I did some User Interface Testing for Yahoo Mail a few years back, and one of my suggestions to them was a “what’s new” page that would display the additions and changes to Yahoo Mail. That way, I could easily keep track of Yahoo Mail when they changed it. About a year later, that “What’s New” link appeared at the top of Yahoo Mail, and I’ve been checking it ever since. Here’s a story about me dealing with it recently:

I have been a subscriber of Yahoo Mail Plus (their paid service) for a few years now. It’s cheap, and it removes ads from my mail, so I’m happy about that. Today, I noticed a little text box on my main Yahoo Mail page that said the following:

New! Extra email address with awe-inspiring “dot”
Exclusive to Yahoo! Mail Plus customers until November 30th. No extra cost. Get “firstname.lastname@yahoo.com” before someone else does. Get it now!

I’m suprised I noticed the text box, since it blends right in with the rest of the Yahoo Mail UI and looks suspiciously like an ad that I would normally ignore. So, I have no idea how long they’ve been featuring this new option. Weeks? Months? I have no idea.

I decided to check Yahoo’s What’s New to see if Yahoo was talking about their new “dot” feature. Low and behold, the What’s New page said nothing about it.

So, that’s my first Bad User Interface complaint. If Yahoo doesn’t update their What’s New page when the add new features, then I’m not going to be able to trust it, and so the page becomes ineffective to me. Now I know: If one wants to keep up with the new features of Yahoo Mail, checking the “What’s New” page isn’t enough. That’s bad.

But this tale of Bad User Interface gets even weirder.

I decided to contact Yahoo Support to notify them that their What’s New page didn’t include the new “dot” email address feature. I knew from experience that to contact them I’d have to use Yahoo’s Help system, and that before I could send them a message I’d have to use their Help Search. So I searched for “What’s new”. Their Help Search returned the following page:

Yahoo Mail > Yahoo Mail Help: What’s New

Not only did this page did not mention the “dot” email address either, but thisWhat’s New page is completely different from the other one that’s featured at the top of the page. Furthermore, it talks about a feature that I don’t believe actually exists in Yahoo Mail, which is Avatars. I say that because that Yahoo Avatar Help page says nothing about using them in Yahoo Mail.

And to top is all off, the Help What’s New page has a typo in their link to the Avatar page. It links to yahooo.com with an ‘o’ in it.

So, in summary:
1. Yahoo’s What’s New Page didn’t mention the new feature of “dot” email addresses.
2. Yahoo’s Help has a seperate What’s New Page than the main one.
3. Help’s What’s New has different items listed in it.
4. Help’s What’s New page seems to have contradictory information about features that appear to not yet exist in Yahoo Mail (Avatars)
5. Help’s What’s New has a broken link in it.

What it all ads up to is that I simply can’t trust any of the Yahoo support documents to truly keep me informed of what’s new with a service that I pay for. So I’m back to square-one: missing new features or stumbling upon them blindly.

I think Yahoo needs to streamline their help pages, and change their What’s New Page to be more of a changelog that lists additions and changes in chronological order, rather than their current page that feels more like marketing material rather than a help document.

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