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Yahoo!’s University Design Expo Creates Student/Employee Mashups

Having worked at Yahoo! for nearly two years, I remain impressed at the company’s ongoing efforts to bring folks from the outside world onto campus. Not only have we brought in big thinkers for various weekly brown bag lunch talks (including amazing individuals from Microsoft, Amazon, LinkedIn, NetSquared, and Technorati), we’ve also reached out to the academic community.

Last week, as one of those efforts, Yahoo! hosted a User Experience Design Expo on campus. We invited some of the top graduate-level students from the following programs:

• New York University, Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP)
• Royal College of Art, London, England. Computer Related Design program
• UCLA (Media Design)
• ESDI Graphic Design, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
• California College of Art, Oakland and San Francisco

The Expo was a real-world “mash-up.” Students from around the world shared their latest design thinking with Yahoos from many disciplines. The exchange went both ways, and we shared many of our latest efforts, prototypes and research finding with the students. Both goals seemed on track by the end of Tuesday, as numerous C-level execs sat in on the students’ presentations, as well as chatting more informally at the several “gallery” events.

I was fortunate to be among those chosen to show off some of Yahoo!’s current and upcoming user experience and design projects. Our group showcased behind-the-scenes findings from the new home page, the Mail beta, and the new Photos. I was personally able to share some of our guiding principles used around Personalization on the network. And, as befits any organization participating in the Web 2.0 world, we did our best to field as many questions as possible during the events.

Throughout the event, I was reminded of the dearth of design research available when I was in school. It was refreshing to see that times have changed; many of the students focused on solving actual user needs, and testing their solutions for efficacy. Several of the students’ products and prototypes, in fact, had emerged out of frustrations with existing products or inventive solutions to long-standing needs unaddressed by the current market. Further, these products had been refined and expanded based on user feedback.

By the end of the 2-day event, I think we had successfully exposed a new generation of big thinkers to some of the exciting problems yet to be tackled here at Yahoo!, and, equally importantly, learned a great deal from them. I hope that the conversations and projects shared at the Expo will be just the beginning, and that we see some of these students on campus again…joining the daily dialog that is continually advancing our products.

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Tags: design, new york university, royal college of art, ucla, ucla media design, esdi, esdi graphic design, cca, california college of art, interactive telecommunications program, design expo, yahoo design expo