Yahoo!
Yahoo! Groups Moderator Central

With millions of people using Yahoo Groups, it was an honor to be asked to help establish Moderator Central — a site that would serve Yahoo Group Moderators. Collaborating with product marketing, we developed solutions that could offer this group support whether a relatively new moderator or one who’s been active for many years. Only just launched this year, it's already seen huge traffic.
Web Site
http://moderators.groups.yahoo.com

Year Built: 2007
Project duration: 3 months
Zaudhaus role: Conceptual Designs, Interface Design, HTML Engineering, Visual design

Services
Interaction Design
Custom Web Applications

Industries
Media & Entertainment
STATS
RELATED
CHALLENGE + SOLUTION
The Challenge: Yahoo! really wanted to find a way to make their 360 product more engaging. People were using it - plenty, but compared to other blogging tools and the upstart mini-blogging tools, they were not seeing the type of growth they wanted. After much user-research, Yahoo! did have some direction as to the areas to focus on. Also, Facebook was gaining a great deal of ground - where the focus was the user-profile vs. the posted comments. We spent a great deal of time simply defining the areas we should focus on - to ensure that everyone agreed with the work we were doing. Negotiating those opinions between product, engineering, and marketing groups was no small task.

The concepts we ultimately came up with and settled on focused on first, a more streamlined and engaging 3-step approach to setting up your 360-page and several versions of layouts for the actual 360-Home page and user profile page. These versions had slight shifts in module priority throughout. The setup process involved information design and a visual design implementation we knew would engage users. We also purposely built in some simple ways that new users could leverage their existing content from other Yahoo! properties in their 306 pages. The various layotus for the pages emphasized different modules - some emphasizing profile in general, and others emphasizing content publishing. In user-testing, the emphasized profile pages were more successful as was the simple 3-step creation process.