I’ve been getting more than a few emails and comments from people looking to remove to their Avatar from their Yahoo email account. A few people want to start a letter-writing campain to get it removed. If you’d like it removed, post a comment here, and link to this blog to help give us some exposure.

Again here are the steps to turn off the Avatar from Yahoo Mail:

Visit the Yahoo Avatars page.
Click the “Preferences” link -- it’s tiny and on the upper-right of the page.
Click the Delete option, then confirm.

Remember, you still won’t be able to get rid of the placeholder box once this is done.

The Avatar, and even the little ghost icon you get if you haven’t enabled Avatars, are quite juvinile. I’m sure there is a whole demographic of people who love Avatars, and that’s fine, except over the last seven-plus years Yahoo has targeted Yahoo Mail at just about everyone, including business users, professionals, grandparents, and millions of others who aren’t the target market for Avatars. So adding the Avatar to Yahoo Mail has made it feel like I’m using a Fisher-Price email application. The look of Yahoo Avatars is shamelessly styled after the Bratz dolls and the Avatar page itself is all about dressing-up and accessorizing your Avatar, like I’m playing dollhouse. When I had an Avatar enabled it made me cringe and it made yahoo mail feel like a cheap marketing ploy rather than a real mail app. There must be millions of mail users who are’nt into this.

More on Yahoo Mail’s Bad User Interface

It’s easy to think that people who don’t want an Avatar in Yahoo Mail can simply turn it off. But let’s take a look at the problem that crops up from making that assumption.

1. If a user has their Yahoo Avatar turned off, which undoubtedly millions of users do, they get a placeholder image in their mail program that features an agressive javascript tooltip that (a.) pops up without a “hover” and (b.) covers up the Unread Messages status and (c.) doesn’t go away immediately when you roll off the placeholder. The result is I see this popup virtually every time and it covers valuable information -- that’s some Bad UI right there but it’s not my point. The tooltip says “Your Avatar goes here! Click here to create the virtual you”.

2. A curious user will click the placeholder and visit the Avatar site where they’re promoted to create an Avatar. There’s not much on the site to let you know what’s going to happen. Yes, there’s a graphic that shows some Avatars, but unless the user is familiar with the Avatar look-and-feel, s/he may mistake this graphic for simple marketing graphics, not realizing it’s an actual preview of what’s to come.

3. Once the user has created their Avatar on the Avatar site, they’ll see their Avatar face in Yahoo Mail and only then will they decide if they like it and want to keep it. But the option to delete it is burried -- not in Yahoo Mail, but in the Avatar pages. In essence, the “off switch” is placed in a totally different location than the “on switch” was. This makes it difficult and frustrating to a user who wants to get rid of their Avatar or experiment.

4. A search for Avatar in Yahoo Mail’s Help pages reveals nothing about how to turn it off, so people end up googling for it and end up on my page here.

A simple fix for Yahoo to implement would be to put a close button on the Avatar graphic. Oh yeah, and to put some information about it in their help pages.

I’ve been quite fascinated with the latest round of Web 2.0 desktops. These are my-yahoo-style content pages that focus more on RSS and Tags integration and use AJAX and CSS to make them more interactive and easier to configure.

The one I’ve been most intrigued with so far is netvibes. I love that from the moment I arrived on their site I could start configuring it without having to make an account first, and it allowed me to save the changes later. I also love that editing their content does not require a seperate page; it’s done right on the main Netvibes page and often without needing to hit a “save” or “update” button. For example, you can click on the page headline and edit it immediately, and as soon as you’re done, the page’s title tag changes. Amazing!

There’s a bunch of other 2.0 Desktops around. Windows Live and Protopage are two others I’ve tried. But for now I’m sticking with Netvibes to see how it goes. I’ll keep everyone here posted.

Check it out: http://www.netvibes.com

I’ve not sampled their ice cream yet, but the people at Laloo’s Goat’s Milk Ice Cream have great taste in design.

Adobe announced that they’re finished with their acquisition of Macromedia. It’s been a mixed-bag for many real-life users out there, some being thrilled with others being worried. But most of the fears have been about user interface or software bloat.

I am not looking forward to the merger because of competition. I really only use one Adobe product, and that’s Photoshop. I’ve been using it almost daily since 1997, and I’ve stuck with it through many revisions since that time. The biggest upgrade I ever saw to Photoshop was 6.0, when Adobe added a ton of web-related features. Photoshop never had proper drawing tools, but 6.0 added vector illustration tools, new in-document text editing, layer styles, layer-based slicing tools, weighted image optimization, the liquify tool, text warping, not to mention a complete second tool called ImageReady designed just for the web. It was just a massive upgrade. Read the rest of this entry

So, a few days after blogging about the Bad User Interface experience I had with Yahoo Mail Yahoo (1) got rid of the offending, error-laden What’s New Help page, (2) they added Avatars to Yahoo Mail, and (3) they still didn’t update their remaining What’s New Marketing page.

There are still no help topics regarding the Avatar in Yahoo Mail, and there’s still no mention of Avatars in the What’s New tab. What does my Avatar have to do with Mail? Does my avatar appear in emails I send? Who knows -- There’s no mention of it in the help system or the What’s New Page. So, again it’s reenforcing that I can’t trust Yahoo’s Help system or What’s New section to find out about new features. This is still very bad User Interface.

For anyone looking to turn off Yahoo Avatars: it’s possible to delete your Avatar if you set one up by going to Yahoo Avatars and clicking the preferences link, then clicking Delete. This will still leave a placeholder that looks something like this, but it’s better than nothing:

I pay for my Yahoo Mail and I’d really like to get rid of the Avatar for good. I don’t even want the placeholder around.