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Yahoo! Sports Redesign Sparks Controversy, Disdain From Users
coastal984 writes "Yahoo! launched their latest redesign over the past couple of weeks, revamping their utilitarian Yahoo! Sports section with a new-age, modernized look, which features a much darker, graphical background, and light, larger text. Only problem is, the sports buffs that frequented Yahoo! Sports loved the basic, easy to read and comprehend presentation that the old site used (Which was a predominately plain white background, and smaller, dark text. Thousands of users took to Yahoo's uservoice page to express their discontent, begging for the old design back."
Terrible.
I figured the submission was overblown and whiny hate due to change.
But holy cow that site is HORRID. I hope some management gets fired.
Looking at it I can only think of this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juFZh92MUOY
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
>> Disdain From Users
Yes, both of them objected. (I don't really blame Yahoo for taking another shot at a service no one's used for the last ten years.)
Who the fuck uses Yahoo!?
First impression made by the color scheme was "rotten guacamole". What's worse is that the section landing page had a decidedly Web1.0 feel to it -- I was actually looking around the page for Geocities banner ads, blink tags and little monkeys to punch.
Shit layout, shit color scheme, completely unreadable, overly busy. Yahoo needs to lay off their entire design staff. They have obviously been cubicle squatting since the 90s and likely never been outside Yahoo HQ or to any other website other than Yahoo since then.
And W - T - F is up with their logo? It's like they are trying to cross brand a Fraternity with a Womens Lifestyle mag.
Jesus fucking christ! Who the hell thought that layout and design could in any way be considered good web design? Were they on acid or smoked a few joints that morning?
I didn't use that particular section but if I saw that concept on any other page on any other site I would never go back.
This is a perfect example of Rule #2: Never let a web designer design your web pages.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
If only the W3 had created some mechanism whereby different people could have a different layout. Oh well.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The background image behind the text makes the text more difficult to read. Doesn't anyone at Yahoo have any usability design experience? It looks like Yahoo is going back to the days of the flaming logos. Gaudy design for the sake of gaudiness.
It's not THAT bad...
But I guess I don't care anyway, this isn't the type of story I come to /. for.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Unless it's for a hackers/nerds website, stick with dark text on a light background.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
They've really taken the circa-2004 Myspace page design aesthetic to heart on this one.
I used to do computer repair work in an area where AT&T was partnered with Yahoo for email services and content delivery. The biggest complaint was that Yahoo wouldn't stop redesigning everything. I recall one older guy who needed zoomed text and low resolutions just to see his email. Took some work to get it so that everything fit *and* he could see it. The very next day, the guy calls and complains that we broke it. Yep, Yahoo changed their email design for the third time that year (It was June or so). This is the first time I recall an outcry of this volume, but I've heard it all before, one disgruntled user at a time.
The ironic part of this is that these same disgruntled people won't switch to another service because they don't like change. Go figure.
Nobodies Prefect
Tidbits for Techs Technology Blog
For all we know, something like this happened, the CEO or someone from management got involved and they got the results we all just saw.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
who have been subjected to some reallllly bad UI by Yahoo in the last few months.
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
Everybody wants to be Bing. Why, I have no idea. Of course Bing didn't invent background images, but it seems like Google got scared by Bing (once again, why?) and started laying more eye candy on things. Then of course there's the infinite scrolling fad, which I call "tantalus scrolling" after the figure from mythology who was condemned to drink from a cup where the water level always lowered just below his lips. So. Yet another crappy Yahoo design doesn't surprise me. A lot of us defected from Flickr over this.
Anyway, long story short is that the web design community has collectively hit the crack pipe, and users have to live in the ghetto they create.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
No matter how the media says the product has lost favor, the millions using it -- who did NOT ask for a facelift to make it less computer-friendly and look more like a tablet -- beg to differ.
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
.... just because it can. And because they have to justify their existence. People who design physical products are aware that changing costs money and takes time; web designers have neither problem. The good part of that, of course, is that you can get information out there dynamically; the bad part is that people don't distinguish between changing the CONTAINER and changing the CONTENTS. The container shouldn't change, because people are used to using it.
This is one of the worst design decisions I've seen in a long time. The whole key to a sports page is you've got to quickly digest a wide range of information. The old page design worked perfectly at giving you over 100 scores for up to 4 different sports at the same time, all the headlines, and the highlights of the blogs. This kind of busy, goofy blinding crap is what have killed AOL's and MSN's portals (in my opinion). Either one of them could have grabbed tens of millions of users from Google News, but they just aren't capable of delivering content without trying to overwhelm the user's eyeballs.
News at ten.
At Flickr, there were over 50,000 complaints in the help forum, people all hate the new design there.
It eats up bandwidth and RAM like crazy (over 10 times as much as the old version).
Yahoo/Flickr ignored all the complaints!
If you want an example of bad web design, try a Flickr search, it keeps loading more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more pictures all to ONE results page... it won't quit until your browser explodes!
http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=beach
Try to get to the bottom of that page. Ha ha!
Note: the old search had reasonably sized thumbnails that you could sort, each page took about 2 seconds to load.
Every page on Flickr is screwed up that way. And yet Yahoo/Flickr continue to ignore the complaints (and suggestions on how to make the site useable).
The very well written biography of Marissa Mayer that recently appeared in Business Insider was very illuminating about the current ongoings at Yahoo. Marissa appears to be a very data driven person, always looking for "proof" of display/design feature ideas and concepts, even for whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide.
http://www.businessinsider.com/marissa-mayer-biography-2013-8
Additionally, she had made a last minute change to the color scheme of the recently revamped Yahoo Mail which necessitated significant man hours at the 11th hour to implement and was detrimental to team morale and cohesion that had been painstakingly developed since her arrival.
I'm sure moving forward there will be more challenges like this that Yahoo will face. It will be interesting to assess whether they are due to the vestiges of incompetency at Yahoo as she believes, or due to her failings as a leader, because let's face it, according to the profile, this type of a UI design change would have had her hands all over it and would've needed final sign-off by her.
UI Design changes are by their very inherent nature controversial, people like things the way they're used to them. Marissa's approach was already problematic at Google, it had problems scaling as the company grew in size, but at least there were people there to manage and mitigate her. There's no-one at Yahoo like that. She is a very authoritative leader.
Disclaimer: I don't know her personally nor have I ever met her or met anyone who has met her. My impressions are all based on profiles of her like the one linked above (which I am not affiliated with but simply found interesting)
-"Those who fought today will die tommorow."-
I'd never visited sports.yahoo.com before. From that perspective, I like the new format better. YMMV of course, but it makes me wonder how much of the outcry is about somebody's cheese being moved, and how much of it is about actual loss of usability and functionality.
This happens every time a popular website (or application) is updated with a redesigned UI. The fact that thousands of users are complaining tells you nothing about whether the average user finds the site easier to use. The fact that people are posting here on Slashdot to say that they personally dislike it also tells you nothing. Fundamentally, people hate having change imposed on them, particularly if they don't know or agree with the reasons for it. And frankly even if Yahoo's existing users overwhelmingly hated the new design, it could still be the right decision for the company - they need to attract new users from other services, not satisfy their existing dwindling base.
Idle developers are the devil's playthings. If you've got programmers on staff, they're never going to say 'Hey, that's pretty good, we're done.' Their continued desire to draw a paycheck requires them to constantly fuck with stuff that works until it doesn't, so then they can get paid to fix it.
Has anyone else noticed that damn near EVERY UI project out there is getting a terrible redesign? MS, Google, yahoo all are in the process of fucking up common interfaces for the sake of....well, I really don't know, but they seem to have a goal.
Hell, the last /. redesign kind of fucked things up too, now that I think about it. A lot of common pages were buried several links deeper than they used to be. I can't tell if that was done to increase ad impressions or if the designers are just morons.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Yahoo Finance, which was very popular in the financial community, has also been "redesigned". Yahoo Finance was popular because you put in a ticker symbol and you got a chart and all the key performance numbers on one screen. Yahoo was the first to have stock charts where you could easily change the time period displayed, and investors liked that.
Now, there are four rows of Yahoo menu bars at the top of a stock symbol page. There's a big Flash ad at the top. There's a "trade now" button. ("Please provide feedback on the new Trade Now function.") There's another ad. There are links on the left. That's all you get "above the fold", before scrollling.
Below the "fold", there are some links to "reports" Then there are those annoying "Ad topics that might interest you" links. (Not Outbrain, Yahoo does this in house.) There's a table of the top holdings in the fund. Continued scrolling finally gets to the numbers that matter: YTD return, 5-year return, beta, etc.
Yahoo has completely missed the point of why investors go to a page like that.
Ive noticed ever since tablets have come out more and more pages going to a dark backround, I wonder if the dev is taking tab bat life into consideration when redesigning these pages. Anytime ive come across a phone/tablet friendly redesign (nascar.com is the worst) it tends to make it horrible on a PC. Page optimization for a pc vs a touch screen is not the same, as we saw with windows 8 and metro, I dont know why web devs think it can be work for their site.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Years ago they revamped yahoo games, shifted to Flash based board games, destroyed all my games history in Backgammon, Dominoes, Gin, and Poker, and I never really went back.
You know that effect when you accidentally look into a light source and you see a hazy form that obscures your vision for a bit? I get that when I look at white text on black backgrounds. After reading it, I see lines of blur in my eyes. That can't be good.
God spoke to me
What is frightening about the sports page redesign is that yahoo most likely will eventually carry that awful theme across all the yahoo sites.
I'm not sure why, but most recent UI redesigns have just been crap (Ubuntu, Gnome3, Yahoo, Deviant Art, etc). What is it with the UI guys that they just have to go with a bunch of unnecessary bling, that hides the actual content and daily use features?
So long as the contrasts are handled properly (no funky backgrounds that obscure lighter text in some places). Lighter backgrounds stress out my eyes.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Yahoo follows in the footsteps of Microsoft and denies the popular request of users.
Because it's actually related to programming, unlike a large percentage of recent Slashdot posts?
IMHO, white text on black is nearly always an amateurish design, bereft of creativity and solid design technique. I avoid reading such sites because I find them tiresome on the eyes. Just give me plain ol' black type on a white/light coloured background. That provides the most contrast is thus easiest to read, for me at least.
The pursuit of absolute tolerance leads to the most rigorous and ludicrous intolerance. - REX MURPHY
At Flickr, they *did* do beta testing before May 2013 with randomly selected people who were dumped into the "new style" without any say in the matter. Flickr called this a "bucket test" for some reason. About 99% of the testers complained and said the new design was awful. All of the complaints were ignored! Flickr went right ahead with the new horrid design.
The discussion groups for the "bucket tests" have been hidden. I'm sorry I don't have proof of all that. But it did happen, and the employees were very rude through the whole thing.
In a typical corporate redesign, the new site or application is made to look pleasing and artistic to the executive decision makers, who rarely use the site. It makes no difference if additional mouse clicks are required to accomplish the same thing. It makes no difference if keyboard shortcuts are no longer available. It makes no difference if the transfer of information is less efficient and less complete. The important thing is for the new site to look good to upper-level executive decision makers in a 10 minute demonstration.
This makes me terribly sad.
There is no doubt in my mind that my father will be unable to cope with this change and be completely frustrated trying to run his fantasy football team this year. This of course means "support" calls to me, who has no interest in sports, fantasy or otherwise.
"Wait, wait," you exclaim, "the fantasy football section hasn't changed. Well, much, at least." Maybe, but my father has trouble with concepts like drag-and-drop, and is one of the stereotypical older users with whom you can expect to have this type of conversation: "Q: Which web browser are you using?" "A: Google. Or maybe Yahoo? You know, the usual one.", "Q: Sorry, which program do you use to go to Google, or Yahoo?" "A: The Internet". Coping with user interface changes is definitely not among his aptitudes, and this redesign is going to make for a long year of confusion and grumbling.
*sigh*
Cyrano de Maniac
The redesign isn't the worst I've seen, but damn it scrolls slow. There seems to be about a one second delay between me hitting my scroll wheel and the page actually responding. I didn't have this issue on the old player pages.
The scrolling wouldn't even be that huge of an issue, but they have forced all the relevant information (stats) down below all of the pointless crap (I don't really care where Buster Posey was born). So now the first thing I have to do on their player pages is... scroll down to the bottom, which now takes forever.
What type of education does it take to develop and design websites; highschool? GED?
Yahoo has tried at least three times over the past six weeks to roll out their new design. Each time, user comments are not just overwhelmingly negative, but all negative. Users beg yahoo to put back the previous version, which they have done each time after about a day. Until now, this rollout seems to have been some what experimental in that it did not show up on all servers.
This is really the height of web designer ambivalence to user wants/needs/desires. You have a very popular (probably your most after finance) subsite and you change its appearance and your users scream bloody murder. So what do you do? You keep sending them the same changes every other week hoping this time the result will be different. Instead of trying to justify what was clearly a poor decision, step back and admit you were wrong and give the users what they want.
I remember a while ago when I was doing something very much away from my computer and wanted to check some sports scores. I thought how odd it was that my go to thought was Yahoo Sports. And how were it not for that Yahoo would really not be in my life at all save for the odd time a Yahoo Answer would come up via a Google search.
So as football season has rolled around I actually had been going there often to check on things both NFL and CFB related. I noticed the new logo and thought ugh, who thought that was a good idea. Little did I know that was just the tip of the iceberg.
See this thread and thing hrm, did something change more than the logo and I didn't notice it? Then go there and wow yeah, I would have noticed that. No, just no.
Good job Yahoo in your effort to drive away the vestiges of your users. I have no clue what I'm going to use now but there no way I'm using that.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
In what sense is that "new-age"?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Seriously, sports section? How is this "stuff that matters"...
:wq
Nuff said.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
I deleted my Yahoo account because of the static search bar and buttons that stays on every page and takes away from your viewable area of important things. Everyone on My Yahoo is complaining about the same bar as it really affects small screen devices and laptops. I completely gave up on Yahoo.
I'm pretty sure "sucking" is Yahoo's new business model. They seem to be generating more traffic by sucking than anything else they try. I think humanity as a whole needs someone to look down upon with disdain, and Yahoo seems to be willing to step up to the plate here! Sure, you can scoff now but 5 years from now everyone will be talking about how much they hate them, yet everyone will be visiting their web site in record numbers (Kind of like Facebook and Zynga games, now.) I don't think there's any other explanation for their behavior. Even "gross incompetence" doesn't fit -- even a blind squirrel gets a nut from time to time, and they've got no nuts over there!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Since I refuse to use facebook for anything, I guess I can no longer make a simple comment.
Big bummer. I have been commenting of ESPN for some 10 years and formed a lot of relationships with various posters.
It is a shame to have this taken away for I'm not sure what reason.
Seems like tons of sites are now forcing people to use facebook to make any commentary.
I can't see if someone posted on something I wrote on Yahoo! on my main page anymore.
Now I have to wait for 1/2 a day for something to pop up in my email telling me I have replies or thumbs ups to something I posted. There is a way to get to the old scheme through Yahoo Alerts!, but that is buried and you have to re-sign in constantly which take considerable time. So Yahoo has rendered the commentary relatively useless for the vast majority of folks.
Before you would be able to see people commenting on your post in a live interactive way.
Now it is no longer practical. Makes me wonder if they just want to phase out commenting in general.
I seem to remember that. When the thing first rolled out, there was backlash on the forums. Of course with the even newer betterer design, I can't even figure out WTF happened to the discussion forums. Oh wait, there it is. Jesus what a catastrophe!