Please put me back to old My Yahoo | Hacker News Reader

Please put me back to old My Yahoo

yahoo.uservoice.com

22 pointsstinger41 comments

What is surprising (and scary) to me is that corporates such as Yahoo who have lots of money and great talent can only end up with seriously mediocre at best re-designs?

At first reading the user complaints, I just thought "Bah, they would get used to it" (without actually visiting the page first). And then I visited https://my.yahoo.com, I totally agree with those complaints. as a fellow designer, some points I've noticed:

#Poor selection of font sizes

#Poor selection of colors (especially for background)

#Poor application of borders (remember, in design, borders portray complexity (in this case, unwanted).

#Inconsistent design themes (Search button has borders and gradients and shadows, the rest do not)

http://img809.imageshack.us/img809/9383/hhew.png

It seems to me that the design they had in mind was something iOS7-ish (which is actually good due to the minimal information it shows the user at any point) , but ultimately they ended up with something else more complex, confusing and awful.

Either way I wish Yahoo good luck and wouldn't dare to judge an entire company based on this design alone.

So on the money. How does this happen? Mayer's majdate was all about a culture shift, aligning the company to her old digs at Google. But it remains a thoroughly mediocre interface and service (for some reason I have refused to relinquish my Yahoo Mail account).

I think it comes down to 2 things:

A) there's an AOL-esque aspect to Yahoo. I genuinely believe that they don't want to be innovative, because they have such a white-shoe and casual-user demographic trapped in their walled garden. Yahoo doesn't want or need to re-invent ghe wheel.

Ii) Yahoo, as s company, is such a bloated entity. A fresh, interesting, original design concept would have so many layers to penetrate. Hence, the diluted mediocre crap.

I think Marissa tries to be personally involved in some design work.

She's pretty hands on. This is an illuminating (though longish) piece regarding her approach: http://www.businessinsider.com.au/marissa-mayer-biography-20...

> corporates such as Yahoo who have lots of money and great talent can only end up with seriously mediocre at best re-designs?

Still suffering from the changes to Google Apps. Now responding to an email in Gmail requires 3 clicks to open it in a pop out full page view.

The sad part is it isn't easy to shift out once your team is on Apps.

Thanks for giving reasons why this dashboard/home page is not well designed.

Can you point to a page that is well designed in your opinion. That would help me as a non-designer to appreciate your points.

Hey Keith, I'm glad you brought this point up!

Well, in all honesty, design is something of personal preference. But, the 'right design' is the one that strikes a chord with the majority of your users, making them 'feel at home'.

There are a lot of examples I'd like to cite, but, the best example you can use for reference is most of Apple's web design philosophy (P.S - I'm NOT an Apple 'fanboy' though I like their designs). Another one would be Stripe. They have some pretty consistent designs!

As a bonus - Every designer has his/her own version of 'good design rules'. These are just mine :)

-Don't use complexity where it's not needed. Borders and gradients add complexity. (good example: iOS 7)

-Generally, try to use contrasting colors for action buttons (Purchase/Sign up/Subscribe). There is some psychological study associated with the color choice too.

Link: http://blog.kissmetrics.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/color...

-Once you use a color for a particular type of button (Action, or example) maintain it throughout the site - So your users will know which buttons are important and have side effects (like, costing them money) and which ones don't.

-Contrast is everything. If you use a dark headline, then use a light background. And vice versa. Also, a small black box of 100px x 100px provides more contrast than a mild grey box of 200px x 200px. Contrast is not something that is proportional with colors. Always experiment!

- Sometimes, you get drowned in your own designs that you wouldn't be able to tell them if they are actually good looking or you only feel that way because you bought it/designed it yourself.

-In such situations, close all tabs, watch a movie or perhaps even go for a small cycling session and come back and re-check. You'd be surprised how many flaws you will be able to discover, then :)

I'm only telling you all this since you specifically mentioned you are a non-designer. I hope this helps :)

I'm afraid we will see more of those puke-colored gradient backgrounds in the near future...

I prefer hearing about _the reasons_ why something new is not appreciated rather than the usual "the older was better".

The poster of the complaint didn't really want to go back to the old My Yahoo. What they want is a new My Yahoo that

* use smaller fonts ("Font way too big and no way to adjust.")

* preserve the user-configured layouts ("Apps are rearranged all over the place, and some old ones are no longer available.")

* provide the useful quick previews for new items ("Hovering over news items no longer gives brief synopses.")

* etc.

Any discussion about "new vs old" is not going to be constructive. Users should learn to report "what" they want, not just filing generic complains. But treating users as intelligent people that can be taught things may go against the current trend of treating users (especially when customers) as spoiled kids.

If I were to deploy such an interface change I would provide a complaints box with these instructions: "0) complain only about one things, you can file as many complaint as you want. 1) Please summarize what you do not like. 2) Please suggest a better alternative. NOTE: generic complains like 'it sucks' will be ignored."

You can read the generic complaints as "I don't want things to change at all. They were ok the way they were. I don't want to be forced to adapt to changes that I never asked for and that do not seem beneficial to me. I don't want to deal with this at all. I don't even want to think about it. I just want to use the app like I used to and carry on with my life."

Resistance to change is a major factor in the adoption of new technology and without some kind of change management, reactance will occur.

I haven't used My Yahoo in about 4-5 years since switching to igoogle, but since iGoogle shuts down at the end of the year I just gave My Yahoo another look as I'll need a new dashboard/news/weather replacement soon. The old My Yahoo was hideous, that looked like it accumulated a bit of Bitrot over the years, the new one actually looks like a breath of fresh air, quite polished and well-designed. It's more likely I'll be switching back to My Yahoo once iGoogle goes out.

Are we looking at the same site?: https://my.yahoo.com/?mkg=970

iGoogle is being transitioned out for a Google now homepage. It's a much better implementation than a smattering of stale info boxes/links.

The aged old problem of change: there are always people who are against it. Change is what Yahoo! needs, if some people can't handle it then maybe they should move on.

It just sucks that Yahoo's market was basically People Who Don't Like Change.

This may be lost here, as most of us aren't yahoo's traditional market. Yes, I have an address and it even has early emails with my wife. That was years ago.

I've already heard from one family member about changed, an aunt, not going to be fun doing family tech support.

Except they 'fixed' stuff that wasn't broken, like Groups.

and sports. top center for each team page used to be the most current game with direct links to box-score and recap/preview. below that was news with stats and division standings in a sidebar. everything I wanted on one page. Now it's split into multiple pages that aren't well interlinked.

only thing I can think of is they get more money with more pageviews

Sounds plausible. By far the plurality of complaints on that page have to do with the loss of customizability. It's as if Yahoo desperately wants people to flip through several pages of unrequested information from sports scores to stock quotes, where one custom page would have sufficed before.

This also ties in with the overall industry trend of using more pixels -- in the form of unnecessary whitespace and large fonts that, again, can't be customized by the user -- to display less information. Once again, the company gets more ad revenue as users struggle to access content that was previously displayed in a more compact format.

These days, beleaguered behemoths like Yahoo and Microsoft focus their business strategies on their wants and needs rather than those of their users. Obviously, this kind of abuse will only work until they're replaced by more customer-centric organizations.

Groups? It had the horrible, horrible interface! And it didn't work properly with different encodings.

Yes, indeed.

Change is just fine — but the inability to port your extra tabs (which may represent the majority of your feeds) is technical incompetence! You wouldn't upgrade your email if the transfer ate half your old emails.

This reminds me of an xkcd comic: every change breaks someone's workflow. It would have been a good idea to include an opt out feature, though.

Eh. Having to create new features that also support the old design is a pain the ass.

>It would have been a good idea to include an opt out feature, though

How far do you carry that opt out? Three versions down the line do you end up having to select one out of four versions? Who is going to maintain that?

Exactly. These people don't realize that "try it" really means "switch ahead of the time when we force everyone else to switch." There's no opt-out because everyone is going to be switched sooner or later, whether they like it or not.

It is still useful when the new version have problems. It took some time before Google finally removed the old Google Groups, and they made it easy to switch back and forth during the meantime.

And currently you have the new Google Maps that's mostly useless, and it's fairly easy to switch back and forth between it and the old version.

Well, if they mean "switch ahead of time", then they'd better say so - instead, if they are saying "try it", then there is a misleading implication "choose which one you prefer" which in this case apparantly is lying to the users.

Yahoo just broke Yahoo Groups a few weeks ago. The new UI is god awful and makes some stuff impossible (like posting in plain text with proper quoting). It's also literally rather broken: author search doesn't work at all. Also they are losing and delaying emails at random and have been for weeks, and stopped answering support emails about it.

You can't import the extra tabs to the new service? The decent engineering talent has clearly left the building at Yahoo!

MyYahoo has been my default RSS reader before there was a google (yes I'm ancient) and it was a real gem. I have 10 tabs in the damn thing and the idea of those not being easy to transfer is a really great reason to find something else.

I guess my real lesson is NEVER trust a third party with the data you love. And I don't care if it's Google or Facebook I'm telling you now as you become an older nerd that those services will go the way of GeoCities one day.

I opted into new My Yahoo!, was presented with a preview with a warning as well as an option to go back https://www.evernote.com/shard/s103/sh/6dff6226-59b4-44e1-82... What did I do wrong?

People hate change. Sometimes warranted, sometimes not.

I don't like the color scheme, but other than that it's not too bad. Yahoo does need to allow more user customization before they lose too many users. That said, people tend to be more vocal when they don't like something. I doubt that those who like the change, or aren't bothered by it, are going to make a comment on uservoice.

"Choose Themes" fixes your colour scheme issue.

If there ever comes a day when I actually use yahoo, I may just take your advice and look for that. ;-)

Ah the vocal minority. As Henry Ford said, "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses". Don't let a few troglodytes stand in the way of progress. Look at your analytics for approval/disapproval, not your inbox.

Have you seen the actual site? It's atrocious.

Looked quite nice to me.

Disclaimer: I don't use my.yahoo.com.

The issue sfor me are:

1) like all the subjects of this link, I can't go take a look & decide - they're forcing me into it.

2) I use Yahoo as a simple new aggregator, with a few small, collapsible boxes for weather, a few sports scores, a couple links. I don't need to see images of the sun that take 15% of my screen to tell me tomorrow will be sunny

I think the comment "This is MY Yahoo, not YOUR Yahoo" hit it right on target. Add to the fact that their new email system is an unusable disaster, it is sadly time after 15(?) years to dump them

The web interface for Yahoo! Groups is more or less unusable. The admin panel doesn't load, can't read messages, can't approve people - More or Less - its non functional.

I can't believe how much of the stuff they put out these days is just flat out broken. How does this get past QA?

I've posted this before, but for all the money they have, give me a decently paid position and I'll at least make sure things actually WORK

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