I was a dedicated and happy Yahoo mail user for several years, and I still have thousands of email messages dating back to probably 2002 archived in my old Yahoo mail account. When I was using it, I liked Yahoo mail’s features and functionality very well; I really had no complaints. Because I was already “in” Yahoo when I used their mail program, I pretty much always ended up using the Yahoo search engine, and I also found myself visiting Yahoo’s then-popular main page/portal several times daily to catch up with the news, stock market, etc.
But then, Google got its claws into me and hasn’t let go. It started when I got that first “invitation to try Gmail” email from a friend about 3 years ago. Because Gmail was getting a lot of press and buzz at that time, I gave it a try out of curiosity, and was immediately and powerfully sucked into the Google vortex.
Oddly enough, I can’t really tell you specifically what it was that converted me from Yahoo mail to Gmail pretty much as soon as I tried the latter. I just discovered that Gmail WORKED better for what I needed it to do in some intuitive, organic ways that I hadn’t even realized I wanted out of my email system before The Gmail Conversion Experience. I soon found myself using my basic Gmail account as a sort of makeshift, web-based, do-it-all organizational system, and it worked better than anything else I’d tried. You know a digital product is really well designed when it functions so beautifully that you just sort of begin feeling like it’s an extension of your brain, only with better organized synaptic folders. That’s how Gmail worked and still works for me.
After I was thoroughly hooked on Gmail, I began adding a number of the individual web-based tools that Google has rolled out over the past 24 months. I currently rely heavily on Google docs, Google calendar and Gmail chat. I really like Google Latitude, although I have been rather surprised at the slow start that particular G-product seems to have had. People just haven’t gotten as excited about it as I thought they would. But as location-based online and mobile experience becomes more familiar to people over the next year or two, I think Google will be ahead of the curve with their next version of Latitude.
I just added Google tasks to my ever-growing Google lifeware bundle last week, and I am already totally dependent on that. As with all the Google products I’ve used, it’s not that there is any “wow” factor or some whizbang new trick to Google Tasks. But the Googlion developers somehow once again succeeded in making the simple indispensable.
I also have all of the mobile versions of my Google tools and apps loaded on my Blackberry Storm, so they go where I go. I have joked that I am now just waiting for Google to release a chip that I can have implanted into my head to run their stuff – that’s how much Gmail et al have become a part of how I work, live, communicate, organize and play. And trust me, I’ve tried a lot of different on and offline “organizational systems” over the years, from expensive DayRunner books to Outlook to individual pieces of software that I tried to patch together. None of it helped me run my life like this free suite of Google tools I am using now. As a classic ADD girl, I still struggle to stay on top of everything, but my friendly and reliable Google helpers have made a real difference. So to say that I am a Google fan would be an understatement. The company should hire me to appear in TV commercials where I will happily regurgitate the geeky fan testimonial you just read for the benefit of their viewing audience.
But back to Yahoo.
Now that I use Google-everything, 24/7, I rarely find any reason or impetus to visit the Yahoo main page like I did at one time, back when I used Yahoo mail. I can actually go many months without ever visiting Yahoo’s front door or even remembering the portal exists. But Yahoo has just rolled out a new version of their once-dominant portal/homepage, and the company is suggesting that the revamped site could be something of a gamechanger, luring Yahoo’s defectors (like me) back from Googleville, and attracting new fans to boot. Yahoo boss Carol Bartz says that the redesign is the “most significant change in our home page since the company’s inception.”
After reading the hype, of course I had to hop right over and take a look at this hot, new Yahoo front page for myself, marking my first visit there in a really long time. Was it possible that the new, improved Yahoo could break my powerful and all-encompassing Google dependency by offering something radically better looking, easier to use, and loaded with functionality I didn’t even realize I needed?
Well, unfortunately, I’d have to say no. Or even heck no. I was majorly unimpressed, and even kind of baffled when I checked out the new site because the Yahoo folks are undoubtedly among the best and brightest around when it comes to development, design, usability and branding. So for this company to bungle this so badly is hard to figure out. For starters, why did they decide to pour more resources into a “main” portal page at all? This strikes me as a very odd move at a time when users are clearly taking their traffic in the direction of decentralized online elements that can be creatively and easily assembled into an almost completely customized personal portal, which can even work double duty as their primary social networking profile/platform. The idea that people still want to come to some type of universal portal, where Yahoo corporate takes the biggest role in choosing the elements and the content, and that users would then want to use that relatively generic front door as the gateway to all their online activities strikes me as incredibly retro. But Yahoo seems to think the idea still has legs. I just happen to believe they are dead wrong, and I’d be interested to see the research they relied on when they decided to allocate resources and brand capital to this idea.
Additionally, now that we are all accustomed to the elegant, modern and stripped down look of Google’s stuff, and even to Facebook’s fairly minimalist design, pages like Yahoo’s much-hyped new one (which sure looks a lot like their old one to me) are just sort of exhausting and overwhelming in their busy-ness. The colors are too loud and actually, there is too much color altogether. Despite Yahoo’s obvious attempt to better organize and pare down the amount of text that’s there, there are still simply too many words on the page, giving the user the feeling that Yahoo is afraid that if they don’t shove their content in your face right away, you might not stick around to see it. After spending some time poking around this new Yahoo portal, and playing with what’s there, I felt like I’d been trapped in the carnival grounds after dark, with distracting, garish color splashing all around me, and content barking at me from so many directions that I couldn’t actually “hear” any of it that well. As far as usability goes, the sense of being overwhelmed by too much of everything makes it difficult for me to figure out what path(s) the Yahoo folks are trying to get me to take when I land on their page. This is what is markedly different from the Google online experience, which is what has become most familiar to the online audience.
And frankly, as iconic as that cartoonish Yahoo “Y!” has become, the good, old Y! is also now really, really dated. As a consumer, when I see that Y! today, or when I hear that no-longer-impishly-playful-but-instead-downright-annoying Yahoo yodel, my immediate association is with the first Internet boom, you know, the one back at the beginning of this century? In fact, when I visited the “new” Yahoo homepage today, I actually found myself wondering when the Pets.com sock puppet was going to make an appearance somewhere on the site. (Surely you remember the Pets.com sock puppet who so compellingly held our converged online/TV attention for one brief, shining, venture capitalized moment, back when Hillary Clinton was still rockin’ the headbands?)
Really, visuals that are mostly evocative of 2001 just aren’t a productive or up-to-date brand association for Yahoo to be relying on in 2009. I know Yahoo can’t totally ditch their beloved Y!, but I would suggest that the company take every OTHER opportunity to rework and refresh their brand’s look and feel, from colors to fonts to theme music, And they could at least do some kind of snazzy Y! update. Changing the color from purple to red and back to purple doesn’t count. Maybe instead of an exclamation point, the Yahoo Y! could have a question mark or something after it (I kid! I kid!). But seriously, Yahoo, It’s time to leave your glory days of five to ten years ago behind and chart a new path that shows the creativity and functionality that built your reputation in the first place.
My last complaint about the “new” Yahoo page is that it’s far too overtly commercial-looking for users like me who have become accustomed to deluding ourselves that we are not being exposed to mucho commercial content and advertising when we engage with Google products. We are able to hold on to this fantasy of ad-free browsing because Google is so stealthy and smart about making their revenue streams less “in your face” when you look at or use their products . But when I look at that new Yahoo portal, I find myself immediately throwing up a mental defense before engaging with the site because it’s so obvious that I will have advertising and commercial content shoved in my face if I want to get to any of the good stuff that is ostensibly there somewhere.
So there you have it: not exactly a glowing review of Yahoo’s new portal page from me, a former Yahoo devotee. But I do want to note that I still think Yahoo mail is pretty darn good overall, and I want to give a shout-out to my favorite Yahoo product, Flickr, which kicks Google’s Picasa to the curb. I was a very early Flickr fan and adopter, so I now have more than 12,000 family and personal photos stored there. I do love Flickr so (but I really wish they would improve their video functionality).
So have YOU checked out the all-new, whizbang main Yahoo portal that everyone is talking about? What do you think? Could it lure you away from Google, even in part? And what are your thoughts on whether it’s time for Yahoo to completely overhaul its visual branding?
Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.
