobile that leans heavily on social.
Likewise, that cross-device consistency and signal-based personalisation is key for a very important reason other than usability: It helps Yahoo serve ads. The new newsfeed will be home to graphical, video and text ads, all tuned to your interests and actions. "The personalisation and recommendation system will have very similar targeting capabilities with advertising," Mike Kerns, VP of Product, told Wired.com. It's a smart way to deliver targeted ads, especially on mobile.
Goldberg was quick to point out that these ads will be easy to spot. "We will have clear attribution to make sure users don't confuse it with a recommended piece of content." Goldberg was also eager to note that this was a step towards where Yahoo is going, not the destination. "It's the beginning of a vocabulary," she said.
The new front page launched on 20 February and will continue to roll out for the next 24 to 48 hours.
This story originally appeared on Wired.com
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
