Yahoo is a major producer of both text and video content. So, it often researches profitable ways to remix and repurpose them. As an R&D contractor for its News division, I designed and prototyped concepts for new audio-to-text, dual cameral video, commenting, and text-to-image generation features for apps and Web sites, as well as storyboards and UX designs for a personal finance app.
Yahoo Accessibility’s “Y-clip” uses natural language processing to let viewers clip sports videos and the matching transcriptions of their play-by-play voiceovers interchangeably. The clips can then be shared to social media or the video’s comment thread.
As commenters are Yahoo’s most engaged users, I created several UX concepts to drive conversation, including a swipeable paragraph and a comment button that shows the heat of a section’s conversations.
The “Reax” concept for Yahoo News used dual-camera video to meld livestreaming with open-access social video chat.
During major events, users could watch—and add their own—livestreams with real-time text transcripts. Live chat comments included a gamified button pull effect that shot stars onto the screen.
Yahoo was also developing a personal finance app based on tandas, a peer-to-peer lending method which is common worldwide but relatively unknown in the US. I designed these landing pages to help executives envision how different value propositions might shape the marketing.
I drew these boards to illustrate how we might explain tandas using a visual metaphor like an umbrella in the app’s onboarding flow animation.
I also drew illustrations of tanda member locations and financial needs in a range of styles in order to test their flexibility and user appeal.
Yahoo desperately needed R&D expertise after announcing its acquisition by Verizon. Departments wanted to launch their nascent concepts soon enough to get real-world results before the new management team reviewed them…at the same time that staff were departing and there was a hiring freeze.
I helped them get several of these projects launched and past the management transition, including the “Y-clip” project for Yahoo’s Accessibility team, the “Headline reactions” feature on Yahoo’s homepage, and the “Tanda” app for Yahoo Finance.
.6M
daily views of homepage projects
K
Tanda app installs in < 4 months
projects across 4 Yahoo divisions