JaySmall.com/old

The new Yahoo! home page design generally looks more attractive, seems better organized and even works a little better than before.

The layout emphasizes search more (gee, does anyone wonder why?), but also has a tabbed box interface that emphasizes a wide selection of content features, frequently updated. On search, Yahoo! is now the "me-too," but on broad content aggregation, it is still the best.

Drilling down to the details, though, I wonder about a couple of the design decisions that led to the look of the left navigation bar.

Why are the links alphabetically sorted? Unless they are links in a grouping that most users would expect to be sorted by first letter (e.g., a link group of U.S. states), I believe vertically stacked nav links should be sorted by order of importance.

Who sets that order? Site bosses, with help. You put the links on top to content and tools that you wish to emphasize, or that site users tell you (adamantly, sometimes) they want to find at a glance.

Instead, the Yahoo! alpha-sort leads to another bit of weirdness: links to Finance, News and Weather are displayed in slightly larger text than the rest, presumably for emphasis in the link crowd. Unfortunately, it just looks like a formatting mistake. I've placed an example image with this post, but note it is smaller than actual size.

If they made me Chief Yahoo for That Left Nav On The Home Page, I would start by resorting the list, putting those emphasized nav links at the top of the stack, working with the other Yahoos and conducting user testing to determine which links should go higher and which lower. I might even put the first few critical link words or backgrounds in a different color for added emphasis.

I know that does nothing for users who may be color blind or have other vision impairments, but the combination of sort order by importance and colors for emphasis should provide enough structural and visual cues for anyone.

On an Internet service as large as Yahoo!, changing navigation link order can mean many millions of page views gained or lost on specific content sections. Falling back to alpha-sort, instead of making the hard decisions about what to emphasize more or less, feels like a non-decision on a subject where big decisions are needed.