Web Design Elementals: 
  Case Study IV
web design:


design basics


case study details





other resources

links
class rolldocuments

credits



Yahoo!

Pic of Yahoo!'s main page.Yahoo! (live site) is one of the best known search engine websites, and it has been around for a very long time. Perhaps this one reason why its webpages are so cluttered? At the time of this case study, the site had just been redesigned for an improved look and for better navigation, so this will be an interesting case study.

One question to ask, right off the bat, is, is the Yahoo! site really cluttered like I stated earlier? I say yes, because although I understand what Yahoo! is trying to do with its website (present lots of divergent information), I still say that its site design is poor, for the most part.

One thing to remember about people who use the Internet is that, as they become more experienced with surfing the web, they spend less time reading everything they see and more time skimming. One reason they do this is because monitors are hard to read from. Another is that webpages are typically so overstuffed with useless information that the users have learned that it is not worth their time to actually read every sentence. Just by looking at the thumbnail images of Yahoo!'s main page, located to the right, one can see the sea of blue links that have no seperation or order. What user wants to hunt through this mess to find a relevant link?

Pic of Yahoo!'s old main page.It is said that a camel is a horse that was redesigned to please all people. The same can be said about Yahoo!'s new website. It does make improvements over the old site in certain areas, but most of the webpages are still consumed by meaningless strings of links that, while an entire population may use to varying degrees, an individual will never use.

The Yahoo! site has a standard link set that sits at the top of its main page. This set consists of a shopping link, an email link, and a personalization link, among others. These nice links disappear on every other page in the Yahoo! site however, and are no where to be found on the interior pages.

In this instance, Yahoo! uses poor navigation because a user cannot easily get to main areas of the yahoo! website from one particular section. If the user is in finance, and wants to check their email, they have to get back to the main page in order to get to the email page. Further, on these interior, divided pages, the only link back to the main page is a text link located among other links at the top of the interior webpages.

The large graphic link located in the top-left corners of these webpages is a link that initially links to the webpage the user is currently on. This is completely usless to begin with, plus the initial page in these sub-sections of the site are the ones where a user is most likely to want to go back to the previous page, and thus should be links to the main page. Overall, link consistency on this site is even worse than on the previous case study site's.

Pic of Yahoo!'s  search results page.Ignoring the other functions the Yahoo! site offers, lets look at the search engine part of the site. How well does Yahoo! present search results for users? From the main page, the search book is easily found and easy to use, which is a good thing. Now let us look at the results page.

Specifically, when a search results page is presented, Yahoo!'s site presents a list of further categories that a user may want to look at. This is a good thing so far as search engines go because it can help a user to better define their search. Next, a clearly demarked list of sponsor links is listed. Yahoo! gets points for clearly defining these as sponsor links as well, because they inform the user that these links are not necessarily best matches.

After these sponsor links, the actual search results appear. of course, by the time a user gets past the category and sponsor stuff, they have had to scroll the webpage down, as the browser window is already full with other content. Concerning search engines, Google has a much better design for displaying similar results, which we will discuss in the next case study.

Here are some quotes by random people asked to look over the site.

So, is there a better way to offer a search engine and give users lots of information? Sure, as we will see in our next case study.