The Ultimate Web Design Job

Well, not probably the ultimate (see Google), but I’d be one excited designer if I was given the same task as Larry Tesler. As the new vice-president of the user experience and design group of Yahoo!, he’ll be leading one of the greatest web design jobs in the world: improving the Yahoo.com homepage.

Larry Tesler has made a career out of making computers easier to use — the man invented the idea of cutting and pasting when he was an engineer at the legendary Xerox PARC research facility in Silicon Valley in the mid-1970s. But these days the 60-year-old whiz is facing a distinctly different design challenge. As the new vice-president of the user experience and design group at Yahoo! Inc. (YHOO ), he’s charged with fine-tuning some of the Internet’s primest real estate: the Yahoo.com home page.

For the moment, Tesler is tight-lipped about what’s in store for Yahoo.com, but he does offer some hints. “One thing I’ve been pushing hard since I got here is that using Yahoo should be a delightful experience,” he says. Expect him to take advantage of more advanced Web browsers, and he may reduce clutter by “hiding” material so users can opt to see more news, for instance, by rolling their mice over a topic. That would be a big improvement. But he has a long way to go before Yahoo is a delight.

You’ll have to wear a lot of hats for this job (usability, design, programming, marketing, etc.) but none more important than that of a magician. Hey, you’ll need a lot of wizardry to please 15,000,001 daily visitors (the last visitor would be your boss).

I already pity the guy 😉

Via BusinessWeek.