Well, after many years of loyally using My Yahoo! as my home page for all sorts of information, long after I left Yahoo! Mail for GMail, Yahoo has finally managed to drive me out of my My Yahoo! (...now "My Sharona" is stuck in my head) thanks to their new redesign. I'm not a huge fan of the redesign in general - a lot of information that used to be nicely compact is now spread out, which means more scrolling for me. But I could have lived with that, at least out of laziness if nothing else.
The most egregious and unforgivable change to their design, however, can be seen in this screen shot of My Yahoo! as it now appears. You may notice the somewhat glaring blank space that takes up several square inches in the upper right quadrant. Yup, Yahoo! decided that whenever I view my page, I need to view an immovable advertisement taking up some of the most valuable real estate on the entire page! At least in my case it is thankfully just blank, due to the most excellent FlashBlocker Firefox add-on, but it effectively destroyed the main reason I stuck with Yahoo! - that at a glance I could see sports scores, a little news, and my fabulous wealth in the form of my stock portfolios. The advertisement used to be a thin band across the top - annoying, but much easier to ignore (which is, I'm sure, why they changed it).
(To make matters worse, you'll notice that the nifty mouseover summaries of the news stories sometimes appear under the nonexistent ad, rendering one of the coolest MY! features totally useless.)
I played with the layout a bit to try to put some useless information in line with the ad section so I could scroll down, but after about two minutes of this, I realized it was a huge waste of my time. Yahoo! had drawn a line in the sand, saying their right to advertise to me (or show me a nice white box, in my case) was more important to them than my getting the information I wanted from My Yahoo!
So so long, Yahoo! Hello, Google home page.
The main reason I'd stuck with My Yahoo! for so long was I liked the way they handled sports scores and news (somehow not surprising that sports aren't at the forefront of the folks at Google designing this thing), and frankly for a long time Google Finance was kind of teh suck for displaying portfolios. But Google Finance is coming along nicely, and my discovery of the CBS Sportsline Gadget actually makes looking at the scores more pleasant. So after 5 minutes of rearranging and playing, I'm now much happier with Google than I had been for years with My Yahoo!
So - thanks, Yahoo! for showing me the door. I had been a loyal user for a long time, but I appreciate your taking the time to do a redesign that chased me to one of your competitors. No, no! Don't be modest! That takes real work, to make someone as lazy as me change his habits!
This whole little mess is nicely indicative of why Yahoo! continues to have their ass handed to them by that little upstart Google company. Yahoo! seems to place their eggs in the basket of "our users will stick with us even if we poke them in the eye periodically". I don't begrudge Yahoo! the right to make money, but somehow doing it in a way that chases their loyal users into Google's arms seems like a bad idea.
If you're going to do a redesign in the future, Yahoo!, I suggest you consider two things: first, does the redesign give some obvious added value to your users? And second, does the redesign give you some obvious advantage over Google's competing tool, whatever it is (or at least not make Google's tool more attractive)? Unless you can answer both questions with a resounding "You betcha!", DON'T DO IT.
It actually makes me sad - to be honest, part of my loyalty to My Yahoo! was simply rooting for the underdog here. Yahoo! continues to get so roundly smacked around by Google, I felt that if I could use one of their tools, I might as well, just to encourage competition. But it's only fun rooting for the underdog if they are likable. If they run up and slap you in the face and then scurry off giggling at what an idiot you are to be rooting for them...well, maybe the favorite is the favorite for a reason.
Here's hoping they know well enough to just leave Flickr alone.
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