Ordinary Nothing

A couple of weeks ago Yahoo! changed the interface of their Groups
service. And they made some very unfortunate choices during the
overhaul, which looked nicer, but drastically reduced usability.

They did, however, provided an easy access to a feed-back form. And
they paid attention to the comments, fixing the main problems almost
straight away. And by now all but one of the problems is fixed. So
basically I’m impressed, and in a good way. Currently, the groups look
better, and retain the previous functionality, so that’s a success.

One other odd problem which I’m not sure about, related to the amount
of members in the group. After the graphical change the group I was
monitoring listed about 200 more members than there were before… And
there weren’t more than 4-5 people tops who joined during that day…
Odd, and I still don’t know whether the problem was before the update,
or after the update.

My original list of problems, as I listed in the feed-back form was:

1. The main messages list doesn’t show message ID for
individual message. This is actually useful sometimes. You also removed
the option to find a message by number/ID. I, and other people I know,
used this, several times.

2. Messages on date view are sorted as new-on-top, with no possibility
to change that. From the main list choosing "last" goes to the first
messages, and "first" to the last. In a single message view, "next"
goes to an earlier message and "previous" to the newer ones. This is
different then before, and feels very upside-down. Please either change
it back, or make it a user-option.

3. The new message posting screen allows to specify a language. The
drop-down list is not alphabetically sorted, so if someone looks for a
language they have to read all the list entries.

4. Please make the message preview, and the nice break lines, on the
message list optional. It’s prettier, but less functional when I want
to go over several messages in advance. I want the ability, that I had
on the previous layout, of seeing as many message subject at once.

5. The message view page has an ad which pushes inside the message
area. This mean that the first few text lines of the message are
shorter. This is very very bad. If some of those lines are quoted, and
the ">" character are properly formatted to fit standard line
length, the first few lines of the message will still look broken and
unreadable once the length is changed. Don’t do that.

Thank you for your attention, and please do address these issues. The
new look is nicer and friendlier, but parts of it drastically reduces
functionality, which is not worth it.

And like I said, they fixed everything, except the problem of the ads
inside messages (#5 in the message). This is still there, and still a
problem. It is a big problem, but I don’t expect they’ll fix it, since
the ads probably pay money.

But the rest is fine, so overall I’m satisfied. The next/previous
problem was fixed straight away, as where the ID related ones.

The ability to choose sort direction and preview were added later.
Currently it’s through a URL parameter, which does the job, but is
carried through all index and message views, so changing the sort
option also changes browser history, making read messages appear as
unvisited links. But that’s minor and doesn’t change often. I’m still
not sure that there are advantages to this system over others without
this drawback, but I can see why this was the simplest to implement.

April 11th, 2005 at 0:44 EET | Categories: Web | Track comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.