User Experience Design by Ram Narayan (VP - Product Management - Yahoo) at Web Innovations 2009 Mumbai

Posted by Ankesh Kothari

at May 13, 2009

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Ram Narayan starts with his definition of web 2.0. Web 2.0 = open and social. Harnessing collective information. User generated content.
Case study: Yahoo Buzz. People can buzz up an article that they’ve liked. The more buzzed an article, the more popular it becomes and the more people can read it. This is the social part. The open part is about opening up layers of interfaces for advertisers and webmasters for better targetting.
Case study: Yahoo Answers. People can ask and answer questions.
Yahoo Boss interface allows anyone to build their own search engine. Yahoo has opened their search infrastructure.
Building the design ecosystem = product management + engineering architecture + user experience
We shouldn’t forget a lot of visually challenged folks while designing the user experience of the website.
Case study: Yahoo Maps. Yahoo pays attention to how local users give directions. Usage of maps is different in India than in USA. So Yahoo adapts to the local taste.
Case study: Yahoo Cricket. Relaunched in 2008. By March 2009, overtook cricinfo in terms of unique visitors. They don’t do everything. Just focuses on what the users want most: scorecard / highlights. Not much of long expert analysis articles.
Yahoo organizes open hack days where people create applications built on Yahoo network within 24 hours.

The presentation went through a lot of Yahoo websites as case studies for good user experience.