Yahoo! Movies EU editorial staff create as many as two features a week. These might be previews of an upcoming film, seasonal previews, actor profiles, top ten features, or film festival features.
In 2008, they were still creating feature pages using creaky old templates like this:
Note the narrowness of the page, the stingy photos, the dated chrome, and the video links that open a popup video player.
Working with User Experience Design, my project was to implement shiny new templates roughly based on Yahoo! TV that would be more attractive to users and easier to sell to sponsers.
Key improvements included:
- Wider page, allowing integration of a new video player component with a larger playing area and a big bold preview.
- Multipage gallery where each photo view was a new ad impression.
- Use of photo pages to drive traffic deep into the site using contextual links.
Over one hundred features have been successfully created using these new templates. Only a selection are shown below.
