Back in October, Yahoo revealed that Yahoo Answers sees 30 million questions and answers per month, with users contributing 2.4 questions and answers per second. Although Yahoo Answers sees a significant amount of traffic, its design and layout has been outdated. Now Yahoo is rolling out a much-need upgrade and redesign to Answers, which will be implemented over the next few days.
Navigation: The homepage’s navigation bar has four new tabs: Home, Browse Categories, My Activity, and About. Each of the tabs stays on every page you visit in Yahoo Answers. “Home” brings you to the homepage which includes a rotating Best of Answers feature, the link to the Answers Blog and more. “My activity” lets you access your Answers profile, and view your activity on the site. “About” features the Community Guidelines, answers leaderboard, Suggestion Board, and links to the Answers blog.
Browse Categories: Yahoo has redesigned the feature to browse answers by categories. On the previous version of the Answers homepage, all of the categories were displayed on the left hand column, which Yahoo says took up prime landscape on the homepage. Now, Categories is featured in a navigation tab within a hide-away menu. So you can always see the categories on any page via the drop down feature of the “Browse Categories” tab. And you can also lick on the tab j to be taken to the “All Categories” page. From this page, you can access all the questions that are open, resolved or in voting on the site.
Aesthetics: Yahoo has slightly changed the background color of the Answers page; toning down the green and replacing the white background with a light blue palate. Even the smiley icons have received a facelift. With the removal of the categories section, the homepage is a bit more cluttered and roomier. Yahoo says that the backend of the site has been fixed to eliminate a few bugs. Answer category leaderboards will now be updated on a daily basis instead of weekly.
While Yahoo Answers is still one of the leaders in the Q&A space, the site is now facing competition from startups who are innovating in the space, including Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake’s Hunch.