What happens now?
There are a lot of changes going on recently in Yahoo! At the beginning of this year (2009), Yahoo! announced that it had hired veteran technology executive Carol Bartz as its new CEO. In July 2009, Yahoo! became partners with Microsoft in search engine business with a high expectation to challenge “Google” who is now a top runner. Today, in August 2009, there are some changes on the Yahoo! website.
What I’ve mentioned before?
In January 2009 I stated in my article that Microsoft would probably do not stop negotiating with Yahoo! in spite of failing to acquire it last year; only waiting for the right moment. Yet, I believed that one day Yahoo! might have to sell their business or became partners with Microsoft. Well, the experts know that a negotiation has never been done at the first round, right? Yes, seven months later (July 2009), Yahoo! finally became partners with Microsoft!!!
In December 2008, I critiqued the Yahoo!’s usability testing process for the new look of their website, compared to Google’s and Facebook’s usability testing processes.
“Compared to Facebook.com, the Facebook team is much smarter than Yahoo!, creating the “New Facebook” as an option first, and then recently they turned it to be a default setting with having the “Old Facebook” as an option instead. Meanwhile, they got good and bad feedbacks from the real users, so they could be able to redesign their stuff effectively.”
I also mentioned that letter “M” in the URL of that testing homepage and the choice of colors used would be a tactic in business which is related to Microsoft.
Let’s talk about the new Yahoo! homepage
Today, I visited Yahoo! website again and saw a new improvement based on exactly the same approach as I suggested in the article about nine months ago!!!
Yahoo! Homepage (Aug 07, 2009)
- Figure 1-
In figure1, looking at the dark-blue bar on top of the page, you will see a yellow button saying “Try it now!” The new Yahoo! homepage is now set as an option with a “close” button on the right, see? Now, it’s in a testing process. In the future, they will switch the options if the feedbacks are good and most users are familiar with the new system. They completely changed the usability testing technique from a poor one which got a lot of complains from users to a new one that I mentioned.
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© PK*[Aug.07, 2009]
pkdatabase.wordpress.com
