Yahoo! has a ‘one size doesn't fit all’ attitude towards the concept of a formalised design process. However, the speed of its market and the pace of technology both require Yahoo! to be keenly aware of how to best manage product development.
Project management tools, such as Agile (described in detail later), provide the backbone for product development while allowing the design team to be creative. Key elements of this process include:
- Using product development methodologies with short design iterations, continual prototyping and product development and small, tightly integrated development teams
- Providing designers and other project team members alike with the business tools needed to relate design actions to financial goals
- Building of methods and patterns libraries to encourage consistency and reduce repetition across products and teams.
The design function at Yahoo! has a staff of over 300. The majority of them are based at the organisation’s US headquarters, the remainder spread around the world.
The company’s User Experience Design group includes user researchers, visual designers and interaction designers. In addition to this, specialist knowledge is heavily drawn on from teams at Yahoo! on a project by project basis, such as the Mobile team who advises on the transfer of technology to small user interfaces.
Yahoo! completes 90 percent of its design activities in-house, but occasionally uses external design resource for unusual or high-profile projects, a type of activity the company calls 'hyper design.'
Typically, Yahoo! recruits highly qualified designers with a decade or more of professional experience and high levels of academic qualification (often PhD level, particularly in its user research activities.)
Some Yahoo! businesses also hire staff with creative backgrounds that fall outside the typical web-development career path. The company’s news and sports portals hire professional photographers, for example, in order to inject added visual insight into their product ranges.
Yahoo! requires all its designers to have a business focus, to be capable of understanding the business goals of the projects in which they are working. 'The designers who take the time to learn the business do not think that their value is limited to the creation of online product experiences, it’s creating work that not only moves people, but moves the needle for the business,' says Joseph O’Sullivan, Senior Design Director. 'These designers are the most successful.'
Indeed, designers are encouraged to think more widely than the boundaries of their own discipline. 'The design industry in general has the tendency to only own half the problem. If you want to take a strategic leadership role in any problem then you need to own it,' says Luke Wroblewski, Senior Design Principal for Search at Yahoo!.
In more depthFind out how other companies in our study hire designers who demonstrate a
wider skill set including: multi-disciplinary working, business acumen and strategic thinking
Perhaps like no other industry in history, the Internet exhibits a relentless pace of innovation. Being first to market with a successful new technology or a popular application can earn its owners millions. Successful Internet businesses have learned how to scale their activities with great rapidity and to evolve the business models and roll out new services with similar speed. This sometimes involves buying out smaller niche market product or service providers in order to remain at the frontline of market developments.
Yahoo! fits this model precisely and its board cites a policy of continued and accelerated product innovation as being fundamental to its sustained growth. Recent innovations brought to the market by Yahoo! include its Yahoo! Go product (a multi-device interface for its mail and personal information management products), a new interface of its email application, and continued expansion into new content areas including Yahoo! Answers, which allows users to post a question online and view a series of relevance-ranked responses from the overall web community.