Responsive, 'Working With Briefs' Workshop - OUGD503

We began this session by looking to how we work with live briefs. We have began by looking into one of last years YCN briefs, 'Make Yahoo! the worlds most popular homepage'. This was to engage with live briefs to give a insight into how we could possibly begin thinking about responsive briefs for this year. 

In groups we needed to come up with a possible solution for this brief. We began by thinking about what the initial problems are with Yahoo! and start to begin looking at where the faults lie, to work out how we could improve this.

What is Yahoo biggest problems?

- Its competition, i.e. Google

- Colour Scheme

- Over-crowed and cluttered, making it overwhelming to read

- Too many navigation's

So what makes Google so successful?

- Choose what you want to look at

- Personalised

- Simplistic and Minimal

The initial thoughts we had was to De-clutter the homepage, making it less overwhelming to read and engage with. We wanted to remove any unnecessary information to make it more appealing to look at. However we knew most people would think this way so needed ideas how we could make our proposal more innovative and different. 

We needed to think about the target audience, 13-18 year olds. As they engage with social media, we wanted to incorporate this someway with the re-design of the webpage. We thought if we could link the social medias in with the homepage of Yahoo!, it will encourage the target audience to use and share the page more. 

Possible Ideas:

- Link it to all social networks.

- Drag in what you want.

- Personalised tick boxes when signing up.

- Suggestions after looking.

- Yahoo bookmarks - After searching, it will save the most visited sites, playing on this personalised idea. 

- More iconography.

- Impacting colours.

- Reminders and Calendars. 

We decided we could make the homepage interactive, to make it more appealing to the younger audience. We also wanted to personalise this, we thought as everything is on Yahoo! at the minute, news, finance, weather, we could make these a suggestion for people to look at. When signing up, they can pick and choose what they want to view. To expand on this and to make it interactive we could have almost like a drag box, in where after they have chosen what they want to view, the articles or information would open up. Making so the initial homepage was purely iconography and the information would open up when you choose to view it. Another idea we had was to sync the homepage with things like calendars and reminders, again linking in with the personalised elements. 

We then played around with possible thumbnails of layout suggestions. We expanded on the idea of the 'drag box', as well as playing around with the suggestion of a journey: