Social Media

After a few years (four) of the same look and feel of Yahoo’s home page, we see some pretty dramatic changes, but not everyone is loving it.

The new look of the Yahoo homepage does feel a bit cleaner and seems like it will match up with the style of Windows 8 quite well. The new homepage offers up a sleek tile design that you can easily customize to fit your needs. Another noticeable perk of the new design is how the site looks on a retina display or any other very precise display, it’s much clearer. As with pretty much everything these days, Yahoo is also getting a bit more serious with social networking and invites you to log in with your Facebook account for further customization and social linking.

The user response to the new look of the site is mixed so far. I can’t get through the comment section of almost any post without someone posting a complaint about the new look. Users are saying things are too big or not displaying very well on their screens while others just don’t see why they had to “fix something that wasn’t broken”.

I am taking a more optimistic approach and I actually think that while it may not be perfect it’s a move in the right direction. Infinite scroll on the newsfeed  and the a better connection to social media are a few of those “right” steps. However, there’s just something about the new look that feels a bit out of place; maybe it’s just because it’s new and so much different than the last. I think Yahoo may have to update this look, maybe relatively soon, in order to add a better feeling of solid design while preserving what makes Yahoo appealing in the first place, perhaps more of a hybrid of old and new. How do you feel about the new look?