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October 19, 2007

A Day in Their Shoes

Like any consumer-focused tech company, Yahoo! spends a lot of time conducting various kinds of customer research. We have a dedicated research team that takes this on to understand our customers and improve our products. But last week, we wanted to do something different and have the rest of the team go deeper as well. We invited members of the Yahoo! Search product, marketing, design, and engineering teams to get out of their cubes and into the "shoes" of our customers for a day. The goal of these customer visits was simple -- have every team member understand at a very personal level how their customers use search in their daily lives.

After forming small teams and hanging with financial analysts, stay-at-home moms, Yahoo! loyalists, customers who use competing products, teachers, and students alike, the day culminated with a Customer Poster competition where Yahoo! teams shared and reflected on what they learned.

By observing our customers where they actually search, we saw how they chose a search engine for different tasks, scanned a results page and what they expected to see -- whether it was a hedge fund analyst doing company research, a teacher building a lesson plan or, in my case, a parent researching images of Peter Pan for a blog she was creating for the local elementary school's play.


Search Field Day


While only a few team members received awards for their Customer Posters, we all felt pretty victorious because our customers had inspired some great ideas that will help us build more useful products to better serve them.

If you've got any big ideas on how we can make search a better experience for everyday users, we're all ears.


Michael Kronthal
Customer Insights Team, Yahoo! Search

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Comments

The bottom line is relevance. All of the new Search Assistance features are nice - but users need the most relevance SERPs.


Yahoo is reasonably relevant by today's standards.

Hopefully, you will encompass more of the 'invisible Web, into the SERPs

From a user interface perspective, the search bar on the Yahoo homepage could be made a little bigger and more centered in the height of page

The real flaw is that there does not appear to be any interest in improving AltaVista and AllTheWeb.
They have been relegated to expensive doorway page status. They should be given their own SERPs and personalities.

Posted by: Search◊ Engines Web | October 19, 2007 08:21 PM

Customers are the key. Every company should stay in the customers' shoes for at least a day in a month! Nice work!

Posted by: Alexis Kauffmann | October 20, 2007 05:13 PM

Customers often use other search services because they wanted to find exactly they want to. But other Yahoo services still good and can help. For example Answers.

Posted by: Symbian | October 23, 2007 03:32 AM

Great idea to have employees get a feel in customer's situation.....

Posted by: Home Furnishings | October 24, 2007 11:06 AM

One thing that has improved a lot recently on Yahoo search is the new way you treat clicking on a link from a yahoo news story. Nicely done.

Posted by: Advice Network Writing Contest | October 30, 2007 01:23 PM

Maybe a strange questino or comment, but have you guys ever considered that there might be differences between countries and cultures in the way they search? I could imagine certain countries use many words to describe the item they are looking for while people from other countries might be shorter in describing the item.

I like the costumer involvement yahoo emphasized in this article. I only wonderd whether this is an incident or not? To make costumer involvement really work costumer involvement should be periodical and can be in the whole product development process.

Posted by: interaction design | November 1, 2007 05:37 AM

good idea..

Posted by: berkay | December 18, 2007 04:02 PM

One thing that has improved a lot recently on Yahoo search is the new way you treat clicking on a link from a yahoo news story. Nicely done.

Posted by: image upload | December 24, 2007 10:14 AM

Great idea to have employees get a feel in customer's situation..

Posted by: güzel sözler | January 16, 2008 12:39 PM

thanx a lot

Posted by: mIRC | February 3, 2008 02:18 AM

Successful website

Posted by: mIRC | February 3, 2008 02:20 AM

Thanks for nice post

Posted by: film izle | February 3, 2008 02:21 AM

One thing that has improved a lot recently on Yahoo search is the new way you treat clicking on a link from a yahoo news story. Nicely done.

Posted by: aşk şiirleri | February 24, 2008 02:57 PM

Customers often use other search services because they wanted to find exactly they want to. But other Yahoo services still good and can help. For example Answers.

Posted by: radyo dinle | February 24, 2008 02:59 PM

thanks best regards

Posted by: mirc | February 25, 2008 11:01 AM

thanks best regards

Posted by: mirc indir | February 25, 2008 11:03 AM