The Creative Challenge
Yahoo! is the original .com start-up, the first internet site that made sense at scale of the sprawling mass that is the internet. The core element of this success is the Yahoo! homepage. In a single page it is able to capture the most important things you need in your daily internet life - to communicate, to find out, to explore. Google and Facebook are now more popular homepages - so there is now a need to inspire our users, particularly those new to the internet, about to set an email address for the first time, to again set Yahoo! as their homepage.
A dry list of benefits is not going to persuade them - but beautiful, engaging, fun, digital creative, illustrating those benefits just might. This work should be able to appear on Yahoo! and across tablet, mobile and desktop as a minimum - but the brief is open to exploring new ways (particularly digital) to reach our target audience. These may be ways that everyone’s been ignoring for years, are unfashionable, or simply bonkers - but our target audience set a high bar for their attention daily and we need to meet it.
Target Audience
13-18 year olds. They are getting a smartphone for the first time, they have ready access to a tablet - even if its through school. They love and use Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in that order (and need an email address to use them). They’re already adept at filtering the multiple messages that they’ve been sent since they were born, chopping, making their own, shifting between different personas online and offline, with their friends and family. Authenticity is key.
13-18 year olds. They are getting a smartphone for the first time, they have ready access to a tablet - even if its through school. They love and use Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in that order (and need an email address to use them). They’re already adept at filtering the multiple messages that they’ve been sent since they were born, chopping, making their own, shifting between different personas online and offline, with their friends and family. Authenticity is key.
We began looking at the existing Yahoo website:
We found the colour boring, dated and isn't fresh or vibrant. Purple suggests luxury and a treat when actually Yahoo needs something which you would use everyday. We also thought it looked clinical and was too busy. What we did like about Yahoo was the iconography, which are quite nice.
We began listing ideas that would make Yahoo suitable for a younger audience.
- Personal Aspects: Being able to modify the website to suit you (designed for you?). Being able to change simple things such as the colour and background pictures (photo collage of YAH mates). Also an initial questionnaire when you sign up to Yahoo so you would be able to pick and choose what news you receive by selecting certain topics and hobbies/interests. This way the website can work for both 13 and 18 year olds - they won't like the same layouts or have the same interests. Being able to personalise it removes this problem.
- Greeting: It knows them as a person and greets them when they log in (Good Morning..) However I found greetings kind of creepy when technology welcomes you.
- Social Media Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr etc. Allows everything to be in one place, as one news feed. You can upload something to all of them at once or selected ones depending. Making it easier than ever before to be connected with everyone.
- Weather: Icon or illustration of a person wearing appropriate weather clothes to show what the weather is like as well as a temperature underneath. We felt a personal Avatar (like the ones on Xbox) which could be modified to suit the person.
We wanted to make Yahoo a more interactive website with different sections with appropriate yahoo related names such as "Yah Hobbies" Being able to edit the details to really make the website suit the individual, but we felt this was whey cheesy.
Syncs with your calendar - reminding you of important dates or things to do as well as your mums birthday etc... Stay organised with yah calendar. Ha
Above are our final sketches and plans for the website. We decided to name it Yahoo Life, to brand it as more than just a search engine. If it were to just be with a search engine then it would no compete with Google. This way it provides a multi-stream newsfeed for all social media, a calendar which syncs etc. The page is modified by the user to suit them and their needs. Also the user can upload photos and arrange them into a collage or a full bleed image.
We began listing ideas that would make Yahoo suitable for a younger audience.
- Personal Aspects: Being able to modify the website to suit you (designed for you?). Being able to change simple things such as the colour and background pictures (photo collage of YAH mates). Also an initial questionnaire when you sign up to Yahoo so you would be able to pick and choose what news you receive by selecting certain topics and hobbies/interests. This way the website can work for both 13 and 18 year olds - they won't like the same layouts or have the same interests. Being able to personalise it removes this problem.
- Greeting: It knows them as a person and greets them when they log in (Good Morning..) However I found greetings kind of creepy when technology welcomes you.
- Social Media Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr etc. Allows everything to be in one place, as one news feed. You can upload something to all of them at once or selected ones depending. Making it easier than ever before to be connected with everyone.
- Weather: Icon or illustration of a person wearing appropriate weather clothes to show what the weather is like as well as a temperature underneath. We felt a personal Avatar (like the ones on Xbox) which could be modified to suit the person.
We wanted to make Yahoo a more interactive website with different sections with appropriate yahoo related names such as "Yah Hobbies" Being able to edit the details to really make the website suit the individual, but we felt this was whey cheesy.
Syncs with your calendar - reminding you of important dates or things to do as well as your mums birthday etc... Stay organised with yah calendar. Ha
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