Design Inside Yahoo!: Tom Chi

Yahoo! recently redesigned its MyWeb bookmarking service with a new look and several new features, making it easier and more powerful to use.

This is the first interview of Design Inside Yahoo! To start the series, I interviewed Tom Chi, Product Lead for Yahoo!’s MyWeb.

Joshua Kaufman: Yahoo! is all about the social web these days. How does Yahoo! MyWeb fit into this strategy?

Tom Chi: The social web is a critical piece of Yahoo’s strategy going forward. Sites like Flickr, [Yahoo!] Answers, del.icio.us, and MyWeb all have an important role to play, and there are definitely plans to make full use of them. The most significant shift over the first generation of “social network” sites (Friendster, Orkut, etc) is that these sites have a confluence of community and content where each is bettered by the presence of the other. In the case of MyWeb, the content is bookmarks, tags, and annotations, supported by and shared via a robust relationship platform. Along with Delicious it makes up the social bookmarking arm of Yahoo’s social strategy. As for how Delicious and MyWeb will play in the long term, I’m not going to go into great detail, but suffice it to say that Joshua, Stephen and I sit right next to each other, and are mapping out a pretty sweet plan.

JK: The new design of MyWeb is certainly brighter than the previous one. What were the key drivers behind the design?

TC: We had a lot of orange paint left over from a previous project… More seriously we realized that we were sitting on a ton of amazing content. For example I just did a search in MyWeb for “knitting” and found 3700+ links (“gardening” brings up 6500+). That’s not too shabby for a community that has been labeled as being ubergeek and dismissed as only caring about CSS or the latest Python framework. Given this, improving discovery and browsing of great content was the key driver for the new design. To that end, we simplified the navigation into 3 tabs, and provided a more intimate and dynamic interplay between tags and pages. We highlighted the human aspects, displaying avatars on mouseover on any username, and worked to make the tag browsing interaction lighter and more natural. Lastly, we took some steps to promote people, tags, and pages as primary system objects and Me/Contacts/World as primary scopes. I won’t bore you with the full information architecture discussion (although maybe this audience would enjoy it), but the net effect of the work is that the design feels more human scale, but lets you easily reach much more good data.

JK: “Interesting Today” is a new feature of MyWeb. How does MyWeb determine “Interestingness”?

TC: It’s a proprietary algorithm that is keyed off of both popularity and different time dynamics. It was pretty fun to develop and tune because it’s a dance between human interest and algorithmic “understanding” as it shifts hour to hour and day to day.

JK: One of the early challenges for Yahoo! was getting people to understand what MyWeb is and how it works. Are you overcoming this, and what are you doing to make MyWeb more accessible to your mainstream audience?

TC: I’m not allowed to reveal internal product stats, but I can say that after the redesign traffic has gone up quite dramatically. The problem before was the barrier to entry for new users was incredibly high. With the new design, we’ve created the possibility of a compelling logged out experience which helps to sell the value of the system before you take the steps to sign up and become a contributor. Specifically, interesting today highlights the cool content of the moment, and search gets you speedy access to all public bookmarks. Lastly tag pages (e.g. astronomy), allow users to see ongoing saves in any topic they’d like to follow. This is what we’ve been able to do so far, but it’s just the start. In the next few months we’re taking this to the next level in a variety of ways.

JK: What’s next for MyWeb?

TC: 3 words: Iced out rims. Er… I mean, I can’t exactly disclose that, but it’s sweet.

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Tom Chi is Product Lead of Yahoo!’s MyWeb.

Check back next Monday for the next interview in the Design Inside Yahoo! series.

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