A while back I wrote about the secret handshake. The idea is that websites that want to communicate with you could allow you to provide to them a keyword (not a password) that they would then include in all email correspondence. It would make phishing more obvious and allow you to set up filters to look for your handshakes to move them to priority folders.

Yahoo! has been using something similar for at least a few months now. It’s not for email, it’s for their log in page. Here’s how it works:

• Yahoo allows you to choose some words or upload an image. This image becomes your seal.
• Once you’ve done this, the seal will appear everywhere Yahoo asks you to sign in.
• Since it’s displayed before you sign in, it’s computer dependent -- go to a different computer and you’ll need to set up another seal.

Read the rest of this entry

Gmail has some UI problems. Recently I blogged a bit about the bugs in Yahoo Mail Beta and in that entry I said that even with it’s slowness, Yahoo Mail Beta is still better than Gmail. A few people have chimed in to let me know their own thoughts, and one poster took issue with my Yahoo vs. Gmail comment:

your right about one thing: its antaganizingly slow. horribly slow.

your completely wrong about another: it is in no way shape or form, better than gmail. gmail is a MUCH better online email service. nothing really compares to gmail as of yet even with yahoo’s new offering..

I admit that Gmail does have Yahoo Mail Beta beat in the speed department. But I still feel that Yahoo Mail Beta is better than gmail. Read the rest of this entry

I’ve been using Yahoo Mail Beta for the last month or so, and it’s really starting to drive me buggy.

When I first started using it, I was quite impressed. It featured drag-and-drop folder operations, multiple tabs, and more. But a recenty a few aspects about it have really been bothering me.

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I’ve blogged about this before but it continues to get sillier and sillier. Want to keep track of What’s New With Yahoo Mail?! There’s now three different ways to get only part of the full picture:

• Use Yahoo Mail’s What’s New Page link at the top of the Mail Page (which I will call the “What’s New Page” from now on). If you subscribe to Yahoo Mail Plus you’ll get a different page that looks broken to me.
• Look at the “What’s New” section of Yahoo Help (which I will call “What’s New Help” from now on). Hey, it’s got info about Avatars!
• Subscribe to the Yahoo Mail Beta Update Blog (which I will call the “Mail Blog” from now on) where you’ll get another set of info.

The problem with this is, of course, that none of these three-and-a-half sources provide all the info. The What’s New Page informs us of a Beta, Mobile Phone Alerts, and some sort of award they won. The What’s New Help section informs us of the new Avatar, the PhotoMail beta, and a change to saving copies of messages. And the Mail Blog informs us of the Blog itself and the new “dot” yahoo email addresses feature. There appears to be no crossover.

So, now I’ve got three places I need to look in order to find out what’s new with Yahoo Mail, and that’s still not full coverage. The Mail Blog is a bit confusing. I think it’s fine to have beta news in a different place because not everyone has the Beta. But parts of the blog claim “beta” while other parts claim “everything”. In fact it’s missing info on new beta features (RSS reading) and including info for non-beta-exclusive features (the “dot” email addresses). Which is it, Yahoo?

All of this gives me the impression that the Yahoo Mail group has a communication problem. They need to cut the marketing hype out of their What’s New Pages (Come on Yahoo, your PC Magazine award is not exactly “What’s New” material), they need to be inclusive of all that’s new (none of the News pages mentioned the addition of RSS which apparently was announced on the 29th of Nov. ) and they need to pick one place for all the news to go.

Come on Yahoo! I’m rooting for you!

I discovered that clicking the “subject” button in the compose tab of the new Yahoo Mail Beta will give you a random, silly subject line that reads like spam. Good work Yahoo.

I’ve been ranting for the last few weeks about the functionless and Yahoo Avatar and how to remove it.

Perhaps it’s dumb luck, or perhaps someone at Yahoo Mail has been reading my rants and decided to throw me a bone, because two days ago my Yahoo Mail Plus account got upgraded to the new Yahoo Mail Beta. I’ve been a huge fan of Oddpost and I’ve been waiting for this for a while.

And guess what? There’s no Yahoo Avatar in the new user interface. In fact, there’s not even a place for it since the old mail “home page” is gone, with the new UI defaulting to the Inbox view. This is good news. Of course, it doesn’t mean that the Yahoo Avatar won’t debut in the new UI at some point, but the professional feel of the Yahoo Mail beta makes me hopeful.

I’m not going to bother with a full review of Yahoo Mail Beta since it’s been convered by many other blogs. There are choices they made that I don’t agree with (that I’m going to blog about later) but my first impression is that it is extremely cool. Good job Yahoo, for both the great new UI and for not having the Avatar. I can now sleep again.

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.

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.

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.