Yahoo has come out with a new and personalized home page named My Yahoo rather than the classic home page. It is integrated and created to give audience a fresh look and more function with additional toolbar or button in it. In My Yahoo home page, users can personalized its home page by creating own layout, choosing prefer colour, add in news of the days to your page or even share your page with friends.
Classic Yahoo! home page...
My Yahoo! New & personalized home page...
Nielsen (1997) has said in his article that web users use to scan the web material. Hence, the new personalized Yahoo webpage’s layout has not much different compare to the default classic home page. The web designer is following theory by Diana C. Reep (2006) where consistency is a must to bring classic Yahoo home page and My Yahoo personalized home page under single identity. This principle is important to avoid users get confused by the page identity.
After trying to use the My Yahoo services, I personally think that it is better than the classic type because it provide more interactive functions that suit the need for most of the web users in the new era. It is also user friendly.
Similar with the classic home page, My Yahoo home page remain three columns but more framing exists to arrange different types of information in different frame. As Kress & Van Leeuwen (1996) has indicates that the stronger the framing of an elements, the more it is presented as separate unit of information. The absence of framing is to stress on group identity, presences signifies individuality and differentiation.
Besides framing, salience is being used in My Yahoo by giving the home page background a colour to make the page looks lively. It is following Kress & Van Leeuwen (1998) theory where the elements of salience are made to attract the viewers’ attention to different degrees.
References:
1.Reep, D.C. 2006, Technical Writing: principles, strategies, and readings, Pearson Education, New York.
2.Kress, G. & Van Leeuwan, T. 1998, Approaches to media discourse, Blackwell, Oxford.
3.Nielsen, J. 1997, How Users Read on the Web, Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, viewed 15 November 2009, <http://www.useit.com/alertbox/97109.html>
No comments:
Post a Comment