Yahoo and Twitter rolls out new look, reinforces importance of design

Jacky Yap

11 years ago

Yahoo!, a global internet corporation known for its web portal, has just announced its mobile redesign across its various products: Mail, Homepage, Finance, Search, Messenger and News. The announcement comes following its revamp of its desktop web properties earlier in Tuesday.

According to the official blog post on Yahoo!’s tumblr account, the mobile redesign is intended to make the user interface of Yahoo!’s mobile website more consistent and in line with its native mobile apps, while also providing a unified experience across devices.

“We’re focused on building products for where our users are, and that includes mobile apps of course, but it also means providing an awesome mobile web experience, regardless of the device you use. Today many of our global users are accessing their web experiences on feature phones.” – Juliana Santarelli, Senior Product Manager, Mobile & Emerging Products

Other than Yahoo! rolling out its redesign, another internet giant, Twitter, has also revamped the way it displays conversations on its web and mobile portal. The new revamp: there is now a vertical blue line to indicate connected tweets and displaying them in chronological order. You’ll see up to three Tweets in sequence in your home timeline; if you want to see more, you can tap a Tweet to see all the replies, including those from people you don’t follow. Here’s the new look:

Design plays a huge role in all products. Yahoo and Twitter along with other internet giants such as Google and Microsoft are constantly tweaking their designs: Look at Windows 8 and its whole new metro style design, one of the biggest and boldest redesign by Microsoft yet. At Google too, since CEO Larry Page took over in 2011, Google has been consistently releasing beautifully designed products. He engineered the design revolution.

When Page took office, his first directive was clear. “Larry said ‘hey everyone, we’re going to redesign all of our products,’” recalls Jon Wiley, lead designer on Google Search. Wiley and co had just two months to give Google a fresh coat of paint, and to start thinking holistically about how Google as a whole was perceived. “We had a mandate to make this all look good,” Wiley says.

Taking a page from Page’s book, Yahoo! seems to be infusing the importance of design into its product, ever since new CEO Marissa Mayer took over. Marissa was previously with Google, holding key roles in its various products such as Google Search, Images, News, Maps, iGoogle, Gmail and many more.

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