Voices of our users

Posted September 23rd, 2009 at 12:00 pm by Nicki Dugan, Blog Editor

 9 Comments / Filed in: Our Users, Video

As Elisa Steele, our chief marketing officer, noted in her post about the launch of our new brand campaign, we’ve spent a lot of time over the past few months getting to know what we mean to people. To bring that to life, we set out with a camera and a microphone and caught up with a wide variety of users to ask them what difference we make in their lives.

Here’s a video that captures just some of their stories:

Some notes on these great characters, by order of appearance:

• Sonia uses the homepage to manage her life… and admits to listening to Launchcast radio on Yahoo! Music when she’s in the shower.
• Dennis first used Yahoo! Search in grade school to look up the pink Power Ranger (he had a big crush).
• Bob lives on Yahoo! Finance and swears it helped him save his retirement funds.
• Evelyn relied on Yahoo! to stay connected to the world when she was in the Air Force, stationed in the desolate Australian outback.
• Bodhi is a California grad student from India who uses Yahoo! Messenger video chat to connect with her parents in India every night.
• Ted and Vicky used Yahoo! Messenger to court each other – much of it long distance. They also ditched their cable when discovering they could meet all their entertainment needs on Yahoo!.
• Erin is a fine art photographer who’s created a huge following on Flickr for her beautiful Polaroid photography (and scored press coverage and several commissions and exhibitions).
• Brandon is addicted to film and relies on Yahoo! Movies on his iPhone for ratings and reviews (and incidentally is one of the youngest patent holders in the US).
• Valerie used a Freecycle group on Yahoo! Groups to outfit her classroom with free stuff (including a clawfoot bathtub the kids read in).
• Larry admits to spending about two hours a day managing his teams on Yahoo! Fantasy Sports.
• Emily loves looking things up on Yahoo! Search, like where dimples come from and why the starling is the most hated bird in the world.
• Thomas gets sucked into Yahoo! News daily, digging that one minute he can read about the elections in Afghanistan and then stumble on something about the depletion of ants in the Amazon rainforest.

Connecting with real people, real users, to hear what they love, hate and need about using our products is what we’re all about. As our new brand campaign stipulates, Yahoo! is about you. All you.

Stay tuned for standalone video profiles of these great voices and more.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Tagged: Our Users, Video

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9 Comments Add your own

Sunny Singh | September 23rd, 2009 at 1:57 pm

Exactly why I love Yahoo! Especially the homepage, and many like Google for some reason but really they have no class so Yahoo’s the one stop site for everything.

Emily Grube | September 23rd, 2009 at 3:37 pm

Nicki,

Nice work. It’s always good to refresh yourself on why Yahoo! is so useful. =)

Brinke | September 24th, 2009 at 1:37 pm

Nice work, now I know what I missed!

Brinke | September 26th, 2009 at 6:37 pm

PS-

Can someone design and upload a Yahoo Firefox theme?
Maybe with the Y!ou theme,etc

phillip | September 28th, 2009 at 10:42 am

I just wanted to say that I do not like the new homepage at all. I want my old homepage back. It just worked better for me. and it did not have crap poping up on it all the time.

Becky | September 30th, 2009 at 12:47 am

I hate the new homepage. I use Yahoo for everything…I mean EVERYTHING!!!! And now with this new homepage I can’t find anything. I want my old homepage back. You used to give us the option to switch back and that was great, but now you have taken that away….you need to give it back. The last thing I want to do is have to find a new homepage, but I just can’t make Yahoo work for me anymore….

Seth Wisely | October 4th, 2009 at 9:45 pm

yahoo products do not carry the creepy stigma of google “free” products. Please keep it that way. :)

valves manufacturer | October 11th, 2009 at 6:13 pm

Your voice are very good.

fallen earth chips | November 13th, 2009 at 1:46 am

Nice work.