Monday, June 15, 2009

Yahoo! considers another homepage redesign

(source: deliverability.com

Yahoo! can be referred as a internet content provider that allows its users to browse for almost everything ranging from webs, news, images to blogs. Yahoo! was founded in 1994 by Jerry Yang and David Filo but was only incorporated in March 1995 (Wikipedia, 2009). Apart from that, Yahoo! also invented Yahoo! Mail where users can sign up email addresses using it and Yahoo! Messenger where users can chat with one another using its online chatting system. Labrou and Finin said Yahoo! provide a huge hierarchy of categories that touch every aspects of human endeavors.


(source: Wikipedia)

"Yahoo! is testing to redesign its homepage, emphasizing news feeds and applications as well as search results." (ZDNetAsia)


Methods in designing a homepage

Redesining a homepage acquires various kinds of methods. Jakob Nielsen (1993) introduced the heuristic evaluation method that allows a good guideline in designing a home page. It is also the least expensive method and conveniently useful.


Home Page = Document Design

In the case of Yahoo!, a home page equals to a document design. Nevertheless, redesigning a good home page means a good document design is needed. Reep (2006) implies that document design refers to the physical appearance of a document. Yahoo! needs to acquire both printed words and good visual presentation on its home page in resulting to a great home page design. As illustrated by Reep (2006), readers do not only read printed words on the text, they also "read" the visual presentation of the text. Hence, Yahoo! can design a webpage allows the good flow of virtual presentation and texts.


Genre

Genre can be defined as ways in which we make sense of types of texts, as culturally defined and expected combination of field, tenor and mode (Schirato & Yell, 1996). The genre that can be implemented in Yahoo! is Public (Wikipedia, 2009). This implies that Yahoo! provides a great usage to anyone as it does not contain materials that are not allowed in the online community.


Home Page Design Principles

Apart from that, a good home page design comes with principles. Thus, according to Reep (2006), the most essential way into creating a home page is to have balance, proportion, sequence and consistency.

A good balance in a page should have the comparable visual weight on both sides of a page while a good proportion to a page design should have the appropriate size and placement of text, graphic aids and format elements on the page (Reep, 2006). Apart from that, a good sequence in a home page refers to the arrangement of the design features. Readers read from top left corner to right bottom corner. Lastly, consistency means presenting the features consistently such as fonts, typeface, margins and identation.

The latest design of Yahoo! homepage
Printscreen (source: Yahoo!)


My Personal Opinion

The latest home page redesign that Yahoo! did was just 3 months ago, which is March (ZDNetAsia, 2009). I am already very much satisfied with its current home page, and if it keeps redesigning it, it can lead to confusion in utilizing it because most people would spend more time in getting used to new home page. In other words, it is time consuming.

(source: www.feld.com)


References:

  • Reep, D 2006, 'Document Design', Technical Writing, Chapter 6, pp.133-172
  • Schirato, T, Yell, S 1996, 'Framing contexts', Communication and Cultural Literacy: an introduction, Chapter 5, pp.90-117
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