Yahoo Changed! What Happened?
Carolyn
asked: I’ve been using Yahoo! as my home page for years, and today when I
turned on my laptop and loaded the browser, everything looked completely
different. And, to be honest, Office 365 looked different today than it used to
as well. Is my laptop broken?
We can’t tell you how often we get
asked, usually by family members: “Suddenly, my computer looks different. Is it
broken?” We always chuckle a little, because it never is. The problem is that
Carolyn (and perhaps a family member) was using Web-based services, and the
user interfaces for these services change regularly. Whether the user interface
changed because the vendor wanted to add functionality, or whether the vendor
changed the interface in order to simply “spice things up,” the changes can be
confusing. The funny thing is, the day before Carolyn asked this question, Ken
noticed an article in the Wall Street Journal about the user interface
change—it was that big a change!
The fact is, when you rely on an
online service, you can be guaranteed that sooner or later, the user interface
will change. You need to be willing, at any point, to look around on the screen
and locate the information you need. You don’t have any control over where
Yahoo, or any other online service, puts the various bits of its online
information, so it’s up to you to be flexible, and peruse the screen. We
certainly know people that cannot function when a single icon on their screen
changes location, much less the entire user interface. In this case, both Yahoo and Microsoft’s
Office 365 had updated their interfaces in the same week, so we guess it could
appear that the computer was somehow “broken”, when, in fact, it was just
progress. As you well know (and to misquote Heraclitus, that famous Greek
philosopher), the only constant in the computer industry is change.
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