Under a new chief, Yahoo still seeks its voice

In Google's early days, when employees were preparing to release a new project, they had to make a pilgrimage to see Marissa Mayer, employee No. 20, and the head of design and user interface. This was not fun.

"You would sit outside her office and wait like you were meeting with the school principal," said one former employee, who did not want to be named in case paths crossed with Mayer again. "You had exactly five minutes to show her the project you had been working on for months, and if she didn't like it, you were told to redesign it. Sometimes it was just killed."

That kind of perfectionism partly explains how Mayer gained her reputation as the creator of Google's look. During her time at the company, she conceived the stark aesthetic of Google's home page and oversaw the look and feel of nearly every product.

So when she took over as chief executive of Yahoo in July 2012, it seemed she would at the very least bring a renewed vigor to the design of the struggling company. But it is not at all clear that the interface decisions she has made so far are paying off.

She has certainly made changes - with noticeable remakes of the photo-sharing site Flickr, which Yahoo bought in 2005, the Yahoo logo and the company's mail service. These have mostly been poorly received. Users complained about the Flickr redesign because the layout became too blocky, taking away from the images. Designers complained about the remake of the bright purple Yahoo logo, saying it was not much of an improvement.

As for Yahoo Mail, its redesign in October eliminated tabs and other traditional mail features. The reaction? A petition at Change.org to bring back the old format, Facebook groups lamenting the new format and tens of thousands of users complaining on a Yahoo Mail forum.

Change is hard, as the saying goes. But there is more to it than that. Design is a reflection of identity. The new mail service, for example, did not say anything larger about how Yahoo sees itself. Mayer has been aggressively hiring talent for Yahoo News. Does that mean it is a media company? If so, why isn't there media-related content, like news links or in-line Flickr content in its mail service? Is it a social network? If so, why aren't more social elements, beyond the aging Yahoo chat, integrated?

Instead of making any substantive changes, many customers contended, the redesign simply copied Google's Gmail,with its conversation-based email system.

A Yahoo spokeswoman said the latest changes were an effort build a richer experience.

"At Yahoo, we are relentlessly focused on making our users' daily habits more inspiring and entertaining," she said in a statement. "With each of our new products, our innovation and design process will continue to be driven by our mission to delight our users."

One former Yahoo employee said the changes at Yahoo still did not explicitly explain what the company is.

"The actual question is a lot more profound than the design changes," he said, asking not to be named because he consults with the company. "Do you get anything from the design decisions that suggest that they are moving Yahoo from one type of company to another?"

Mayer is not the first chief of Yahoo to grapple with such a question - and with settling on a design to reflect that identity.

In the late 1990s, under Tim Koogle, the company's design centered on connecting people, by integrating RocketMail - which became Yahoo Mail - and GeoCities, the early bloglike platform. In 2001, when Terry Semel took over as chief executive, Yahoo became more of a media brand, and more video was added to the site.

It is still early for Mayer, but her design choices do not clarify what Yahoo wants to be when it grows up.

Don Norman, author of the book "The Design of Everyday Things," does not think that matters.

"The major changes she has made are not what the logo looks like or a new Yahoo Mail," he said. "The major changes are what the company looks like internally. She's revitalizing the inside of the company, and what everyone sees on the surface are just little ripples."

The numbers at Yahoo seem to illustrate that point, too. Since Mayer took over, the company's stock price has doubled. Last quarter, Yahoo acquired eight startups and released 15 new product updates, which have led to a 20 percent increase in the site's traffic; it now reaches 800 million users a month. According to Alexa.com, an online ranking service, Flickr page views have increased since the redesign this summer, despite the complaints. That could also be attributed to the company's decision to give users a free terabyte of storage.

And that logo, in all its purple glory, is still hanging on Yahoo's home pages. Even if we don't know exactly what the company is.

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