I continued to think about what I wrote in last Wednesday’s post, The Minimalist March to Success, and did some more research on the internet. While doing so, I came across two interesting posts one by Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror fame, and the other one by Prof. John Maeda, associate director of MIT’s Media Lab, on his blog simplicity.
John Maeda’s post YAHOOGLE! contains a graphic showing Yahoo’s and Google’s search engine home page evolution through the years. I am reproducing it below as a thumbnail, and you can click on it to view the larger version.
Jeff Atwood’s post In Pursuit of Simplicity, provides more details and excerpts all related to Google’s attention to simplicity.
So it seems complexity has plagued Yahoo’s design of its search engine home page for a long time. I wonder who is behind such complexity? My take is Yahoo’s marketing and management guys have more power than the user experience and usability guys. I can imagine one of the marketing team guys talking along these lines. “Oh… there you see, we have 40 square pixels free on the home page. Let us insert some more ads, or links, or anything that will cause people to spend more time here.”
Problem is… that usually has the very opposite effect on people, especially those who come over to search.
Let me know what you think