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Yahoo Mail Avatars: The final chapterDec-16-05, 10:31 pm by Hanford | Read full postFile under: User Interface, Yahoo, Mail 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. The Multi-line Map Tool on TourDec-13-05, 9:36 pm by Hanford | Read full postFile under: User Interface, maps I was recently invited to one of Silicon Valley's big search/map companies to do a UI presentation, where I demonstrated the simplicity of my multi-line map tool UI solution. The multi-line mapper is so trivial design-wise that at first glance it appears as though it shouldn't even be considered UI design, much less highlighted in a User Interface presentation. However, that's the beauty of it, and the beauty of user interface design in general; that something like this eluded all the major map sites since they've existed, and the key to solving it was simply reconizing the problem existed. Hopefully we'll see multi-line input implemented in at least one of the big map sites before too long, but only time will tell. And if you work for a map site and you didn't see my presentation recently, I am still available. Bad User Interface: A frustrating first experience with Google PicasaDec-11-05, 2:57 am by Hanford | Read full postFile under: Google, Bad User Interface  My good friend Chad Spacey has told me a lot about Picasa. It's a photo thumbnail/organizer from Google. Kind of like Adobe Bridge, Adobe Photoshop Album, and my personal favorite ThumbsPlus.
But Picasa is from Google. And it's free. And it looks like it has some cool features. And I trust my friend Chad's opinion (he has great ideas). So I decided to give it a try. Once I got it working it seemed pretty cool (although I still prefer ThumbsPlus) but getting it working was another story. Continued Third time's a charm: Yahoo AnswersDec-8-05, 7:31 pm by Hanford | Read full postFile under: Yahoo, Trends, Bad User Interface There's been some buzz today about the new Yahoo Answers. It's a site where users can ask questions, and other users can answer them. Yahoo used to have a section called Yahoo Experts which was virtually the same thing IIRC. It's been gone for a quite a while, but it appears as though the Help for Yahoo Experts is still around (I may use that help link to compare the old Experts site to Answers). Yahoo replaced Experts with Yahoo Advice which also dried up a long time ago. I wonder what Yahoo has done differently with Answers to ensure it doesn't end up disappearing like Experts and Advice. Better get this one right Yahoo, you're running out of name. On a related note: Does Yahoo's Help Section need an overhaul, or what?! Still having help for a service that disappeared in 2002 isn't a good sign, Yahoo. I've been finding Bad User Experiences left and right with Yahoo's Help these days. Just see my previous blogs on Yahoo Mail for more. I'm don't want to write about Bad UI all the time, honestly ... How to remove the Avatar from Yahoo MailDec-8-05, 12:39 pm by Hanford | Read full postFile under: Yahoo, Mail, Bad User Interface  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.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 InterfaceIt'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. Web 2.0 DesktopsDec-6-05, 12:47 pm by Hanford | Read full postFile under: User Interface, Misc. 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 Great TasteDec-5-05, 2:09 am by Hanford | Read full postFile under: design  I've not sampled their ice cream yet, but the people at Laloo's Goat's Milk Ice Cream have great taste in design. Why I'm not happy about the Macromedia/Adobe mergerDec-4-05, 11:51 pm by Hanford | Read full postFile under: Photoshop, Trends 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. Continued Yahoo Mail Plus: Avatar UpdateDec-3-05, 1:00 am by Hanford | Read full postFile under: Yahoo, Mail, Bad User Interface 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. Bad User Interface: Yahoo Mail's 'What's New' PageNov-26-05, 4:41 pm by Hanford | Read full postFile under: Mail, Bad User Interface 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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I make things. From consumer electronics, to video games, to theme park attractions. Perhaps I can make things for you! Check out my portfolio. When I'm not making things for other people, I'm usually experimenting.
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