Yahoo's Burke Culligan
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)This story has been corrected. See below for details.
SUNNYVALE, Calif.--After getting an earful from disgruntled testers of its revamped home page, Yahoo is working on a new incarnation that will dramatically speed up access to e-mail.
The new home page, code-named Metro and due to launch later this year, will let users customize what they see and install a range of applications. But upon beginning "bucket testing" last September, in which different subsets of Yahoo users are involuntarily presented with variations of the new home page, Yahoo found out it was making it too difficult for people to continue with their accustomed practice of dropping by the page to scan for changes, said Burke Culligan, senior director product management for Yahoo front doors, in an interview at Yahoo headquarters here.
In particular, people were incensed that it took too many mouse clicks to glance at their e-mail inbox. But changes are coming to fix that, Culligan said.
"We have moderately addressed it in this round and we're going to radically address it in upcoming testing," Culligan said. "We've rethought the flow and design based on feedback we've gotten from users. I think users will...feel much better about it."
The change is part of a bigger discovery, that many Yahoo front page users want to keep abreast of events with updates a few times a day. "The biggest thing we've learned is that these are quick-hit check-ins--tell me what I want to know and let me see it quickly," Culligan said. "We developed a philosophy we call quick in, quick out."
Yahoo faces an enormous challenge with its Yahoo.com site, which despite the company's strategic troubles still is used by hundreds of millions of people monthly. Changing too fast or too deeply risks alienating users, but changing too slowly risks losing those members to challengers such as Facebook or iGoogle.
My Yahoo for power users
Another complication: Yahoo already has a customizable home page, My Yahoo. The company has a plan for keeping the two properties relevant, though: as Yahoo.com becomes more flexible, the Internet company will reposition My Yahoo for sophisticated users who demand even more customization such as themes and movable modules, Culligan said.
"We'll move the mass market to the Yahoo front page," he said. My Yahoo will be "the powerful high-end product for the users who really want to go to the nth degree."
For the main home page, Yahoo has opted to proceed cautiously to avoid shedding loyal users.
Yahoo is testing a new home page. The new site is more personalized and customizable. This version is a 'baseline' for user testing; Yahoo will add more features later. (Click to enlarge.)
(Credit: Yahoo)"You want to bring them along with you. You have to find the right things that are familiar but innovative. We walk that line," Culligan said. "We want to make sure we don't miss on something major that's going to cause retention issues."
So far, Yahoo hasn't seen overall problems retaining that loyalty among those in testing, he said. And the company has seen improvements in both page views and time spent on the site.
"Overall the story is positive and heading in the right direction. With our refinements we hope to push it further," he said.
Easier reconfiguration
That doesn't mean the company isn't learning from its missteps, though. Another change: Yahoo has made configuring the applications easier. A cautious start required people to fill out forms for the customizable list of services on the left edge of Metro. Now, though, Yahoo has moved to more of a design in which changes can be made on the fly.
Culligan is particularly proud of a new horoscope application that lets people add a different sign of the Zodiac to their pages. The only drawback of the faster approach: settings are stored locally on the computer, so logging in elsewhere won't show the same horoscope. A similar change was made with the weather report module.
"When we originally launched, we were thinking users would want to sign in and store locations as part of a Yahoo profile. But a lot of people wanted to just add cities without signing in," he said.
One internal advantage for Yahoo is that Metro's customizable interface will be simpler to manage internationally. Today, "We have 30-plus front pages. This puts us all on the same platform but allows for local customization," Culligan said.
Correction 9:53 a.m. PST to correct the spelling of Burke Culligan's name.
Yahoo is testing a new home page. The new site is more personalized and customizable. This version is a 'baseline' for user testing; Yahoo will add more features later. (Click to enlarge.)
(Credit: Yahoo)Yahoo has begun offering some users a more personalized home page that the company hopes will increase the usage and utility of a Web site that's widely used but elderly in Internet years.
The new home page features a dashboard on the left edge that reports activity with a variety of applications. For example, it can be set so users see e-mail from Yahoo Mail, AOL, and Gmail, and other applications notify users of comment on photos posted at Flickr, events on the calendar, and bids active on eBay.
The new page will be revamped later with more dramatic changes, such as the ability to house user-selected Web applications, but the company is starting with a relatively modest redesign to get baseline testing data for later comparisons.
The new page is being tested with a small subset of users in the United States, United Kingdom, India, and France. About 314 million people used the site in July, according to ComScore's estimates.
Yahoo already offers a customized home page, My Yahoo. It won't be phased out, the company said, but the regular Yahoo home page will look more like it.
"These two starting points are definitely converging," the company said in a statement. "To help people make sense of what's happening in their world, we're redefining the concept of a 'start page' away from either a broadcast view (Yahoo.com) or a personal view only (My Yahoo), and creating a homepage that blends the best of both approaches to deliver relevance for a mass market."
Clicking the mail tab on the dashboard reveals a miniature inbox. (Click to enlarge.)
(Credit: Yahoo)Although the Yahoo home page remains a major force on the Internet, much new activity has shifted to social networks, search engines, and other sites. Yahoo's ultimate hope is that Yahoo.com will become a more active part of people's online lives, not users will use Yahoo.com not just to check the latest headlines but also to check up on others in their social orbits.
People can't sign up for the test page, because Yahoo wants a random selection of users, the company said. The timing for broad release of the final version depends on how the tests go.
One major upcoming phase will be hand-picking the online applications at the site. "People will be able to customize the applications area in the coming months during future rounds of our ongoing testing process," Yahoo said. With its Yahoo Open Strategy, the company is trying to attract programmers to build applications on Yahoo properties, offering the promise of a large audience.
On Monday, Yahoo will begin the weeklong roll out of the new My Yahoo to users in all markets. The start page service is graduating from the much-coveted beta status, and integrating improvements made over the last several months like new and third-party content modules, a streamlined header, and advertising that's not as in-your-face as previous iterations. (See full list of updates below.)
The move paves the way for Yahoo's open-platform strategy, which was announced in late April. It lets developers create widgets that work on other Yahoo properties and OpenSocial in the hopes of expanding how and where content can be used.
All My Yahoo users should have the new version of by July 14.
From the release:
Custom-designed modules with more of great content from select publishers (such as New York Times, People, Wall Street Journal, etc.) New and improved Yahoo! modules, including Top Picks from Your Page, Flickr, Note to Self, To Do List, Movie Showtimes, Scoreboard, Stock Portfolios, TV Listings, Calendar, Yahoo! Buzz, etc. New modules that provide access to third-party services (i.e., Netflix, Gmail, POP mail, Facebook) New header with easier customization tools for adding content and choosing options, as well as tabbed browsing for multiple pages More control, with additional page layout options, a less intrusive advertising approach, and easy drag-and-drop functionality
Got late word from Yahoo today about the company's new update of My Yahoo, due to roll out at 9:00 PM PDT tonight. As it turns out, I already have access to the features. So this report is based on hands-on access to the new service. We also covered an earlier version of the new My Yahoo back in March.
My Yahoo now has a slick pop-down window for adding new page elements.
(Credit: CNET Networks)There are a few new modules available to My Yahoo users, like improved calendar and bookmarks widgets. The biggest update, though, is a new method to update your personal page, called "inline personalization." Now you don't have to hop to a new page to select a module and add it. Instead, a little window drops down over your page and any changes you make are immediately reflected on your page, still visible underneath. It sure beats going to a separate page, as Google's personal page, iGoogle (news) makes you do whenever you want to add content.
Yahoo's new implementation of home page personalization is quite good. The menu that opens up over your home page is clear and easy to use. But inline personalization is not unique. Both Netvibes and Pageflakes (roundup) let you add content to your personal page without jumping away from where you are. Furthermore, Netvibes and Pageflakes also let you add RSS feeds by entering in just the URL of the site. Yahoo has a good directory of popular blogs that can be added with just a few clicks, but adding feeds not in the list requires that you find the complex URL of the RSS feed itself and paste that in.
I would still recommend the new My Yahoo, especially to nongeeks. It's simple but capable, it's slicker than Google's personal page, and it does most of the stuff that the upstart home page services offer. Personally, though, I am sticking with Netvibes. There's no killer feature in My Yahoo that makes me want to switch back to it (I used it for years until I got hooked on Netvibes), and it's too tedious to add RSS feeds to Yahoo.
Update, 5/17/07: You may have trouble getting to the new features today. Apparently the debut isn't going super-smoothly, and it's not happening all at once. My contact at Yahoo dropped me this note last night after I posted the above evaluation: "The rollout of new features did begin tonight but it will be gradual and complete tomorrow."
My Yahoo's new interface
(Credit: Yahoo)Yahoo unveiled a new look and feel for its My Yahoo personalized start pages today, bringing the service up to speed with an increasingly customizable, Ajax-driven Web. It's about time: competitors like Google Desktop and Pageflakes have also been rolling out new updates recently. The new My Yahoo is not readily available; rather, it's in a limited beta that only a handful of random Yahoo members can opt into thus far. The full version will be rolled out over the next few months.
We haven't tried it out yet, but Yahoo representatives stressed that this is "truly a beta." In other words, there are going to be some bugs. If you're one of the Yahoo users who's been given access to the new beta, let us know how it is.
So what new features can you expect from the latest iteration of My Yahoo?
- A slick new interface, designed to better match the main Yahoo start page (which got its own redesign last year).
- Rollover pop-up previews of news stories and other content so that you can take a look before you click to another page.
- Suggested content offerings depending on what other Yahoo services you use. If you play a lot of Yahoo Games, your My Yahoo start page will automatically include a selection of game modules. You can change that, of course.
- Easier sharing features that allow you to share a selected piece of content (like a news story), an individual content module, or your entire My Yahoo page via e-mail. Click on the "share" tool, and a dialog box will pop up that allows you to send it to a friend. Your friend does not need to be a Yahoo member for this.
- A focus beyond news that emphasizes rich media like Flash games, videos, up-to-the-moment weather and finance data, etc.
- Ease of use, featuring drag-and-drop customization and plenty of drop-down menus for tweaking the page to your needs. You're Time magazine's person of the year--clearly you deserve the simplest yet most advanced customization features for your My Yahoo page.
UPDATE: Sign up for the beta while you still can here.
Yesterday I had a chance to sit down with Pageflakes' new CEO, Dan Cohen. Pageflakes makes a "single page aggregator" service. It's a good site to use as your home page. You can add RSS feeds, widgets, and all sorts of content to the page, and you can set up multiple tabs on your site for different categories of content. [See previous Webware coverage.]
Pageflakes' special power is its community focus. You can easily share your page layouts with other people and even let them modify your pages. Cohen sees Pageflakes as a good service for groups or clubs: people can collect resources from the around the Web to make them available to all their members. Not a bad idea.
Can a small site like Pageflakes compete against Yahoo's configurable home page, My Yahoo (or Google, AOL, or Microsoft)? Cohen admitted that the number of users on his service is quite low. He also said his other upstart competitors (NetVibes, YourMinis, etc) aren't doing much better. But he said his work experience at Google and Yahoo has given him insight into what works and doesn't. And, he believes Pageflakes benefits from being a smaller company. Due to his company's focus and nimbleness, he said, he can build a better mousetrap, and do it faster. One thing he'll never be able to fight is Yahoo's marketing reach, though.
If you want more than what the big sites' start pages offer, Pageflakes is worth checking out. I use its competitor, NetVibes, and I really like it, but they function similarly. Both have a lot of fancy modules you can put on your pages, but I just use them to read my RSS feeds. There is one key difference: Pageflakes loads more quickly.
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