Yahoo! Sports Redesign Sparks Controversy, Disdain From Users

coastal984 writes "Yahoo! launched their latest redesign over the past couple of weeks, revamping their utilitarian Yahoo! Sports section with a new-age, modernized look, which features a much darker, graphical background, and light, larger text. Only problem is, the sports buffs that frequented Yahoo! Sports loved the basic, easy to read and comprehend presentation that the old site used (Which was a predominately plain white background, and smaller, dark text. Thousands of users took to Yahoo's uservoice page to express their discontent, begging for the old design back."

Re:Five Words

[Anonymous Coward]

For sports news, many many people. It's honestly the one part of yahoo that is good.

Note: They don't just mash up news, they actually have a sport writing staff.

I use Yahoo sports pages a lot

[Andy Prough]

This is one of the worst design decisions I've seen in a long time. The whole key to a sports page is you've got to quickly digest a wide range of information. The old page design worked perfectly at giving you over 100 scores for up to 4 different sports at the same time, all the headlines, and the highlights of the blogs. This kind of busy, goofy blinding crap is what have killed AOL's and MSN's portals (in my opinion). Either one of them could have grabbed tens of millions of users from Google News, but they just aren't capable of delivering content without trying to overwhelm the user's eyeballs.

Very similar to their Flickr remodel.

[Anonymous Coward]

At Flickr, there were over 50,000 complaints in the help forum, people all hate the new design there.

It eats up bandwidth and RAM like crazy (over 10 times as much as the old version).

Yahoo/Flickr ignored all the complaints!

If you want an example of bad web design, try a Flickr search, it keeps loading more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more pictures all to ONE results page... it won't quit until your browser explodes!

http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=beach [flickr.com]

Try to get to the bottom of that page. Ha ha!

Note: the old search had reasonably sized thumbnails that you could sort, each page took about 2 seconds to load.

Every page on Flickr is screwed up that way. And yet Yahoo/Flickr continue to ignore the complaints (and suggestions on how to make the site useable).

They broke Yahoo Finance, too

[Animats]

Yahoo Finance, which was very popular in the financial community, has also been "redesigned". Yahoo Finance was popular because you put in a ticker symbol and you got a chart and all the key performance numbers on one screen. Yahoo was the first to have stock charts where you could easily change the time period displayed, and investors liked that.

Now, there are four rows of Yahoo menu bars at the top of a stock symbol page. There's a big Flash ad at the top. There's a "trade now" button. ("Please provide feedback on the new Trade Now function.") There's another ad. There are links on the left. That's all you get "above the fold", before scrollling.

Below the "fold", there are some links to "reports" Then there are those annoying "Ad topics that might interest you" links. (Not Outbrain, Yahoo does this in house.) There's a table of the top holdings in the fund. Continued scrolling finally gets to the numbers that matter: YTD return, 5-year return, beta, etc.

Yahoo has completely missed the point of why investors go to a page like that.

Re:Five Words

[BD]

Note: They don't just mash up news, they actually have a sport writing staff.

...that is better than many other major organizations, at that. Their Jeff Passan has been out in front of a good many breaking stories in the last several years, and their other guys are pretty solid, too. Best of all, they mostly don't go out of their way to start a "controversy or fluff story du jour" like other orgs do. (I'm looking at you, ESPN.)