Larry tesler has made a career out of making computers easier to use—the man invented the idea of cutting and pasting when he was an engineer at the legendary Xerox PARC research facility in Silicon Valley in the mid-1970s. But these days the 60-year-old whiz is facing a distinctly different design challenge. As the new vice-president of the user experience and design group at Yahoo! Inc., he's charged with fine-tuning some of the Internet's primest real estate: the Yahoo.com home page. On one hand it's a rare opportunity to shape the design of a seminal Web portal that draws millions of visitors in a single day. "Anything I do will have a huge impact on a lot of people," he says. On the other hand, by many important metrics, what he's fixing ain't broke. While the page's current design won't win any beauty contests and lacks the simple elegance of archrival Google Inc's welcome mat, it works. And those millions of daily visitors might chafe at any overhaul that displaces Yahoo's myriad features. If Tesler were to scare offjust 2% of Yahoo's daily users, it would amount to 3 million fewer visitors.
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