William Reardon’s Blog

I first came across My Yahoo! over 10 years ago. If I remember it correctly, I believe it’s why I created an account with Yahoo, and I’ve been a loyal fan ever since.

In fact, what motivated to join Yahoo, back in 2001, was a chance to join the My Yahoo development team.

For 10 years, eons by web standards, it’s been my favorite website & default homepage.

But apparently for only the next 5 days.

After 5 days, it looks like I’m headed over to Google Reader or something similar.

If you’re a fellow, long-time user of My Yahoo, for the past few months you’ve likely gotten this nag dialog:

Sadly, there never was a way to close or remove it. I even poked around ABP to see if I could block it, but as it’s a dev tag, there didn’t seem to be.

Even more annoying, they changed it frequently.

As if users weren’t converted because they hadn’t noticed it.

From the folks I know, the reason they (and I) haven’t converted isn’t because we don’t know about the new My Yahoo!, it’s because we don’t like it.

Today it seemed to have changed once again:

So here’s my question: whatever happened to the customer being right?

Why don’t I get to decide what I like, instead of having what I’m told is good forced upon me?

Isn’t having a passionate user-base, one enamored with a product, a good thing?

If people aren’t converting, the problem isn’t the people, it’s the product.

Harassment, nagging, and strong-arming are not good substitutes for good product development.

There’s two reasons I can think Yahoo is making this move & there both really bad reasons:

1) Simplify development & support, by collapsing two platforms into one. Now, this isn’t a bad reason in of itself. In fact, it’s a good goal, but it’s the implementation that’s wanting. If the goal is to simplify/reduce the code base, to support a single version of My Yahoo, that’s fine. But it should be done in a way that doesn’t affect user.

That is the onus should be on Yahoo to create “new” interfaces that replicate the “old.” In doing so, they wouldn’t even have to tell me there’s a change. Everything would still look the same — to new users & old — and the code base would be reduced as well.

2) It’s embarrassing for the creators of the “New” My Yahoo, to have such a large portion of the user base on the “Old” system. I can see this being painful. I wouldn’t want to have to give a presentation to Sue, Jerry, or Ash showing only 30% (or whatever) of users have adopted my new product.

But frankly, if this is the reason, someone should be fired.

I’m not joking. Putting the pain of bad decisions on the user base is simply unacceptable. Doing it to save face — doubly unacceptable.

In a good company, management should be the user’s advocate. Pushing against the inevitable lethargy of a bureaucracy to do the right thing. To develop the best product. Think of the horror stories of Steve Jobs getting upset when brought a shitty product. Maybe not the best people skills, but that’s great customer advocacy.

Yahoo says they’re listening. I hope they are.

Let the old My Yahoo be.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 9th, 2008 at 10:18 pm and is filed under nerd-ness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.