If an interface is good, content easier to navigate to. Ease of navigation depends on how fast it is for me to navigate to something, and whether or not the website takes me to the right place.
One major design choice involves the choice of sacrifice good UI for ads’ visibility. One constraint may be the necessity of ads placed a certain way to sustain a level of revenue. It would have been more profitable for Yahoo for put their ad on the top of the front page, requiring them to sacrifice UI.
A second theme was the decision to make important headlines and category titles purple to improve memorability (people will remember to click what’s purple if they know Yahoo’s theme color is purple, and that way they will get to what they want faster.)
The necessity of keeping costs low may have also prevented Yahoo from revamping their UI. Yahoo, already struggling to stay afloat, cannot afford to raise costs by changing their design, which may entail hiring more developers to change the design, more designers/UIUX specialists to evaluate quality of the changes.
Finally, Yahoo has to maintain its brand image in order to retain users. Google, Yahoo’s competitor, sets a precedent in that now search engines are expected to look minimalist and simple, and to present more complicated aesthetics is to deviate from what is popular among users. One could argue Yahoo should change its design to replicate simplicity. However, one may also believe that this may turn off the few remaining Yahoo aficionados who remain out of loyalty. To change the design is to change what made Yahoo unique and to perhaps lose, not gain, web traffic.
Yahoo has decent learnability. Visually speaking, the categories of information like weather or horoscope are a bit harder to locate if you were searching for them for the first time, since they are in much smaller font relative to the news article previews. In comparison, the prominence of its article previews made them easy to locate. Almost everything except for the navigation bar, search box, and news feed are a tad too uniform.
Regarding the learnability of viewing articles, it was easy for a first-time user to view individual articles once you clicked on the headline. This is because Yahoo News successfully follows the standards of most news feeds that anyone is already used to. On the home page, the articles are displayed as a full RSS feed. When you click on a headline, it directly displays article content in its respective Yahoo News link — that’s the way most news feeds work.
If you are using the search box, too, even long-time Google users that use Yahoo for the first time would not find an issue. Yahoo’s search results strongly resemble Google. The majority of the page is white space and for every article, there is bolded colored title, left aligned text, display of link, and brief preview of the link’s content.
The memorability of Yahoo depends on what feature the user typically looks for and/or uses. If you were looking for Weather and you hadn’t used the site in a while, the placement of weather on the page doesn’t make anyone remember Yahoo particularly. “Weather” is jammed between Trending Now and Scoreboard, making it not stand out.
Yahoo has low efficiency. The ad at the top of the page makes it longer for the experienced user to scroll down and locate what they want. On the home page, the infinite scroll also makes for faster viewing of news instead of clicking on the first page, second, etc. for more results.
Yahoo has fantastic affordability. Although its home page is a little too heavy with content, every single aspect is interactable — if you click on it, you go somewhere else. All the necessary features of Yahoo that one would want to access, like viewing mail, news, and weather — are all accessible on the front page.
Old: The ad takes up a lot of space and makes scrolling down to see news more cumbersome.
New: I would relocate the giant ad banner on the homepage so that all the content on the home page would require less scrolling down to locate. Instead, I would place it in the ad below the first. I also put more diverse types of news to replace “Trending now”, since it increases the number of different types of things in eyesight when a visitor visits the website.
Old:
The articles with image previews are placed on the right-hand side, which doesn’t seem relevant. It would be better to have the “related content” articles have image previews as well, since readers are more likely to want to click there.
New: