The Yahoo! Identity

Yahoo has been trying to find its identity for a long time. If you ask what Yahoo does best in the industry, you probably wouldn't get many answers. A few responses would be Flickr, Finance, and Fantasy Sports.

So let's look at Yahoo's front page:

Any well designed web site prominently displays the what people use the site for. Yahoo's site is chaotic with an ridiculously sized advertisement right at the top. So what does Yahoo do? News?

Let's look at Google:

Oh, Google does search. The other products are contained separately. The navigation through Google products is intuitive for the most part (Google Hangouts being an exception)

Let's move on with Yahoo's site:

You would think hovering over the row of four mini stories would change the larger image due to how the imagine as laid out. But that isn't the behavior anymore. I say "anymore" because that expected behavior was there previously. 

Once you go lower on the site, you realize that Yahoo is now a news aggregator.

The news aggregator has the the source and a preview of the headline, which is expected. You have the comments/like/report/share icons for the articles; the action behavior is a disaster (e.g. clicking the comment icon displays the comments but clicking it again does not hide the comments). Then you have "native" advertisement and click-bait mixed into the news.

Unlike other news aggregators, Yahoo attempts to open the article embedded in the Yahoo site. It is truly an attempt. Just look at the following examples:

This one doesn't display the article properly.

I click into the headline and I get a "Read more" button. Just open it in a new page.

Just for curiosity, I clicked on an advertisement...

There is no doubt how Yahoo is generating business using advertisements. I have no doubt what Yahoo tried to do with the advertisement page above...

Yahoo has been pushing its original content the past few years. And where is the original content on the front page? No where to be seen. Yahoo has influential contributors like Katie Couric and David Pogue but yet, they are not on the front page among the news aggregator.

Yahoo needs to define their identity and then design their products to align.