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.

I’m cynical. But I believe that the new Xbox 360 has the number “360” in it because if they had named it the Xbox 2 it would have sounded lame when compared to the upcoming Play Station 3. Three is better than two, isn’t it? But how does three compare to three-sixty? Tricky Microsoft.

So, did Nintendo fail by not giving their upcoming “Nintendo Revolution” console a big flashy number at the end? Not nessicarily. Remember, 360 degrees equals one revolution.

Since 1995 there’s been a joke going around that goes something like this:

Only Microsoft could design an OS so counter-intuitive that shutting down the computer is accessed from the “start” menu.

All too true, and I occasionally still see that gag on the web. But, many people don’t realize that Apple one-upped Microsoft with the crazy-popular iPod. Here’s my Apple version:

Only Apple could design a music player so counter-intuitive that shutting down the device requires pressing-and-holding the Play button for three seconds.

Furthermore, there is no text label on the Play button to let one know that it’s overloaded with “off”. And during this three second period while ‘I’m holding the play button down, there’s no visual indicator that anything is happening. And one out of three times when I’m attempting to turn my iPod off I get five to seven seconds into it before I realize that for some unknown reason the iPod is ignoring the command, so I have to let go of the button, wait a second or two, and try it again and hope for the best.

The iPod is far from a bad product, but it’s filled with tiny little cases of Bad UI like that.

Update:

A bit more about this. Since turning something off is normally a simple procedure, the iPod’s overloaded Off button can make first-time users who don’t figure it out to feel, well, stupid. And a product should not make the user feel stupid.

I suggest Apple change the Hold switch to do double duty. Make it a 3 position switch, with it’s normal position resting in the center. Slide it to the left, and it locks on “hold”. Sliding it to the right makes temporary-contact as an off/on toggle. The right side is spring-loaded to return to the center. This allows the switch to rest only in the center (on) or the left (as hold), and this way the device can auto-power-off without the switch ending up in the wrong state. This also solves the problem I run into occasionally where I try to power the iPod down while the device is on Hold.

Almost immediately after posting my blog about Google Maps and Yahoo Maps lack of multi-line address input I had an idea to write a quick little tool that will take a multi-line address and pass it on to Google Maps or Yahoo Maps Beta , formatted correctly of course.

Here it is:
Multi-line Input for Google Maps and Yahoo Maps

This little tool fixes a bit of Bad User Interface in those mapping sevices.

Google and Yahoo: See, that wasn’t so hard was it?

For years and years and years, I’ve written addresess like this:

Mr. and Mrs. Fakeperson
123 Fake Street
Monolux, California 92001

See that? It’s on three lines. The address itself is on two. That’s how we were all taught to do it in school. It’s often how addresses are written in emails, and websites, on envelopes, and on the note my Dad pins to my shirt when he lets me out of the house alone.

But Google Maps and Yahoo Maps Beta both only have one address line. So If I get a two-line address in an email and I try to paste it into one of these map sites it fails miserably. The frustrating thing about it is that wanting to map a two line address seems like an extremely common use case. In fact in my life it’s more common than having a single line address.

When you paste a two-line address into Google Maps, only the first line survives. So you have to go back and copy the second line, return to Google Maps, and paste it in there, along with a comma.

The new Yahoo Maps beta pastes both lines into the field (yay!) but won’t reconize the Carriage Return, so you get a run-on sentence like this:

123 Fake StreetMonolux, California 92001

This might lull one into thinking it’s going to work, but after hitting enter it’s revealed that it doesn’t. Still, it’s significantly better than Google Maps, because all you need to do is just add in the comma. Yahoo, you’re soooooo close! Yahoo’s old UI was multiline, but instead of being one giant text field, it was multiple single-line text fields, so that didn’t work either.

I’m kind of shocked that with the new map revolution, neither of these systems are optimized for the copy/pasting of addresses. After all, the web has supported multi-line text fields for as long as I can remember. Come on Google Maps and Yahoo Maps, get with it! You’re going in the Bad User Interface section of my site until you fix this.

Quick update: I’ve created this multi-line address mapper tool to solve this problem for the time being.

Today I got an email from Amazon Web Services about their new service, the Amazon Mechanical Turk.

I had to rub my eyes and double-check the sender to make sure I was not seeing things. I wasn’t. Amazon Mechanical Turk is a service that farms out remedial automated tasks to humans, with an API that mimics artificial intellegence.

I think this has to be about the stupidest name for a service I’ve ever heard. I’m familiar with the infamous chess-playing automaton turk . I read about it when I was young and have been quite fond of it ever since. Last year I actually worked on a design for a toy partially based on the turk. And I’m a huge fan of Amazon as well. But to name an automation service after it is just asking for trouble. It requires a long-winded explanation for people who aren’t familiar with story, and it’s not exactly a name that rolls off the tip of the tounge.

Overall, my experience with the Amazon Mechanical Turk was an entertaining one, if not from just the silly name.

How Amazon Mechanical Turk works:

Let’s say I have a website that needs tens of thousands keyword-tagged photos. I have the photos, but they’re not tagged. To do it alone would be a huge task for me. It would also be a huge pain to hire people to tag them for me. After all, I’m not a people-person. What I really need is a way to automate it. And need a way to automate the automation, becuase I’ll be adding new photos all the time. The Mechanical Turk system allows me to automate the process with humans. I can build a process that accepts photos and passes it to Amazon, who in-turn finds the people, gets the data tagged, and gets it back to me.

So, that’s it in a nutshell. There’s a second part, their website where they match people up with tasks. I decided to see what kinds of tasks they were offering and how much they paid. Amazon was offering “image alignment” for 3 cents a photo. I decided to log in and see how it worked.

I spent the next 30 minutes doing image alignment, which consisted of matching photos to a street address for Amazon’s Blockview yellowpages and map. For every match I made, I got 3 cents. Whooo hooo! I ended up matching 82 images and made $2.46 , although I skipped a bunch because I could not reconize the address.

I have so many questions and conserns about the Mechanical Turk that I don’t know if I can explain it all here. What’s the quality like? Who’s actually going to spend hours rating photos for just a few cents? Who’s going to take a service serious with a name like Mechanical Turk.

here’s their site:

Amazon Mechanical Turk

I’m tagging this as bad user interface because of the silly name.

Another Web2.0 trend : The public Beta. You know, when a website runs for years with a little label stating it’s beta, as if it’s an excuse to have bugs or unfinished features.

Citations: flicker , gmail

So, just I’ve written a few Photoshop tutorials in the last few years. I’ve tried to focus on not-run-of-the-mill tips that are non-obvious. The change a logo to work on a dark background tutorial is my latest, and I was spurred to write this after realizing that that technique I had come up with was quite simple for being so unobvious.

Anyway, my Photoshop tutorials are on my homepage under “Articles”.

I’ve overhauled the old book and music reviews over at tikiroom.com. It’s driven using a new engine that makes it much faster and easier for me to add reviews. This is a small step towards overhauling the entire site so that it’s not so mashed-up. I’ll be watching traffic and sales to see if anything changes. Here are some links:

tiki books
tiki music
Space-Age sounds

I still cringe when I hear “web 2.o” thrown about. I completely buy into what it stands for, and where it’s going, but I believe the label is hype,because I don’t see many aspects of Web 2.0 as being new. Perhaps it’s because I’ve been running a web forum for a few years now. But I’m off-track, perhaps another post.

Here’s a list of a few web2.0 trends I’ve spotted these days:

Missing Vowels
Boy, vowels must be selling for a premium these days, since they seem to be missing from a handful of Web 2.0 sites.

Citations: Flickr, Frappr, not to mention the hipper-than-thou phones at Motorola: The RAZR, PEBL, and ROKR.

Vanilla Design
I think Google popularized the trend of no-frills websites as a “cool” thing, but the Web 2.0 version of the vanilla website seems to use a little more CSS than Google.

Citations: Wordpress, Flock

Multi-sized type
The trend is to post a series of words or phrases in different point sizes. This looks very amateurish to me, like something I did when I first used the GEOS word processor in the mid 80s-- more WYSIWYG1.0 than Web2.0. I spotted it on the Flock preview page as well, but it seems to be gone now.

Citation: Wordpress forums, Ning near the bottom.