Web 2.0 and User Generated Content (UGC) are no long er only marketing pos­tulates, the success of online sites like Wikipedia and YouTube indicates that generating content is more and more becoming reality in online usage behavior. At Yahoo! we strongly believe that UGC is a key driver for increasing engagement and user experience. Therefore we started soon to think about how to use the willingness of our users to participate actively and to share their knowledge in our products. As a data driven company - more than 10 terabytes of data is collected all over the Yahoo! Network daily - a lot of researchers squire our stakeholders in each step of decision taking, product development and product integration.

The presentation summarizes the different research approaches and initiatives taken during the whole development process of our recently launched product Ya­hoo! Clever. From a mandate - increase online traffic through UGC - to the finally launched product a variety of different studies have been conducted in Yahoo!. First of all there was a changing usage behavior of our users concerning social networking and UCG for us to understand. Therefore ethnographic studies and focus groups have been conducted in the biggest Yahoo! markets. At the same time researchers in the design department started with prototype evaluation de­sign studies in which mockups and different types of network integration have been tested. Design researchers work closely with the product development team and the engineering team on the product's front end site.

Researchers all over the Yahoo! Network in the local markets start to work toge­ther with the researchers overseas once the decision has been taken in what local markets the product will be launched. In focus groups the researchers compile which steps are necessary to localize the product. Online surveys and segmen­tation studies help to find out the potential of the product in the local market. Marketing teams start to investigate how to address the users, how to name the product and to define the marketing campaign. At the same time first tests with the product - still in beta phase - are made.

Once the product is launched in beta stadium the first aim is to test it under live circumstances. The collected data (usage behavior analysis and segmentation analysis) help us to understand how users interact with the product and where the product needs to be improved. Finally once the marketing campaign launched, a CATI survey shows us the impact of the campaign and if we succeed in driving users to our product.