“As a result, it’s easy to assume that all Yahoo’s attention is being paid to the home page while none of it is being paid to their other services.”

That’s a pretty safe assumption. Mail, homepage, search, those are pretty much the only properties getting any attention inside yahoo these days. everything else is sorta maintenance mode from what i hear from friends on the inside. there maybe one or two really big properties like finance and sports that are still getting updated, but they’re so large/successful, the organization is afraid to modernize them.

I wonder where the balance is between expert review and user research? I agree with you regarding the hover treatment, but I have not conducted user research to know if users prefer this hover treatment to the time it takes to click, page load the new page, and then decide against going down that rabbit hole and returning to the home page. I look forward to hearing some of our Yahoo! colleagues discuss what user research influenced the design.

With regard to the disjointed nature of Yahoo! properties, I feel empathy for them. I work for a large organization and curate our internal design framework, so I strive to enforce consistency (look, feel, and behaviors) throughout the product offerings. Nonetheless, resources (time, people, money) dictate that we cannot overhaul every aspect of our product offerings when we roll a new release. We iterate and focus on targeted “real estate.” IMHO, if Yahoo! only released “total makeovers” rather than “point releases” of targeted properties, they’d never innovate and would be dreadfully behind its competitors.

In other news, since Carol Bartz is CEO of Yahoo!, known for her ability to “get houses in order,” I am optimistic that she can streamline the organization, reduce redundancy, and increase interoffice communication and collaboration in order to ensure a more consistent experience in Yahoo! product offerings.

That disjointed design pervades many large organizations like Yahoo. With so many disparate and large services that are silos internally, coming up with any sort of consistency is a political battle before it is a design issue.

I don’t envy designers in this situation (I’ve been there before), and it takes a special sort of talent to make changes across departments.

Ultimately, consistency across an organization has to come from the top. The upper management are the only ones who can improve the structure and goals of the company to support a consistent design. I hate to bring up the always-used example of Apple, but they have a rabid upper management (Jobs) who is focused on achieving this.

@Rob – you’re exactly right…if Yahoo has evidence that people prefer the hovers to some alternative they should definitely stick to them. This is just my opinion.

All I can tell you is that they bug the hell out of me…

I had to open Safari to see these, they wouldn’t show up in Firefox for me.

Certainly a bit annoying. They are slow loading, and the biggest peeve for me is that it’s not consistent. Some of the nav items don’t have the menu, so I hover over them and wait…and wait…and nothing. The expectation has been set for a menu, so I feel like something broke when I don’t get one.

I’m going to “try” to look at the bright side of the fly-outs idea. First good thing, it is much faster to find what you look for, to direct users to everywhere in a couple of secons. For instance, for mail you need one GET request, in mail.yahoo.com we need to load the entire app, plus the inbox, plus the message. I can see Inbox (0) link with a :hover action.

I’ll leave it there, because I still think the fly-outs are generally screwing the new awesome design.

I got to said, that for a major overhaul of such a legend of the web 1.0 is quite a nice work. I really like the aesthetics and the creative direction and how they are making even more prominent the search area. Still there some major issues like the obstrusive flyouts.

Is Yahoo’s home page “the most visited page on the Web”? According to who and by what measure?

As to the fly-outs, I predict they’ll keep them. They are a fantastic way for the designers to get the media droids off their backs (“Look! We’ve given you acres of inventory! Think of the impressions!”). Meanwhile, people will simply click them and get the intended experience of the target site.

Very clever!

I like the new layout because it’s less cluttered, but you’re right – they fly-outs are far too big and the fact that there’s a massive advert plonked in the middle of it doesn’t help.

They could work, but in their current guise they don’t.

It’s because of the size of the ads that make that huge fly-out annoying. Perhaps they could reduce it.

I agree this is pretty bad. I tend not to like flyouts unless they are part of a mega-menu or something like that.

These flyouts seem to be a bastardised version of mega-menu concept and they don’t provide much use on the first sight at all.

Having said all this, I have always had an issue with Yahoo home page and still think it is crammed and difficult to digest.

I also agree with your point of inconsistency across various Yahoo provisions. They are really bad on that front and it is especially wrong considering Yahoo are massive proponents of web standards, patterns and so on.

Google do much better than Yahoo on UI aspects, although Google make masses of bad decisions too.

I seldom visit the Yahoo site at all, but I saw a close friend of mine view his new and improved homepage for the first time.

He spent about 10 minutes looking for the link to reset it back the way he had it. The words he was saying aren’t something I’d want to publish here.

I like the fact that they are trying to improve their page, but I am not really a fan of it. I think that there’s too many stuff to see on the page. It’s “cluttered” in an uncluttered way, if there’s such a thing. But that’s just me.

I agree with the huge flyouts. I don’t think they’re necessary.

Though in fairness, I think they ARE going the right direction, but I wouldn’t mind not having all that stuff on the homepage.

Personally think it looks cluttered and overly complex. It’s better than their previous pages by some margin, but still leaves the user somewhat overwhelmed.

wow, all of the negative comments… as someone who has had yahoo as his homepage for probably 10 years I find this a very welcome feature. Just hovering over the items I am interested in and seeing a quick snapshot (like what I am watching on ebay, or the quick quotes on finance) is so much better than having to click, go to the site, login, etc.

on the negative, the size of the hover frame could be a little smaller, why the need for the ads on the right? And the rapid display of the hover frame is annoying. I would rather seem them have some sort of timer on each link so if you rest on it, it will open, if you just float over it, it won’t.

Overall I think this is just what people have been waiting for…