Yahoo! Sports Redesign Sparks Controversy, Disdain From Users 172
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."
One word (Score:5, Insightful)
Five Words (Score:2, Funny)
Who the fuck uses Yahoo!?
Re:Five Words (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Five Words (Score:4, Informative)
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.)
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Slashdot has been through a number of unpopular redesigns now, and yet here we all are discussing this as if it is going to have any measurable impact on Yahoo's readership.
I use Yahoo sports pages a lot (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I use Yahoo sports pages a lot (Score:4, Insightful)
Agreed. I normally don't care too much about redesigns, and I haven't used the Yahoo frontpage (sports or otherwise) in about 3 years. So I really don't even remember what it used to look like. But.... holy crap this is terrible. For some reason, it took about a minute to load (crappy laptop indexing and backing up a large pst file is partially to blame). Then, when it finally loaded, I have partially transparent content with a background image of a baseball field making me feel like I'm looking at a giant captcha page. With the various lines of grass shadings of the field running off into wildly different directions (thank you gnat-high perspective), text becomes really, really hard to read. There is a giant ad at the top (adblocker is off) that is overpowering the entire site, I can't tell if the main image staring at me is for another ad or a story, as I can't tell what sport it is for, what the story is about, or even who the people in the picture are.
I don't care about the new logo (it's a logo - whoop-de-do. at least it isn't the new Motorola logo), I don't really care about the menu layouts.... but I can't read the damn site. Why in the hell did they decide to go for a layout that actively prevents me from reading the news? Did no one actually try to use that layout?
A friend of mine had a brilliant comment on Marissa Meyer: she can't fail. If she merely prevents Yahoo from being obliterated in the next five years, she'll be hailed a genius. If Yahoo crashes in the next five years, well, everyone saw that coming, and now she has a big CEO position on her resume that she can spit shine into something valuable. Either way, she wins, and Yahoo is completely irrelevant. With the changes that have been happening, I can't see Yahoo becoming anything but an AOL clone: technically still alive, but only because people have a hard time giving up their yahoo email addresses and Instant messenger networks.
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At least it doesn't have that stupid new fad of very light grey text on a white backdrop.
Re:One word (Score:4, Insightful)
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I came here to say the same thing. Yahoo is on a roll.
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I came here to say the same thing as well. I hardly use flickr at all anymore. Used to be a great community and a fun place to get feedback on your photos. I was even a paying pro member for years. It started with minor annoyances like "partners" offering services, even on pro account photos (which had strictly forbidden advertising). Now it's just way to Bing-y all the way around. Can't find a damn thing, and flowing all the photos in different sizes and shapes is just terrible. We need white (or black) sp
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Honestly, it isn't as bad as the Flickr redesign. That one was both uglier and far less functional.
And the damn non-optional Yahoo! bar across the top. Like Flickr users want to be reminded of that.
And photostreams, groups, etc. become a collage of seemingly randomly-sized pics. If I'd wanted Snapfish, I'd have asked for Snapfish.
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+1 Apparently someone at Yahoo just thought if they could get enough new flickr users, it would bring in more profit for yahoo.....so they stupidly went for an over the top UI + essentially unlimited uploading plan that has made it too cumbersome for established users to keep using the site for what they were doing before (sharing photos, participating in discussion groups, and commenting on/browsing other photos)...
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Honestly, it isn't as bad as the Flickr redesign. That one was both uglier and far less functional.
There's no way I'd be using the new flickr if it wasn't for the redesign. That helped so much.
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Even if it's just "change is bad", why piss off a large base of content users? People have no loyalty at all to web services, just momentum. Any bump that gets users looking elsewhere is a horrible mistake.
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Judging by the other replies, I seem to be one of the few people who actually finds the redesign to be easier to read. I always hated the old design, though I'm not a regular visitor of Yahoo Sports in any way. Come to think of it, that may be why - are we sure this isn't just a case of Change is Bad?
Really? A partially-transparent background with a huge colorful distracting picture of a stadium behind it is easier to read? The huge animated advertisement at the top and an unintuitive fixed nav bar on the left and a sometimes-floating-sometimes-fixed nav bar on the right? Are we sure this isn't just a case of Shiny is Good?
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I personally have trouble focusing on lettering when the background color/shade varies.
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Ohhhh Change....
So this change is going to mess your productivity of what... Checking Sports scores. Yep that sounds productive to me.
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LOL.
Why be a victim? Use Greasemonkey and all that ugliness will just melt away.
Oh, don't know how to write javascript code? Yes, that's a problem.
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It didn't work for me. It gave me a bunch of New York City teams... However I am closer to Boston then NYC. Although I am in New York state.
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If you don't have location services enabled in your browser, it's based solely on the public IP address you are presenting to their server and what method their server uses to determine where that IP exists in the physical world.
For a long time, most IP locators thought I was in Virginia because that's where the WHOIS entry for my IP listed as the address (one of Verizon's main centers). Now, they locate me correctly because Verizon delegated the IP range to me, and my WHOIS is correct.
Are you kidding me? (Score:2)
I figured the submission was overblown and whiny hate due to change.
But holy cow that site is HORRID. I hope some management gets fired.
Looking at it I can only think of this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juFZh92MUOY [youtube.com]
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it looks like this horrid android theme i've seen
i used to follow some android themer on google plus and he was all proud of this mostly black theme that he spent days "creating"
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They obviously didn't use a designer for this project. I'm not a designer but I'm pretty confident that I could come up with a better design than that.
But does anyone care ? I mean Ya-who ? I used to use them for email but they kept "upgrading" (i.e. redesign with less features) the service.
Both users complained? (Score:2)
>> Disdain From Users
Yes, both of them objected. (I don't really blame Yahoo for taking another shot at a service no one's used for the last ten years.)
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Re:Both users complained? (Score:4)
>> Disdain From Users
Yes, both of them objected. (I don't really blame Yahoo for taking another shot at a service no one's used for the last ten years.)
Yahoo sports, particularly the fantasy sports, are pretty well trafficked. There's no competition from Google.
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Yahoo sports, particularly the fantasy sports, are pretty well trafficked. There's no competition from Google.
I head a guy describe the system that he uses at, IIRC CBS Sports - and it involved paying a hundred plus dollars to CBS to organize a 'league' with his friends.
On the Internet, even. I don't know if Yahoo is charging, but apparently there is real money involved, and what sounds like a Freshman CS project running the 'matches' on the backend.
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Yahoo is the 'free-est' of the 3 main choices. The basic league is free. They have only really one optional pre-draft add-on (premium draft kits) and one optional post-draft add-on (Yahoo customer service will review your trades for a fee). ESPN also offers free and paid leagues, with a few more paid features. Then there is CBS who basically doesn't offer anything the other two don't, even though they charge close to $200, but the design is much more professional, they have real customer service, and the mo
Rotten Guacamole (Score:2)
First impression made by the color scheme was "rotten guacamole". What's worse is that the section landing page had a decidedly Web1.0 feel to it -- I was actually looking around the page for Geocities banner ads, blink tags and little monkeys to punch.
Shit layout, shit color scheme, completely unreadable, overly busy. Yahoo needs to lay off their entire design staff. They have obviously been cubicle squatting since the 90s and likely never been outside Yahoo HQ or to any other website other than Yahoo sinc
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The design reminds me of too-hip gamer sites.
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You forgot "at the end of the day" and "creatives".
Fred Sanford quote: "I'm blind!" (Score:2)
Jesus fucking christ! Who the hell thought that layout and design could in any way be considered good web design? Were they on acid or smoked a few joints that morning?
I didn't use that particular section but if I saw that concept on any other page on any other site I would never go back.
This is a perfect example of Rule #2: Never let a web designer design your web pages.
CSS (Score:3)
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Can you show me an example of a real production website that has an actual real world use where a 3rd party has created custom stylesheet(s) that completely redesigns a site's layout while still retaining complete functionality.
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Absolutely. Just browse http://userstyles.org/ [userstyles.org].
If you insist on a specific example, try http://userstyles.org/styles/22529/anandtech-forums-fusetalk-look [userstyles.org] for http://forums.anandtech.com/ [anandtech.com]
Although maybe your definition of "completely redesigns" is more extreme than mine?
Distracting... (Score:2)
M.E.H. (Score:2)
It's not THAT bad...
But I guess I don't care anyway, this isn't the type of story I come to /. for.
Re:M.E.H. (Score:4, Funny)
White text on black background? (Score:2)
Unless it's for a hackers/nerds website, stick with dark text on a light background.
Myspace Page (Score:2)
Yahoo underestimates their user base (Score:2)
I used to do computer repair work in an area where AT&T was partnered with Yahoo for email services and content delivery. The biggest complaint was that Yahoo wouldn't stop redesigning everything. I recall one older guy who needed zoomed text and low resolutions just to see his email. Took some work to get it so that everything fit *and* he could see it. The very next day, the guy calls and complains that we broke it. Yep, Yahoo changed their email design for the third time that year (It was June or so)
Don't blame the design staff (Score:2)
For all we know, something like this [theoatmeal.com] happened, the CEO or someone from management got involved and they got the results we all just saw.
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Dunno. Google News underwent a similar asinine redesign before Mayer left, geared towards making the site readable on a smartphone or small tablet screen while removing roughly half of the information.
The difference is that a signed-in Google user can turn the News redesign off and revert to the previous text-heavy format. It's actually a good incentive to sign in. It doesn't appear that Yahoo has the same insight.
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Don't forget the abortive attempt to make Google's main search page look like Bing. Went live in spite of universal condemnation from beta testers, got pulled down in about an hour under massive waves of complaints. Any Googler know if this one bears the personal paw marks of Marissa? Happened not too long before her "promotion" to the broom closet down the hall.
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True, I had indeed forgotten that. It would have made a good April Fool's theme, except it was too disturbing to be funny.
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It auto-senses a mobile client (at least an iOS one) and assumes you are running on a 160x120 PDA from 1998.
If you visit news.google.com on an iPad without signing in, you'll see what I mean.
this is not news to Flickr users (Score:3)
who have been subjected to some reallllly bad UI by Yahoo in the last few months.
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Although oddly enough I've actually seen more traffic going to my Flickr account that was being driven by searches on Flickr. So it looks like they might have tweaked the searching under the hood as well which is nice, but the new UI on the other hand, cluttered.
Ya, I'm getting a lot more Chinese search engine result views of my pictures of tractors(!) lately, which is fine, I guess. I don't really even know what to make of that. But the UI still hurts my wiener.
Everybody wants to be Bing (Score:5, Insightful)
Everybody wants to be Bing. Why, I have no idea. Of course Bing didn't invent background images, but it seems like Google got scared by Bing (once again, why?) and started laying more eye candy on things. Then of course there's the infinite scrolling fad, which I call "tantalus scrolling" after the figure from mythology who was condemned to drink from a cup where the water level always lowered just below his lips. So. Yet another crappy Yahoo design doesn't surprise me. A lot of us defected from Flickr over this.
Anyway, long story short is that the web design community has collectively hit the crack pipe, and users have to live in the ghetto they create.
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It actually does the same thing every time, it's pretty well defined. The problem is that you are viewing it through the lense of the windows paradigm, which doesnt apply on mac. This is not a windows "maximize" button that effectively makes the window full screen (minus window decorations) - it never was and is not supposed to be. It is a fit-window button that expands the window in order to show content. It will only expand the window to cover the full screen if the data it has to display for you actually
Some web designers think change must happen.... (Score:2)
Very similar to their Flickr remodel. (Score:5, Informative)
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).
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At Flickr . . . 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!
When I first was assaulted by Flickr's new scheme, I thought something was wrong with my computer. "What's that awful sound, is the drive dying? Crap!" No, just all the cooling fans spooling up to previously unheard levels under the crushing weight of what should have been a handful of pictures!
Data Driven? Last Minute Decision by Marissa? (Score:3)
The very well written biography of Marissa Mayer that recently appeared in Business Insider was very illuminating about the current ongoings at Yahoo. Marissa appears to be a very data driven person, always looking for "proof" of display/design feature ideas and concepts, even for whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide.
http://www.businessinsider.com/marissa-mayer-biography-2013-8 [businessinsider.com]
Additionally, she had made a last minute change to the color scheme of the recently revamped Yahoo Mail which necessitated significant man hours at the 11th hour to implement and was detrimental to team morale and cohesion that had been painstakingly developed since her arrival.
I'm sure moving forward there will be more challenges like this that Yahoo will face. It will be interesting to assess whether they are due to the vestiges of incompetency at Yahoo as she believes, or due to her failings as a leader, because let's face it, according to the profile, this type of a UI design change would have had her hands all over it and would've needed final sign-off by her.
UI Design changes are by their very inherent nature controversial, people like things the way they're used to them. Marissa's approach was already problematic at Google, it had problems scaling as the company grew in size, but at least there were people there to manage and mitigate her. There's no-one at Yahoo like that. She is a very authoritative leader.
Disclaimer: I don't know her personally nor have I ever met her or met anyone who has met her. My impressions are all based on profiles of her like the one linked above (which I am not affiliated with but simply found interesting)
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Additionally, she had made a last minute change to the color scheme of the recently revamped Yahoo Mail which necessitated significant man hours at the 11th hour to implement and was detrimental to team morale and cohesion that had been painstakingly developed since her arrival.
If changes to a color scheme of... well... anything on the web require "significant man hours"
to implement there's something very very wrong with the development process of the web thing
being color schemed.
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Marissa appears to be a very data driven person, always looking for "proof" of display/design feature ideas and concepts, even for whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide.
In other words: "Welcome to the local maximum, Marissa. You might as well settle in and get comfortable, because you'll be here forever."
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No, she will be out before yahoo finally caves in on itself because she needs to not get any of that on her before moving on to her next victim.
Not having ever used it before... (Score:2)
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UI should always be customizable. No two people like it exactly the same way. Find a default that seems to work for most people, but let people change it to avoid the (justified) complaints.
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I didn't care about the new design in the least, until I clicked on a featured article.
Then the middle section turned white with black text, that had absolutely no formatting. It looked like a 17-page wall of text, with the black vertical sidebars framing it in. HORRIBLE.
I immediately closed the tab, and went back to espn.com.
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I didn't care about the new design in the least, until I clicked on a featured article.
Then the middle section turned white with black text, that had absolutely no formatting. It looked like a 17-page wall of text, with the black vertical sidebars framing it in. HORRIBLE.
I immediately closed the tab, and went back to espn.com.
I hadn't loaded an actual article until I read your reply, thanks for the prompting - now that I have, however, I don't see any issue with it whatsoever. White background, black text, no crazy formatting, no 12-page slideshow for a 6 paragraph article, no animations, no graphical background...? Sounds like an ideal in readability! Kinda like a printed book, you know?
(The sidebars are distracting however, I'll give you that.)
Every time. (Score:2)
This happens every time a popular website (or application) is updated with a redesigned UI. The fact that thousands of users are complaining tells you nothing about whether the average user finds the site easier to use. The fact that people are posting here on Slashdot to say that they personally dislike it also tells you nothing. Fundamentally, people hate having change imposed on them, particularly if they don't know or agree with the reasons for it. And frankly even if Yahoo's existing users overwhel
It always happens (Score:2)
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On the other hand, if you have a really good developer they will tell you that "pretty good" is the enemy of "excellent."
But, if they happen to be a really good developer they will not break shit that works properly, and look to improve what doesn't.
What is with all the terrible UIs lately? (Score:2)
Has anyone else noticed that damn near EVERY UI project out there is getting a terrible redesign? MS, Google, yahoo all are in the process of fucking up common interfaces for the sake of....well, I really don't know, but they seem to have a goal.
Hell, the last /. redesign kind of fucked things up too, now that I think about it. A lot of common pages were buried several links deeper than they used to be. I can't tell if that was done to increase ad impressions or if the designers are just morons.
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Whatever they did to Google Maps, both on Android and via the web is mind boggling. On the Android version they reduced functionality completely (need two apps for street view, really?), while making it ugly and barely usable. On the web version, they actually made it worse than Bing maps. Again, killing street view, unless you actually know which thumbnail is the place your looking for (which means I didn't need street view to begin with), worse, some of their "helpful" thumbnails are for things miles
They broke Yahoo Finance, too (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Yahoo has completely missed the point of why investors go to a page like that.
And we miss the point of why that page exists, and that is to make money for Yahoo. Long gone are the days of VCs throwing money at any company that gets headlines and viewers. Advertising is all there is, short of subscriptions. Yahoo has NO REASON to provide a simple page that the readers like for free. Viewers are not their customers, advertisers are. And the customers of the advertisers are people who are not savvy enough to block those ads.
Yahoo Games (Score:2)
I hate light text on black background (Score:2)
Frightening... (Score:2)
I'm not sure why (Score:2)
I am all for darker backgrounds (Score:2)
So long as the contrasts are handled properly (no funky backgrounds that obscure lighter text in some places). Lighter backgrounds stress out my eyes.
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And even better, users should have the option to customize the CSS of those sites to their needs... and I don't mean with additional browser add-ons. Site should be offering this to their users by default.
In other news.. (Score:2)
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Don't leave out Google. Reaction to the google news redesign was overwhelmingly negative [asktog.com], and all of that was ignored, the good old format never returned. (Sorry for the secondary link, in classic Google style the original forum links were not kept stable)
Google news still sucks compared to the much loved original, and recent fiddles just make it worse. The latest afront is burying links to multiple stories on the same subject behind an annoying scrolling "real time results" list that only serves to make yo
too hard to read (Score:2)
IMHO, white text on black is nearly always an amateurish design, bereft of creativity and solid design technique. I avoid reading such sites because I find them tiresome on the eyes. Just give me plain ol' black type on a white/light coloured background. That provides the most contrast is thus easiest to read, for me at least.
Typical Corporate Redesign (Score:3)
I'm gonna' cry (Score:2)
This makes me terribly sad.
There is no doubt in my mind that my father will be unable to cope with this change and be completely frustrated trying to run his fantasy football team this year. This of course means "support" calls to me, who has no interest in sports, fantasy or otherwise.
"Wait, wait," you exclaim, "the fantasy football section hasn't changed. Well, much, at least." Maybe, but my father has trouble with concepts like drag-and-drop, and is one of the stereotypical older users with whom you c
Slow scrolling... (Score:2)
The redesign isn't the worst I've seen, but damn it scrolls slow. There seems to be about a one second delay between me hitting my scroll wheel and the page actually responding. I didn't have this issue on the old player pages.
The scrolling wouldn't even be that huge of an issue, but they have forced all the relevant information (stats) down below all of the pointless crap (I don't really care where Buster Posey was born). So now the first thing I have to do on their player pages is... scroll down to t
Mutliple Fails and User Hate (Score:2)
Yahoo has tried at least three times over the past six weeks to roll out their new design. Each time, user comments are not just overwhelmingly negative, but all negative. Users beg yahoo to put back the previous version, which they have done each time after about a day. Until now, this rollout seems to have been some what experimental in that it did not show up on all servers.
This is really the height of web designer ambivalence to user wants/needs/desires. You have a very popular (probably your most
Wow (Score:2)
I remember a while ago when I was doing something very much away from my computer and wanted to check some sports scores. I thought how odd it was that my go to thought was Yahoo Sports. And how were it not for that Yahoo would really not be in my life at all save for the odd time a Yahoo Answer would come up via a Google search.
So as football season has rolled around I actually had been going there often to check on things both NFL and CFB related. I noticed the new logo and thought ugh, who thought tha
New-age? (Score:3)
Sports? (Score:2)
Seriously, sports section? How is this "stuff that matters"...
Marissa (Score:2)
Nuff said. [gigaom.com]
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Nuff said. [gigaom.com]
FTFY [kulfoto.com]. I'll be in my bunk.
Yahoo's New Business Model (Score:2)
ESPN Made it so you must log in using Facebook (Score:2)
Since I refuse to use facebook for anything, I guess I can no longer make a simple comment.
Big bummer. I have been commenting of ESPN for some 10 years and formed a lot of relationships with various posters.
It is a shame to have this taken away for I'm not sure what reason.
Seems like tons of sites are now forcing people to use facebook to make any commentary.
Yahoo removed their comments bell for regular post (Score:2)
I can't see if someone posted on something I wrote on Yahoo! on my main page anymore.
Now I have to wait for 1/2 a day for something to pop up in my email telling me I have replies or thumbs ups to something I posted. There is a way to get to the old scheme through Yahoo Alerts!, but that is buried and you have to re-sign in constantly which take considerable time. So Yahoo has rendered the commentary relatively useless for the vast majority of folks.
Before you would be able to see people commenting on your
such as Flickr (Score:4, Insightful)
No matter how the media says the product has lost favor, the millions using it -- who did NOT ask for a facelift to make it less computer-friendly and look more like a tablet -- beg to differ.
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