Will Yahoo's Redesigned Mail Shed the Unflattering Stereotype of Its Users?

If you're among the couple of hundred million people using Yahoo Mail, you might want to log in to your Yahoo accounts today because the company is rolling out a brand new look for its email service. CEO Marissa Mayer introduced the change earlier today in a blog post, showing off the new Yahoo Mail for the web, Windows 8, iOS, and Android. Yahoo said its mail service is now faster, leaner, and easier to use.

Yahoo Mail general manager Vivek Sharma explained the changes in Yahoo Mail in his own post. What Yahoo wanted to do was to redesign its email service back to how it's supposed to be. Right now, it's convoluted. It's got a massive ad box to the right, a long search bar taking over half the top space, a list of trending search subjects below it, a list of news in the middle, all essentially a bunch of stuff you don't care about when all you want to do is check on your email.

All those stuff could have simply stayed at the front page of Yahoo, but somehow, someone, who is presumably no longer with the company, decided that when you want to check for email, you'd be interested in checking out everything that Yahoo offers. Guess what? Not really, no. Google figured it out back in 2003 with Gmail. Microsoft recently reconfigured Hotmail into a more functional Outlook, and Yahoo finally managed to roll out a much cleaner version of Yahoo Mail. And it's not just the web mail.

The Windows 8 version of Yahoo Mail is reminiscent of Microsoft's own Outlook.com. Clean, simple, straightforward. The iPhone and Android apps for Yahoo Mail also sport a similar theme which finally brings familiarity and consistency when switching across platforms as people tend to do these days. The iPhone, Android, and Windows 8 apps are available to download from their respective application stores now, while the web mail should be rolling out very soon.

With this new look, perhaps Yahoo could entice people back to using their Yahoo addresses and shed this stereotypical image of people who use Yahoo Mail.