Yahoo Invaded my New Tab Page so I Wrote Down my Feels

Picture this, I’m on Google’s Chrome browser and I’m doused in Google products as far as Calendar, Gmail (standard norm nowadays), Drive and other applications we’ve slowly but surely become accustomed to. I use Google daily for searches, so usually the CMD+T , a ‘G’ and Enter gets me to Google’s homepage. Not anymore. Now when I type in the keys above I get ‘Yahoo’s homepage’ — all of a sudden, out of the blue, no warnings. Wait a minute, of course this doesn’t sit right. It’s a Google product I’m using so … of course I’d be getting a Google search homepage set default on my new tab hotkey. That’s logical, natural and most of all expected*.

Instead I’m served up an overstocked Yahoo homepage that seems to be wanting to cater to my every need — at ONCE. In truth, this is how Yahoo’s homepage used to look all the time, 12 calls to action competing for attention. Reality check — we’re currently living through the prevalence of mobile and even mobile type UI migrating over to desktop for seamless, minimal experiences that do as little as possible to unnecessarily obstruct the human eye.

Now I’ve heard it through the trenches that Yahoo’s been suffering, that the once successful tech giant is now struggling to stay afloat and not die an inevitable and terribly public death. I delved into the backend of my memory and remembered that for pretty much the last 8 years I’ve been hearing less and less about Yahoo. Part of me wanted to blame Facebook and their ever-growing expansion that started ever since their launch in 2004 but you can’t really blame your failure on others’ success.

Now back in the early to late 00’s Yahoo pretty much ruled the Internet during my secondary school and college years. Ever since I could remember buying my first PC in 2001, the first email address I had my neighbour set up for me was on Yahoo. Sure there was Gmail (albeit a bit later, in 2004) and even Hotmail (are they still alive?) out there as well but you’d maybe feel a little uneasy having or seeing an email address that was presumably ‘hot’ — or maybe that was just me? I just always thought it would be someone’s weird uncle that would have a Hotmail account.

In terms of design, the Yahoo Messenger app was the most intuitive, interactive chat product on the market at the time — it could even stand head to head with Facebook’s Messenger and come incredibly close. Compared to other chat products at the time, Yahoo had the friendliest version of the bunch and the one that was used the most.

On the other side of the ring we had MSN Messenger. Weirdly, I can still remember that awful, greenish UI even before searching Google for an example image. It was so bad it stuck with me.

Surely there were a lot of people using MSN too and they’d maybe laugh at the thought of me using ‘Yahoo’ (especially in the late ’00s) but my bunch didn’t care; the features Yahoo boasted were by far superior.

Besides its design being waay sleeker than MSN’s, Yahoo had Audibles! AUDIBLES! Meaning you could express yourself in the coolest, quirkiest way possible. These well-animated little pieces of artwork packed in so much punch that we always were finding ways to fit them into the conversation.

Categories ranged from love-related ones, taunting for when you’d play games and even seasonal audibles they would bring in depending on what holiday was closer. Their presence is missed by a few Youtubers too — playlists are freely available for us nostalgics. Even the games were great and executed to a high degree; I remember Pool being one of my favourites because you’d be able to get a clear shot provided you had a ruler nearby.

To be fair, I miss Yahoo’s Messenger to an incredible degree and since I’ve started to write this article I’ve been thinking about logging in and see who’s left from anyone I knew ten years ago.

*downloads Y! Messenger for Mac*

Aand they killed it… whatever I used to know, use and talk about just now with love and screenshots is gone. There is nothing that resembles the old Messenger even one bit! They’ve pulled the plug and didn’t even try to resuscitate. I went to the App Store to download it on mobile and see if I still have the same list of contacts because I don’t remember having just 51.. I mean — what? For some weird reason the search is taking waay too long. It’s suspicious. I’ve rebooted my handset. Let’s see. Exactly the same. The search is still loading which means that Yahoo may have already pulled their products off the market; they did sell three days ago.

But unfortunately they sold too late at a not so impressive $4.8 billion to media conglomerate Verizon. I say not so impressive because I know tumblr and flickr are part of the deal too and I don’t want Verison to ruin tumblr. Please, for me. With a $125 billion market cap in 2000 and co-founder Jerry Yang turning down a $44.8 buyout from Microsoft in 2008, it’s clear to see how ridiculously insignificant the sum actually is. One has to admire Marissa Mayer tenacity though, she held on to Yahoo for the 4 years she did, hoping to turn it around for all those involved. But she just wasn’t the right person for the job.

She was a star studded Product Manager from Google that worked on search, their core product, so hope fuelled stakeholders’ belief that she’d be able to build and secure the same success for Yahoo. And Yahoo search is good, one might even say satisfactory. It resembles Google in the sense of it follows convention. It even has a refine search menu pane on the left because that’s now a default feature for this service — it’s expected. But a serious evaluation for product potential was in order. A new hierarchy had to be established. Search wasn’t Yahoo’s main product but they wanted it to be, because of Mayer’s experience.

When I think Yahoo I don’t think search.. I think communication, games, news, entertainment, mail even but never ‘Search’. Features, news and games that make me go ‘Yahoo!’ — there was your angle. Buzzfeed style news pieces, a cool cartoon-human Messenger with killer feats and native Yahoo games stemming from the great collection they had before. Instead, they killed it all.

It’s 2016 and semantics rules the web, now more than ever. People have gotten so used to good products that they now demand only* good products to spend their time on. Time is money, and also ‘life’ so it matters to us what we spend on time on. Ok, that may be a little too dramatic but the feeling’s definitely there for a once tech giant (too soon?) You’d expect someone who’s been around for so long to have their ear more closely to the ground. Conduct tests, see what products people have trouble letting go, see heat maps and figure out why certain pieces of content work and others don’t. The users that have migrated over to Facebook, Google and the rest haven’t forgotten about Yahoo — they just needed the right reminder. And unfortunately that’s what we didn’t get.

It’s simple, too much choice isn’t good at first glance — it’s tiring. Too many choices cancel each other out and leaves the user confused and bewildered as everything battles for attention. There is no hierarchical order, everything just seems to be neatly arranged into their respective groupings and categories. Now if it were 2007 that would have been fine but Yahoo’s been around since 1995 and it just seems a little too safe a game they’ve played. A quick dabble in the Way Back Machine and we can see their evolution’s always been a (very) steady one. They never really experimented with a bolder, more daring layout to their page and that just says how much they’ve got at stake. ‘Had’, ‘had’ at stake.

The time definitely came and pass for Mayer to look at UX. Heck it’s been the* internet buzzword for a few years now. Did she actually look into revamping the UI cause it just looks like a big mess.

My beloved Y! Messenger now looks like this:

a stripped down, incredibly sterile page with no clear clue as what to do first. First of all I don’t know whether I’m AM or Andrea because if I click AM I get this — a sort of pop-up menu that doesn’t even descend from ‘Messenger’ like in older versions but from myself. It even tells me* where I can be reached — my own email address. Great, totally useful. And I just ‘love’ how the thumbnail icons are so* Google — really original. Everything just seems slabbed across the screen to fill up space. Nothing has purpose, nothing is familiar.

It’s got the world’s worse user icon, and big! So we can witness the monstrosity in all its splendour. They all look like links which tells me events will likely be hosted on a new tab. I click on Privacy Settings and get one menu-native tick-box, to choose if I’d like my friends to be able to find me if they search for my number of email. No ‘Invisible’, no ‘Stepped out’ or ‘DND’, and no FRIENDS! The roughly 300 friends I had on my Messenger contact list have now gone down to 51 and they’re not even the ones I recognise. ‘Send Feedback’ is the next link; well consider this it. The UI is so bad that they’re not even trying to be options in a menu but some floaty links on a pane. ‘Get help’ is almost funny when nothing can save you.

Another thing I don’t get is why would you have want to have a link to downloading the mobile app on desktop. A further click lands me on their official ‘Download the app’ page complete with shortcut tabs to visit the app store, read more and see some screenshots. Great but you’ve engaged me in this journey in the wrong place, at the wrong time. I’d now have to pick up my phone and download the app because I really, really want the Messenger app on my phone. I’m not sold (at all). This landing page could have been a sexy 20 second video showing the great features that would steal me from Facebook, Snapchat and the like ; Yahoo native games like that old pool, quirky cool news, AUDIBLES! Because Facebook animated emojis don’t have sound yet. All these great artifice-resources would have made the recipe perfect for Messenger but the end result is so disappointing it hurts.

This is surprisingly sloppy for an Apple Store product screenshot — the ‘Love picture’ event isn’t even centralised to the screen. How can people download that.. it bleeds off the edges. And oh wow, you can like something within the conversation, you can go ahead and blame me for thinking it’s unnecessary and not enough to get us to migrate. It’s not a stimulating feature.

The new icon is flat and devoid of any seemingly human emotion. When the whole internet went flat Yahoo of course followed, cherry-picking features from here and there as if they were making a ‘please all’ minestrone soup. The old skeuomorphic icons were way better in my opinion — they had depth and human-like emotion. Instead they followed the herd which let them to a flat-looking ‘meh’ moment. I mean look at these old versions: the sleeping one on the left is so cute it makes me soul weep for times passed.

Going back to their main homepage where things are just ‘brrr’ — eyes go straight for headlines.

This is where news goes to die. They seem to be scraping the bottom of the barrel by going for the celebrity gossip angle and it’s not appealing at all, that’s Daily Mail’s angle and it’s not at all flattering coming from a Silicon Valley tech giant. You’re still talking to the Internet generation so please act like it. It may come a little too late but I don’t think Katie Couric was the one to ask what millennials like to read; they should have poached someone from Buzzfeed.

But the main question remains: why am I still* not being given what I want after I specifically went to settings, changed my homepage to ‘google.com’ and saved changes. Twice. The first thing I’d sensibly expect is just a blank:address page. Simple, basic even — we’ve all came across a new tab page with no bias. Why shouldn’t we experience the same right now.

On the other hand you’ve got to admire their grit, it takes a lot of guts to force feed me somewhere I really don’t want to be. Don’t do that to me — that’s abusive… almost. I don’t want to feel like this yet I don’t want to stop using Chrome either — it’s faster. Maybe Google’s wired itself so well into my psyche that it’s hard for me to stay away from their products. I mean Gmail’s pretty standard now with anyone and everyone, Google is still the Holy Grail of search engines (nice try ‘Bing’ — it’s the name, people, the name!) It’s very hard coming second to market after the company you’re running up against has pretty much amassed all the market share you could ever dream of. You coming along with a product that adds up to about 5% of the former’s meaning and gravitas (even if that) is not gonna build presence anytime soon. Unless, you could facilitate searching for something that’s actually useful to your target market like I don’t know… geo-located freebies and promotional offers within a 5 mile radius — now there’s something to make you go ‘Yahoo!’.

Instead, given Mayer’s past at Google, they’ve teamed up to give Yahoo a boost — ‘how cute’ one could say.. but two months down the line Verizon just picked up a sale item so this uninspired tactic more than backfired — it inspired a high wave of Internet backlash with a lot of angry people panicking over their browser and Chrome wasn’t even the only one infected.

While I was moaning about this to a engineer friend of mine he immediately knew the solution: it’s a plugin. They somehow installed a plugin that changes your homepage/new tab into that of Yahoo’s. No one wants that, especially when there’s nothing new to see. Oh, if it had this new amazing feature that would break the internet in two then maybe .. maybe we would have let it slide but don’t pull these kinds of gimmicks when you’re already battling for air. Fresh air would have come contextually tailored user journeys, charming, star-studded UX and mouth watering UI like Yahoo used to have in the naughties but sadly some leaders just don’t know where to look for ideas.