Yahoo redesigns 7 of its sites

Eek.

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 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.

Just noticed the new logo a few hours ago.

I have hated almost every yahoo redesign.

This one I liked. It's kind of cute.

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?

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.

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...

Don't forget they are also creating daily logos

http://www.yahoo.com/dailylogo

Yahoo's tumblr blog also makes the basic mistake of not linking back to the main website.

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.

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.

The transparency and non-scrolling BG image reminds me of myspace pages.

Looks like AOL.

Yahoo's logo was iconic, this is gimmicky.

Ugh everything but Yahoo Finance.