I think, and I stress that this is wrought of my own unprofessional feelings, but I think that in the early days of rich consumer UI (pre-2004 lets say), that rounded corners, gradients and shadows did some great things to design, because they created affordances so that people knew, for instance, that a button was a button. It stood out against the other website clutter and cruft.
But we've sort of moved on. I'm reminded of a Doisneau quote (famous photographer, 1912-1994):
> "Nowadays people's visual imagination is so much more sophisticated, so much more developed, particularly in young people, that now you can make an image which just slightly suggests something, they can make of it what they will."
Nowaday's peoples visual expectations of what they might find on a website or app are much better, and you don't need to "point out" as much stuff. In other words I think users "got better". At the same time, we seem to see a real slimming of other visual distractions, so buttons don't need to be pointed-out as much.
This is the essence of Flat-UI in my opinion, that if you remove enough cruft, then afterwards you can remove even more cruft since your buttons and menus will no longer need to stand out from other stuff with gradients/shadows/rounded corners, and users are more attending to looking for them and expecting them anyway.
And I think, in light of all that, Yahoo sort of dropped the ball here. They didn't remove the cruft! Distractions distractions distractions.
I appreciate the minimalism of flat UI, but I do feel the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction.
Microsoft is the worst culprit here - presenting a text block containing some hyperlinks, but the text is all styled identically so you have to hover the mouse over a word to notice the link. WTF?
Sure, let's keep things clean and minimal, but there needs to be some kind of basic visual language that indicates "this bit is interactive, and this other bit is static content".
I think your comment is apt, and I really appreciate the Doisneau quote. What he describes seems to hold true for design always: the "new" is digested in to the collective consciousness and thereby becomes normal, requiring a new "new".
As a brand Yahoo! has always been far from the edge of visual innovation. I once worked on a pitch for Yahoo! long ago, and it seems to me that the angle is still the same: predictable and dated. I'd say there's no reason to ask for more. If anything, they're probably giving their users what they want.
Talk for yourself buddy. I hate most UIs being pushed nowadays, including ones from Google (G+ is a usability trainwreck) and Apple (iOS7... enough said).
I agree. For years I've turned to yahoo first for sports because they had a simple UI, easily accessible box scores, and good bloggers (at least for basketball). And everything came without forcing too many ads down my throat.
I think it's an interesting choice to go dark. Regardless of what prior debates were had on this thread with respect to the "flat design" choice / minimalism there are two things that stand out.
1) It's original. At least, it seems original relative to its competitors. They are borrowing the well-accepted design language of their Weather app (which was critically acclaimed in relevant circles, I believe - like won some kind of award), and assimilated it across their web properties.
Contrary to what other's have said, I don't find the text hard to read. Instead, due to the novelty and aesthetic of the design, I am drawn to stay. It's a nice refresh.
2) It's cohesive. This design language has been consistently ported across its properties without making it constricting. Yahoo Sports is functionally distinct from Yahoo Movies, but blended together by the same aesthetic.
This began with Yahoo silently porting its top bar across its properties (with the search feature ubiquitous across all constituent sites). This final piece was missing and is just another step closer to bringing Yahoo together.
So no, I don't think the designs are cluttered, or that they hide/confuse information, or that Yahoo is copying the fad. I think they are paving their path, boldly, and it should yield some interesting results.
I hate to be the guy that just critizes, but I can't find anything that I like about the redesigns. Take Yahoo Sports for example: the dark background makes it hard to read anything, it's crazy cluttered and even after filtering for NFL I get this stream of useless news. I'm guessing that they did some research and discovered that their core audience likes cluttered designs and the whole image-first, clean design paradigm is not a good idea for content sites.
Also, why doesn't the blog announcement link to the actual sites???
I give them credit for trying darker background, but the new designs are quite unsightly. I also find the fixed background image that doesn't scroll with the page incredibly distracting.
It's actually causing me great physical discomfort to use these new sites.
What Yahoo is doing is maintaining and working hard at a consistent design language, while maintaining individuality amongst their sites. It's a smart move, even if it's not pretty enough for designers or developers to praise it heavily.
Unrelated, but to the tune of the new interest in Yahoo that Marissa Mayer sparked: As a working adult, say, with no time for more entertainment, why would I visit a Yahoo site?
Yahoo's entire strategy revolves around the idea that peoples' tastes and habits change over time, but that content is perennial and not even close to the point of saturation.
I'm not saying there aren't people for whom this strategy doesn't apply -- some call them the "Oh, I don't own a television" crowd -- but it's certainly not just a generational thing.
Interesting. They made it more full of links and images. I was expecting it to feel light (sparse). The dark background makes the whole page look muddled and uninviting.
Perhaps the "best pizza ad format" works with web, we may have to leave out our assumptions because only tech savvy individuals speak of white space, spacing, kerning, and all that other stuff. Frankly many people do not even know the difference between IE and the Internet and a browser?
Edit: If you built a browser aimed at the masses you should just title it "The Newest Internet" or "Get a Faster and More Secured Internet," rather than "Faster and More Secured Browser."
I hope to god Yahoo consciously decided to eschew the current trends of flat, minimal, content first design that is perpetuating through the industry. Windows Phone, iOS 7, and plenty of other leading UI designs are shedding the bloat and focusing on content first. If they didn't do it on purpose, it means they are still the old Yahoo. If they did, maybe they know something about their target demographic that I don't...
I for one thought they did "content-first" right. Looking at the new sports.yahoo.com, a lot of information can be obtained without scrolling down the screen, and much of the visual clutter is localised by with background blurring.
I'll take this over the "huge text" startup-style any day.
They almost make it, but fail on spectacularly on color and backgrounds. The sports.yahoo.com would do much better with a clean background, I find the striped outfield to completely negate the rest of the improvements.
Quite a contrast between Google promoting History and Science to hundreds of millions of people via charming artistic doodles and this cornucopia of horrible purple typography glitter devoid of all meaning and character.
I actually don't mind the Weather page. Looks pretty, though I'd never use it since I almost never need to go weather sites.
The bigger issue to me is none of these sites are particularly responsive. They all have a huge background but small areas for content and huge waste of space on larger monitors. To be honest, I think should've had a bolder re-design with a greater emphasis on editorialization instead of a standardized layout across sections.
I'm just clicking around on them, and somehow I've got the sports site in a state where the scroll wheel scrolls the background images but not the content. Then, after the page finally loads, the left, middle, and right panels all sort-of scroll together, but stop scrolling at different times. That's really messed up. The alignment between them shouldn't change.
Y'know, it's not the site design that turns me off of Yahoo.com.
It's the placement of entertainment and sports as the top items on the page.
I don't particularly care what your site presentation is (OK, I lied, I do: it should be simple, out of my face, and distraction-free), but if you show contempt and insult me with your content, I'm gone and never coming back.
The order of items changes as you make more (or less) frequent use of each section. This has happened for a while, now on Yahoo.com. I don't think it's too presumptuous to think an infrequent user may want entertainment and sports near the top.
I'm really not liking the new feel. The dark background images make reading the content way too hard -- and I can only assume their goal is to replace the background with large ads for site takeovers once in a while.
It's less insulting than the other pages, but I'm getting massively misalligned elements. Yes, I force font sizes to something legible, so your hipster fucking 22 y.o. pixel-perfect layouts aren't going to work.
I think, and I stress that this is wrought of my own unprofessional feelings, but I think that in the early days of rich consumer UI (pre-2004 lets say), that rounded corners, gradients and shadows did some great things to design, because they created affordances so that people knew, for instance, that a button was a button. It stood out against the other website clutter and cruft.
But we've sort of moved on. I'm reminded of a Doisneau quote (famous photographer, 1912-1994):
> "Nowadays people's visual imagination is so much more sophisticated, so much more developed, particularly in young people, that now you can make an image which just slightly suggests something, they can make of it what they will."
Nowaday's peoples visual expectations of what they might find on a website or app are much better, and you don't need to "point out" as much stuff. In other words I think users "got better". At the same time, we seem to see a real slimming of other visual distractions, so buttons don't need to be pointed-out as much.
This is the essence of Flat-UI in my opinion, that if you remove enough cruft, then afterwards you can remove even more cruft since your buttons and menus will no longer need to stand out from other stuff with gradients/shadows/rounded corners, and users are more attending to looking for them and expecting them anyway.
And I think, in light of all that, Yahoo sort of dropped the ball here. They didn't remove the cruft! Distractions distractions distractions.