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Yahoo! Has a New User Interface
Jul. 17th, 2006 05:07 pmAnd it blows, although it blows a lot less than it did.
If you check out the "new" yahoo.com, you are greeted with a white and cool grey page with boxes all about the same size. There is no visual focus on the page. At first glance, I didn't even see the search widget. Only after a moment, did I realise that it was part of the top banner. Yahoo!, when your entire site is the same colour, the only things that pop are the ads that I don't actually see because I have ad blockers. My eyes don't know where to go.
The nice thing about the new layout is all their services are on the left side. I no longer have to dig through the odd hierarchy that was thrust upon me in the prior version. No more hunting for services. It's all right there.
On the other hand, there is a new widget on the right hand side. I call it the "über widget", as it seems like it wants to do it all. At first glance, it's closed, and shows 6 buttons: mail, messenger, radio, weather, local, and horoscopes. when you *mouse over* those buttons, the widget grows and gives you a preview. If you mouse over Mail, it shows the most recent 5 unread message headers. However, as Mail is on the top row, and when moused over, the bottom row of buttons drops down, and the display is actually in the middle. Mouse over a button on the bottom row, and that row pops up, then drops down a content area and display the preview. How. Very. Microsoft. (For those that don't get the reference, MS has often done the "multi-row tab UI" in preferences windows. Depending on the tab you click, the entire row drops to the bottom of the stack, totally preventing you from remembering where anything is. It's often proclaimed by experts as one of the larger UI mistakes, in the same regard as Apple's Quicktime Player 4 "jog dial" volume control.)
They also have tabs set up for news items. This idea has been around for ages. But what's this? Now the tabs select themselves, and rotate every (n) seconds. Oh, were you in the middle of reading that? Not anymore! And people wonder why everyone has ADHD.
If you check out the "new" yahoo.com, you are greeted with a white and cool grey page with boxes all about the same size. There is no visual focus on the page. At first glance, I didn't even see the search widget. Only after a moment, did I realise that it was part of the top banner. Yahoo!, when your entire site is the same colour, the only things that pop are the ads that I don't actually see because I have ad blockers. My eyes don't know where to go.
The nice thing about the new layout is all their services are on the left side. I no longer have to dig through the odd hierarchy that was thrust upon me in the prior version. No more hunting for services. It's all right there.
On the other hand, there is a new widget on the right hand side. I call it the "über widget", as it seems like it wants to do it all. At first glance, it's closed, and shows 6 buttons: mail, messenger, radio, weather, local, and horoscopes. when you *mouse over* those buttons, the widget grows and gives you a preview. If you mouse over Mail, it shows the most recent 5 unread message headers. However, as Mail is on the top row, and when moused over, the bottom row of buttons drops down, and the display is actually in the middle. Mouse over a button on the bottom row, and that row pops up, then drops down a content area and display the preview. How. Very. Microsoft. (For those that don't get the reference, MS has often done the "multi-row tab UI" in preferences windows. Depending on the tab you click, the entire row drops to the bottom of the stack, totally preventing you from remembering where anything is. It's often proclaimed by experts as one of the larger UI mistakes, in the same regard as Apple's Quicktime Player 4 "jog dial" volume control.)
They also have tabs set up for news items. This idea has been around for ages. But what's this? Now the tabs select themselves, and rotate every (n) seconds. Oh, were you in the middle of reading that? Not anymore! And people wonder why everyone has ADHD.
