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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.
Who the fuck uses Yahoo!?
Although I have largely abandoned Yahoo for mail and most news, Yahoo sports (mostly driven by fantasy sports) is one of the only things still driving me to use Yahoo (I also use finance, though the commentary is horrid). Seems like they would be better served by allowing signed in users to theme the site as they like.
>> 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.)
Yahoo sports, particularly the fantasy sports, are pretty well trafficked. There's no competition from Google.
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."
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"?
Well at least now you know how to bring back Yahoo! Sports once you close the tab. Now THAT's some good reporting!
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
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.
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.
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."-
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.
Yahoo is the 'free-est' of the 3 main choices. The basic league is free. They have only really one optional pre-draft add-on (premium draft kits) and one optional post-draft add-on (Yahoo customer service will review your trades for a fee). ESPN also offers free and paid leagues, with a few more paid features. Then there is CBS who basically doesn't offer anything the other two don't, even though they charge close to $200, but the design is much more professional, they have real customer service, and the mobile app is better.
Really, I'm not a huge fan of the redesign but there sure are a lot of cry babies out there considering this is basically free all year long. I suppose that's why their userbase is so large. Yahoo is updating all of their properties, and the FF site hadn't changed since around 2003 with the addition of the drag and drop rosters IIRC. It's not great, but not terrible.... certainly a good start as long as they keep improving it.
They've added many new features over the last two years and really invested in making it the best FF site. Things like draft grades, "Compare my team", Weekly recaps of your players formatted into a personalized email, league pick 'em, easier import of keepers and previous managers (so I as a commish don't have to find and select them). I can see it's a work in progress, but they do keep moving forward.
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.
Dunno. Google News underwent a similar asinine redesign before Mayer left, geared towards making the site readable on a smartphone or small tablet screen while removing roughly half of the information.
The difference is that a signed-in Google user can turn the News redesign off and revert to the previous text-heavy format. It's actually a good incentive to sign in. It doesn't appear that Yahoo has the same insight.
In what sense is that "new-age"?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.