"Reaction [beta]"
Users say "Yah boo!" to Yahoo! TV 4 Dec 2006
Yahoo! is taking a real beating from users at the moment. The company launched a "new and improved" version of Yahoo! TV last week and ever since disgruntled users have been posting complaints on the company's blog. Here are a few choice comments:
"I can't believe that you are now forcing an inconvenient signin to view localized listings! What a cheap, worthless stunt! You had a near-optimal experience lined up before, where apparently cookies kept track of where a user was and what their TV service was. You've blown it now, idiots."
"The listings page took a huge step backwards. The Flash on it is very slow. When I click on any show, I get nothing but a green box showing up underneath. And, all my links to TV listings by genre are now dead. I can't even show listings only by genre anymore."
"Why did you try to fix something that wasn't, to our minds, broken? Worse yet, why did you break it in the process?"
Even former head of Yahoo! Entertainment, Erik Schwartz, has contributed to the debate suggesting that the organisation has lost its way:
"You need to focus on solving your users problems. If you do that, everything else will follow. If you fail to do that, nothing else matters. In the old days if you built fat, slow pages Filo used to come to your cube and tell you to build leaner pages, not so much anymore I guess..."
It's a fascinating debate and one that really highlights the perils of releasing a design without sufficient user testing. What's really obvious is that many of the criticisms stem from the fact that users consider Yahoo! to have "fixed" something that wasn't broken to begin with.
You do have to applaud the company however, for the way that they are handling this matter. As Techcrunch points out, "it's hard for companies to open themselves up to user feedback - particularly when the feedback is anonymous, unmoderated and hosted on their own site...it takes guts and a commitment by senior execs to embrace users, even when they hate you." It certainly does - especially since Yahoo!'s competitors, including Google, don't allow users to comment on their corporate blogs.
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