The world's number one online destination—still the main Yahoo front page—is slowly rolling out the major redesign that was first discussed last fall. US users should start seeing an option to opt-in to the new design when logging in today, while Yahoo will begin rolling out the refresh in France, India, and the UK later in the week. Yahoo's senior vice president of Integrated Consumer Experiences, Tapan Bhat, is already patting himself on the back, calling the new design "the most fundamental change to the homepage ever." We took it for a brief test-drive to see if it lives up to the hype.

The front page has gained a few customization features, similar to the My Yahoo page. "We want to be the center of people's lives online and want to do it in an open, innovative way, all while providing a compelling experience," Bhat told All Things Digital in an interview yesterday. "It marks the beginning of a renaissance of Yahoo, a renaissance where every pixel matters."

You can edit your My Favorites bar, adding up to 3 columns of 12 widgets—though only one column is viewable at a time. Also, the order of the widgets can be re-arranged, except for Yahoo Sites and Yahoo Mail, which are always in the top two slots.

The biggest change to the design is a sort of toolbar on the left hand side called "My Favorites." Users can customize this with up to 36 widgets, which they can customize to gain quick access to things like e-mail, stock quotes, or even third-party sites such as Facebook. Yahoo even includes the ability for users to create their own widgets by clipping an area out of any webpage, similar to a feature in Safari that allows Mac OS X users to create Dashboard widgets from websites.

That will combine with content from the current design, such as top news stories, searches, and hot trends. Bhat explains that the idea is to combine elements of "my world" with "the world," given the user options to customize both types of content. "We wanted to provide broadcast and narrowcast in one place," Bhat said. Yahoo also plans to add syncing with mobile devices, as well, making the whole experience accessible from the desktop or on the go.

In our quick run-through, it doesn't appear that the new design, code-named "Metro," was quite ready to be pulled out of the oven. While the top news stories, searches, and "what's hot" areas work fine, just as they did in the previous design, I couldn't find any way to add the promised custom widget functionality. Further, I added Ars Technica as a favorite site (naturally), though it was only able to display content in the pop-out box in one out of five tries.

Facebook and Flickr were examples of problem widgets, suggesting the problem isn't just connecting to external websites.

Other problems occurred with the supplied widgets. Despite making the round-trip to Facebook three times, and verifying that it was authorized to connect to my account, Yahoo continued to report that it wasn't authorized. I tried using the Flickr widget a half-dozen times, and it reported problems connecting to the service. And some of the widgets, like Games and Maps, inexplicably offered no pop-out. And, frankly, the hover behavior for popping out the widgets needs some improvement, as mousing over the My Favorites quickly became an exercise in frustration as widgets randomly popped up and got in the way.

A status update feature designed to integrate into social networks is included, and it is accessed by clicking just to the right of your username in the upper-right corner. Users of Yahoo Connect and presumably Yahoo IM can see these status updates, and it can also update your Facebook and MySpace status as well—assuming you can get it to work. However, it inexplicably cannot update your Twitter status, despite the service having an open API and the ability to connect to other Web services using OAuth.

The "Movies" widget did pull my location from my profile, showing me relevant movie times for nearby theaters.

The new look is certainly cleaner than the old front page, and feels "fresher." And while tweaking what few options are available is fairly straightforward, it frankly seems like a less-than My Yahoo. It's certain that Yahoo will be working to iron out some issues before the new design becomes the default, though our initial impression is that it looks neat but needs some work before it's ready for the some 330 million unique users that visit every month. We'll reserve final judgment until the new design is ready for full-time deployment.

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