Google & Yahoo User Interfaces Face Off
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Written By Reprise Media | June 8, 2005 | Share This
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We’ve compared their advertising models, product roll-outs, financial statements, corporate cultures, and just about everything else under the sun. But what happens when Google and Yahoo! go head-to-head in one of the most essential yet often overlooked elements of a web site’s success - user interface design?
Luke Wroblewski is the self-proclaimed “nurturer” of Functioning Form, an interface design blog with an article this week titled Google vs. Yahoo! Interface Design that attempts to set forth an apples-to-apples comparison of each engine’s offerings.
Despite the pretty layout and rather lovely tables, the article itself is a little thin. The real meat of it comes at the beginning:
“At a high level, Yahoo! has better integrated business goals with their product designs…their comparison shopping site features multiple entry points that better match consumer shopping behaviors (browse by brand, browse by category, featured products, etc.) than Froogle’s single search box. Yahoo! also has more robust answers to vertical information finding (Travel, Finance, Movies, etc.) than Google’s Web Search features.”
We agree, but given all the forays Google has made into the personalized home page space we doubt this will remain the case for long.
What do the folks at Yahoo! think about their home page compared to that of Google? Here’s an excerpt from a Yahoo! Search Blog interview with Paulien Strijland, Yahoo’s Director of User Experience Design:
Q: How about Google’s front page compared to Yahoo’s front page?
A: Well again, the purposes of both are very different. Besides search, people come to Yahoo’s front page to do everything from getting driving directions to finding stock prices to sending email. You have to figure a way to elegantly include all the things that people are trying to access on one page. Aesthetically, we have a very different challenge from sites like Google that essentially provide variations on one main product. With the creation of our new front page (now in beta) as well as other key pages on the site, you’ll see that we’re putting even more attention into balancing content with aesthetic.
Read the rest here.
Topics: Search: Innovations |