Yahoo! today announced a new mobile application Yahoo! Mobile at the Mobile World Congress. It consolidates many previously (seemingly) uncoordinated mobile initiatives from the venerable company. This is certainly a welcome development. So far so good. However, it also aspires to be “your starting point to the Internet” on mobile devices, and that’s where the tone starts to sound off-key.
As you can see in the image above, the app provides its own user interface to allow access to its included mobile services (apps within an app) such as Maps or Opera Browser. While this may be useful to some less advanced phones, all smartphones already offer their own carefully designed OS GUIs to which their respective user bases have learned and grown accustomed. Why add to the user’s learning curve by introducing another OS-like layer? It also obstructs certain information that could have been surfaced on the system level, such as the unread mail counts in the screenshot above (you have to first open the Yahoo! Mobile app in order to see it).

To make matters worse, Yahoo! Mobile incorporates many third party contents and services–such as news sources, social networks, or RSS feeds–all under the same roof. It results in a cluttered interface that creates muddled, weighed-down user experience. The two screenshots above illustrate the point nicely; just imagine adding even more content sources to these small screens.
So what went wrong? The whole “portal” paradigm just might have been expired years ago. It was the toast of the town in the ’90s, back when the Internet was a strange and scary place. Many users seems to feel that they needed guidance to navigate this land newly found. As the majority of users becoming experienced and comfortable with the networked space, they have developed complex, dynamic and diverse behavior patterns that no single (clean, planned and orderly) contact point could sufficiently satisfy. Just as Jane Jacobs’ urbanist vision has pointed out, it may be time we recognize that cyber world-making is an obsolete ideal.
Fang-Yu Lin