Yahoo!

I joined Yahoo! in January 2006 as a Senior Art Director on the brand creative team, shipping campaigns, microsites, landing pages and email for the flagship business units: HotJobs, Video, Elections, the Who’s Viewed Me push. In the summer of 2007 I was promoted into the Consumer / Customer Innovation Group, a small team chartered to find revenue the business units couldn’t see from where they sat. Different job. Instead of making the thing, I was deciding what the thing should be, prototyping it, and selling it across the company.

Chapter one: the brand team

Yahoo! in 2006 still had the purple, the yodel, and 500 million users a month. Brand work there meant volume and speed: a campaign a week, each one needing to look like Yahoo! and like itself. The HotJobs newspaper and “Magic Slate” work, the Elections coverage, and the Butterfinger interactive video ad are from this period.

Chapter two: the Innovation Group

The Customer Innovation Group reported up through the consumer side and had one mandate: connect advertisers to audiences in ways the standard ad units couldn’t. We ran summits, brought business units into the same room, and left with concepts, prototypes and a partnership. Three of them are below.

Bubble My Video

A user-generated overlay on Yahoo! Video: viewers could add speech bubbles to any clip and share the result. It looked like a toy. It was an ad platform, because a bubble is inventory, and inventory a viewer places themselves gets watched. I led design from concept through the shipped feature and the branding around it.

Threading

Threading was an advertising model rather than a format: one advertiser’s story carried across a user’s session as a sequence instead of a set of interruptions. I designed the page architecture and the animation that explained it to the business units and to advertisers.

Chief Household Officers and Tech Boomers

Two audiences Yahoo! had and didn’t serve: the person who runs a household’s money and time, and the fifty-plus user who’d arrived online late and stayed. The work was research first, personas, a “Gold Mine” sprint, then concepts for products and ad experiences aimed at them. Some of this surfaced in Shine, Yahoo!’s women’s property, in 2008.

Running the group

I wrote the group’s first-100-days plan, its goals and its marketing plan, and ran the innovation summits. The CCI logo and the Purple Cow principles were how a six-person team got a company of ten thousand to take its meetings.

Side projects that shipped

Mia Bella Profile Salon was a small brand I did in this period; it’s here because it shows the same hand at a different scale.

Recommendations

As the former User Experience Design Director of Yahoo! Personals, I’ve had the pleasure of knowing Sean Ross for the last two years. He was a tremendous employee and an asset to Yahoo’s User Experience group and the Personals team. Sean is mature, dedicated and hard-working. He doesn’t shy away from challenging projects, has a strong point-of-view, and at the same time readily accepts feedback about his work. Many times when our team was seemingly out of ideas, Sean stepped in with new thoughts that ultimately led to a solid solution. It is without reservation that I recommend Sean for a design leadership role.

— Kaari Peterson, Director of User Experience at Yahoo!

Sean is one of those rare individuals who can take a step back from an assignment and ask himself, “What would really get people excited about this product?” — then draw on his experiences to come up with the answer. His ideas are always unique and always big. I would warmly recommend him to anyone for anything. Whatever it is, Sean can figure it out. Trust me.

— Todd Anthony, Creative Director at Yahoo!

If superior talent and personal integrity are important qualities in a potential employee for you, then there’s no question that Sean Ross is the perfect creative for your project. He offers something beyond talent — character. He’s an amazing designer who really listens to the needs of each client and is able to design what they sometimes cannot say in words. He is innovative, deadline-driven, responsible, and very intelligent. Simply put, he is phenomenal.

— Joseph Bettencourt, Sr. Program Manager at Yahoo!

Sean was a key member of a great creative team and the go-to on a ton of creative projects — with objectives varying from driving network traffic to increasing trial rates to profile completion — all during a time of huge growth for Yahoo! Personals and the emerging online dating category. He is prolific, smart, clever, a good listener, consumer-focused, humble, calm, super collaborative, and results oriented.

— Annie Sammis, Marketing Director at Yahoo!

What I took with me

Innovation groups die when they can’t show the business units a number. Ours lasted because every concept came with a revenue story and a prototype someone could click. I’ve never pitched a design without both since.

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