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Yahoo! Sports Redesign Sparks Controversy, Disdain From Users

Posted by timothy on from the so-people-like-plain-and-readable-formats? dept.

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."

12 of 172 comments (clear)

  1. One word by kodiaktau · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Terrible.

    1. Re:One word by kramer2718 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Honestly, it isn't as bad as the Flickr redesign. That one was both uglier and far less functional.

      --
      http://yetanotherpoliticalrant.blogspot.com
  2. Re:Both users complained? by mcmonkey · · Score: 3

    >> 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.

  3. Re:Five Words by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    For sports news, many many people. It's honestly the one part of yahoo that is good.

    Note: They don't just mash up news, they actually have a sport writing staff.

  4. Everybody wants to be Bing by istartedi · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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"?
  5. Re:M.E.H. by oodaloop · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.
  6. such as Flickr by themushroom · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
  7. I use Yahoo sports pages a lot by Andy+Prough · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:I use Yahoo sports pages a lot by NeutronCowboy · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Agreed. I normally don't care too much about redesigns, and I haven't used the Yahoo frontpage (sports or otherwise) in about 3 years. So I really don't even remember what it used to look like. But.... holy crap this is terrible. For some reason, it took about a minute to load (crappy laptop indexing and backing up a large pst file is partially to blame). Then, when it finally loaded, I have partially transparent content with a background image of a baseball field making me feel like I'm looking at a giant captcha page. With the various lines of grass shadings of the field running off into wildly different directions (thank you gnat-high perspective), text becomes really, really hard to read. There is a giant ad at the top (adblocker is off) that is overpowering the entire site, I can't tell if the main image staring at me is for another ad or a story, as I can't tell what sport it is for, what the story is about, or even who the people in the picture are.

      I don't care about the new logo (it's a logo - whoop-de-do. at least it isn't the new Motorola logo), I don't really care about the menu layouts.... but I can't read the damn site. Why in the hell did they decide to go for a layout that actively prevents me from reading the news? Did no one actually try to use that layout?

      A friend of mine had a brilliant comment on Marissa Meyer: she can't fail. If she merely prevents Yahoo from being obliterated in the next five years, she'll be hailed a genius. If Yahoo crashes in the next five years, well, everyone saw that coming, and now she has a big CEO position on her resume that she can spit shine into something valuable. Either way, she wins, and Yahoo is completely irrelevant. With the changes that have been happening, I can't see Yahoo becoming anything but an AOL clone: technically still alive, but only because people have a hard time giving up their yahoo email addresses and Instant messenger networks.

      --
      Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
  8. Very similar to their Flickr remodel. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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).

  9. They broke Yahoo Finance, too by Animats · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  10. Re:Five Words by res_comicus · · Score: 4, Informative

    Note: They don't just mash up news, they actually have a sport writing staff.

    ...that is better than many other major organizations, at that. Their Jeff Passan has been out in front of a good many breaking stories in the last several years, and their other guys are pretty solid, too. Best of all, they mostly don't go out of their way to start a "controversy or fluff story du jour" like other orgs do. (I'm looking at you, ESPN.)