If there’s one thing Pandora has taught me it's that they truly listen to their users. The 24/7 streaming music service is highly customizable down to the songs I want to hear (or not hear). As a result, I’m more engaged with the service and favor it over traditional and satellite radio. This level of content personalization and engagement not only made Pandora a successful start-up business, it’s also garnered, in recent days, public admiration from one of the most established Internet companies around—Yahoo. 

So when I came across Yahoo’s latest release that visualizes the traffic to Yahoo properties, and lets users customize results based on various demographic categories, I was both intrigued and apprehensive about the execution.  These days, Yahoo is mostly known for their troubles and not their innovation as big portal sites seem to be fading from the Internet. 

Yahoo's customizable news page

What I Liked

In an interview with AdAge, Mike Kerns, Yahoo’s VP-social and personalization, compared Yahoo’s new system to services such as Pandora and Amazon. These are sophisticated services with advanced recommendation engines that adapt to user habits, something Kerns told Adage is a challenge. He said, "Yahoo today does a very poor job listening to its users in a way they can give us credit for.”

I’m encouraged by Yahoo’s transparency. For a company that has seen better days, it’s refreshing to hear Kearns acknowledge the challenge and take steps to correct it.

I also appreciated the site was built in HTML5 and with CSS3. This framework allows for a quality experience and highlights Yahoo’s interest in responsive web design, the practice of building websites that adapt evenly across devices and browsers. While the design adjusted properly from device to device, the functionality was less adaptive—almost non-functioning—which brings me to a few things I didn’t like.

What I Didn’t Like

When using the website as a tool for research and discovery of, say, the types of Yahoo content that’s popular with 18-year-old females in Dallas, the system can be very valuable to many. Yet, as a personal tool for discovering news content, I’m not convinced that I want to read the news based on people who are exactly like me: my age group, my gender, etc. The results seem to narrow my news content rather than expand it. 

When I sorted news for males I saw sports headlines. When I sorted news for the females I saw a headline for bargain clothing.  This is unsettling as it appeares the system reinforces gender stereotypes at the start. Over time the system is designed to learn the news I like, which is mostly genderless, ageless, and not location-specific. This extra work  to discover content is certainly more than I am used to. 

The last item I’ll draw attention to is the introduction of a new content category named Shine. Situated between the finance icon and the OMG icon, the Shine interest doesn’t appear to have an impact on the results. The tooltip for Shine also did little to explain what I would see in those results. To me, this seems like is a credibility issue for Yahoo: to introduce a new filter that has no impact on the results and lacks clear explanation. 

Kerns also points out in the AdAge interview there is more to come in the form of deeper customization to personalize the content experience on its sites. This first step is definitely something to watch as Yahoo works to incorporate more user insights into their highly-trafficked online news. 

What This Means For Content

Content Science Process

Any time a company puts effort into understanding how users want to interact with their online content is a good thing. The knowledge they'll gain is invaluable to content planning and execution.  In fact, here at Content Science we begin many projects assessing the wants and needs of users to inform what our clients hopes to achieve. We even built it into our process (see right) during the analysis phase.

Introducing new content categories in a staid medium like online news is both admirable and tricky. Are users ready for "Shine" as a news category? They may, if they know what it means. For content to be engaging it has to be clear, especially during periods of innovation where users may be asked to think differently about how they find content. 

While I see drawbacks to Yahoo's latest experiment, I celebrate the fact they're experimenting to create the best possible experience with content.