Yahoo doesn’t grok design
I am excited about the changes Marissa Mayer is making at Yahoo. The company is back in the news, there is excitement in the air, stock prices have soared. But from what we have seen in the past week, I can’t help think that Yahoo doesn’t really get design.
Flickr announced a major update today, and it is getting a lot of good press for it. Users are getting a full terabyte of free storage, and they get to upload huge high resolution images.
But just look at that page. Flickr is about photography, framing matters. Beautiful, high-resolution images will look terrible if you place it in a poor frame. And that is exactly what Flickr has done.
- The text sections below the image are unaligned; it looks cluttered and all over the place.
- Did they really want a contrast as stark as Black and White? It is a distraction from the all important content on the page, the Photograph.
- Typography is one of the most fundamental aspects of graceful design. And now that browser support has caught up, why something as boring as Arial?
- If you aren’t signed in, Flickr’s welcome page looks like a mishmash of common UI patterns. The end result isn’t that welcoming.
Now the other Yahoo! story that is making news, Tumblr. Sure they have a lot of users, but so did Geocities which they acquired a decade back. It looks just as good or bad as any other blogging platform out there. If you have ever used Medium or seen Ghost, you would have nothing to do with the uninspiring design of Tumblr.
After years of struggle, technology has progressed sufficiently for digital media to match the elegance and poise of print. We are still not there yet, but sites like Medium are pushing these boundaries. If Yahoo wants to become relevant again, they need to be doing just that.
We live in great times. Design matters. And Yahoo, be brave.
