Search Engine Journal

Yahoo will soon be rolling out a new homepage design and will begin testing it today with selected “testers” from UK, US, France and India. The new homepage would also come with new features that is aimed at establishing the Yahoo portal as a “friendly and more open” user start page.

Specifically, the new homepage:

will help you get more out of the Internet, make more of your precious time, and make sense of all the things going on in your world. After lots of ongoing research (i.e., focus groups, usability experiments, etc.), today we’ve begun testing an all-new, more streamlined Yahoo.com that will bring the things that matter most to you –- no matter where they “live” on the Web

Initially there will be two new features in the new Yahoo homepage. One is a new user dashboard area to be located on the left side of the portal. This dashboard would let users add previews of not only Yahoo services, but more importantly non-Yahoo services as well. First among these services is a facility for multiple email account checking that would initially include AOL Mail and Gmail. Other services would include, weather forecasts, and local events.

The other feature has something to do with Yahoo’s featured area where contents from Yahoo’s internet properties are displayed on personalized basis. With the new homepage, this featured content would also display other sources as well. The Search Assist would still be implemented in the new homepage as users deemed it a useful add-on to the Yahoo portal.

These plus other more new features will be gradually rolled out as soon as Yahoo gets the feedback from their beta testers. Hopefully in the coming months.

Looking at the screenshots, the new homepage certainly looks cleaner and uncluttered. It reminds me of Google’s MyAccount homepage. Although, the success of this new homepage design would still depend on how fast it will load up even at the slowest Internet connection speed of any user.