The Yahoo! design process

Design activities at Yahoo! are kicked-off at the business unit level, but are closely tied into the business and innovation objectives set by the CEO

Needs identification is carried out by product managers in association with the marketing department. New needs can be identified as a result of user feedback, through the identification of an emerging trend or by the acquisition or development of a new technology. The company’s product teams also look externally for development opportunities, studying emerging trends and frequently acquiring promising technologies from other organisations.

In cases where the Agile development process is used, this requires a Product Requirements Document (PRD) to be completed, which captures insights from the research, presents likely product features and business goals. This is signed off by the General Manager of the relevant business unit, and leads to the establishment of a project team, including designers, user interaction researchers and software engineers.

In reality, says O’Sullivan, there are variety of ways in which projects are initiated and signed off.

Roadmaps

Product lines have their own roadmap for the expansion and implementation of new technologies. Historically, such roadmaps were developed looking a year or more into the future, but such is the pace and unpredictability of change in Yahoo!’s industry that today managers typically develop a roadmap for a shorter time period. Design representatives usually collaborate in the roadmap development process.

Definition and expansion

Initial dialogue involving the designers and the project team will be used to explore and stretch the project goals, to identify other opportunities that can be exploited during the project and to define any user evaluation and research needs or technology developments required to deliver the project.

Sometimes, the project definition phase can take unusual forms. Yahoo!’s Local team, which is responsible for maps, were developing their local information service. In doing so, the entire product development team spent a day walking around a specific local area and spoke to business owners to get a flavour of their daily activities. Their objective then became the replication of this rich information gathering experience in the software product. Naturally, such activities also have the benefit of building team cohesion at an early stage.

Agile and the design team

The Agile process operates as a stage gate mechanism for the development of products, and is one of the main tools used internally at Yahoo! It enables all those involved to understand where they are and where they are going at any one time. Agile also enables designers to feed into the process at the most timely and constructive junctions without restricting the creative process. 

For example, the Agile process makes extensive use of rapid, highly visual techniques (cartoons, story boards etc.) to build the initial product requirements. The adoption of techniques like this, says O’Sullivan, has made the input from the design team highly visible at the early stage of the project.

Design teams at Yahoo! are co-located which, according to O’Sullivan, provides an important creative environment for designers. However, the team adhere to tight project and time management principles, and are responsible for communicating back to the project team with information about their activities and outputs at regular intervals.  Designers themselves have a daily morning meeting, and regularly engage in scrums with the project team of engineers, product managers, and user researchers.

The Agile process requires regular review meetings and the teams have to demonstrate a functional product wherever possible. An RSS feed alerts all team members to any project document updates. This keeps the designers’ input closely aligned with the overall progress of the project.

Yahoo! has made particularly strenuous efforts to align the activities of its user research teams to the Agile development process. The extremely short development loops of the Agile process are incompatible with longer timescales required for traditional usability research. To avoid research findings failing to keep up with the requirements of the project team, researchers have altered their methods, running more, smaller studies to produce specific answers for the design and engineering teams.

At the same time, emphasises O’Sullivan, user interaction research is valuable because even in quite brief studies it often throws up findings that lay outside their original scope. Such findings are absorbed into existing projects wherever possible, or retained for future use. This approach was applied during the development of Yahoo! Personal, when initial ethnography revealed results so surprising that they eventually resulted in a fundamental shift in the product roadmap and level of complexity involved.

The Agile methodology has been readily adopted by the project teams, including designers. 'What’s fascinating about this is that everyone hated it at first and now the teams that do it love it. One of the reasons is that people work more closely and the collaboration that comes with that,' says O’Sullivan.