White Edition
Shine - Cool Introduction
Yahoo has created a new site - for women - call "Shine". The interesting thing about this site (apart from its nice design and content) is the way it introduces itself to newcomers.
When you visit the site for the first time you are greeted with a small "welcome box" - and this is not one of your ordinary welcome boxes either. When you click "continue" it scrolls the page to a new part of the site and opens up a new box. It continues to do this 4 times in an effort to quickly introduce you to the site.
This is a very good way to explain how something works in a quick and easy way. I can see many uses of this technique in web applications where the interaction is sometimes a bit more complicated.
Comments
Daniel Aleksandersen - Apr. 7, 2008
I liked the introduction, but I disliked that the "tour of the website" scrolled downwards so fast. I can understand that many will have problems different whether they are scrolling downward or seeing a whole other page.
Another small annoyance is that there is no way to trigger the introduction again... or at all.
Alex - Jul. 18, 2008
One more women website, even from Yahoo, does it have any chances to be popular?
Published: Apr. 1, 2008
in work notes
Thomas Baekdal is a Writer, Interaction Designer, Change Advocate and Project Manager.
John Fredrickson - Apr. 2, 2008
I was definitely impressed by Shine as well. I don't remember the welcome tips though. Perhaps I just closed the first one as soon as it popped up as has become the habit for me whenever something pops up on my page without my request. It's definitely a nice touch for the more casual web audience though, which this site is clearly targeted at.
I was particularly impressed at Yahoo's ability to handle so much content in a clean manner. I have always been frustrated at Yahoo's over-cramming of their pages so it's good to see they are taking a more design-focused approach.
I wonder if maybe they just thought that their overly dense designs were appropriate for their more traditional audience and that this cleaned-up version is only necessary for middle-aged woman. I certainly hope that's not the case though and that maybe this new design reflects a change in their overall design principles.