Meeting with Yahoo - Klaus Kaasgaard

Klaus Kaasgaard is a Vice President at Yahoo. He was the second presenter. He explained to us that the bottom line is customer needs. He said that right now internet products are hot, but the internet is becoming for of a problem than a solution. There are still unmet needs out there. The goal of design is to find un-expected things. If you find what you already know, then don't waste time on it. Address the full range of research and focus on delivery on research not on solutions. He thinks that focus groups are over-used and it doesn't work anymore. We also need to think more creatively.

Meeting with Yahoo's Marc Davis

Our meeting with Yahoo began with a presentation by Marc Davis. Some of the key notes he told us about design were: First, in design, you should re-fram the issue or problem. Second, for a design team, you should put people with different backgrounds together.

Marc also mentioned about a Yahoo design project called "One Connect". It's goal is to connect people with myspace and facebook, etc... all in one. He also talked about yahoo answers - http://www.answers.yahoo.com/. Finally, he talked about using flikr to track people; no more privacy and bosses may know where we are. The way it works is that people can take pictures using the camera on their cell phone. Then they can send it to their flikr account. Flikr recognizes the background and knows where you are.