Working with briefs- Yahoo

Todays session was for us to focus on working with briefs, initial research and idea generation 

To get us to generate some ideas we got into small groups and worked with the 2012 YCN Yahoo brief.

The target audience is 13-18 year olds and the aim is to make Yahoo there most popular search engine to use. 

The first question we asked ourselves was 'what is yahoo's biggest issue/problem?' and that is that it isn't google

We compared yahoo's home page to googles and there are some major differences, but the main one is that yahoos is so overcrowded and trying to fit everything on one page, google has all this but just has it all tucked away as it is not all needed.

Problems with yahoo

too text heavy 

too much going on

too many links

not suitable for the younger audience 

use icons rather than text

each yahoo link you click on the overall page colour changes, no consistancy 

as there is too much going on the homepage we decided to catorgriese it all into 6 catorgries these being

-news, the news would include celebrity news, world news, sport and strange news. 

-social, this would include all yahoos social pages such as flickr

-fun, including interesting things maybe buzz feeds ect

-videos, likes to entertaining videos

-shopping, shopping links to amazon and ebay, this page would also include student promotions and offers on each week 

-answers, yahoo answers 

Also on the homepage would include a main search bar 

Here are a few sketches of some ideas we had, for the catorgries we would use icons to keep less text on the page and to have a clean, simple minimalist design.