Yahoo TV

Recently Yahoo released a beta version of its Yahoo! TV portal. Now admittedly I have never seen or used the previous version. However, I read a lot of news and noticed some backlash from some faithful Yahoo! TV users. As a designer and usability aficionado I take notice of this as a rare learning opportunity (at someone else’s expense). Now, to make this situation more interesting I have a good friend who recently joined Yahoo as a developer. He does not work in the TV division, but members of his team do and he asked for my opinion of the beta. I thought I would take this opportunity to do some much needed writing.

I mentioned that I’ve never used the Yahoo! TV portal. To be honest I wasn’t even aware it existed because I’ve never made it that far into Yahoo’s vast web of information. Now, I have respect for the Yahoo User Experience team. I’ve read a lot of their published papers in the past and I feel like I’ve learned a lot from their work. That said, Yahoo’s pages are often so big and so cluttered they make my head hurt. I’ve heard a lot of people make this statement before, but I’ve never really seen anyone try to explain why. I know exactly why: too many images. I know people hate too much text, but I’m willing to make the claim that too many images can be worse. At least when you’re faced with several paragraphs of text your eyes can easily pan and scan around to find what you’re looking for. I do admit that the new homepage is a vast improvement on the text-to-images ratio. However, that must have been an accident as it wasn’t taken to heart for the rest of Yahoo’s pages.

The specific TV portal design seems to be a rip of the Apple ITMS. Thankfully there are no Appleish image reflections, something I wish Apple could patent or trademark as a branding scheme so I would quit seeing it everywhere. The rip here is the presentation of items in groups. It’s a great use of progressive disclosure, however I think Yahoo’s designers missed the point. I say this because they literally overfilled the page with this for each category of “collection”. Apple uses this technique to comprise multiple categories in one little compact box on the ITMS homepage which is a great use of space. I will say “bravo” though because this is the first time I’ve seen this technique re-used (that I’ve seen) by anyone outside of Apple.

Another rip of Apple’s design team is the rotating content and video panels at the top of the page. This was certainly not started by Apple, but due to the other blatant rip I assume that’s where it was inspired from. And once again Apple did it much better. On the TV portal there are two rotating panels of different sizes and content that are rotating and transitioning way too fast. In fact, I didn’t even notice the transition animation until just now. And the rotation is too fast to where it’s a negative distraction instead of the gentle nudge to the user’s eyes that it’s meant to be. Apple uses this technique to rotate featured Music, Videos, and Podcasts on the ITMS homepage. Apple uses three panels, but they are all the same size, rotate one at a time, and have just the right speed of rotation and transition.

So far I’ve focused only on design. However, there’s a lot more to a re-design than design and that’s where I think the lot of Yahoo’s users are finding themselves at a loss. Yahoo made a few apparent mistakes here. One of them they’ve done well with in the past which leaves me confused.

For instance, there’s the nature of presenting a beta in addition to an existing live site. I have a hard time even writing the word “beta” in reference to Yahoo’s new TV portal due to the fact that it seems to be the only live version available at the moment. In the past Yahoo has used some great mechanisms to allow users to try out betas by switching back and forth between the old version and the new version. That mechanism doesn’t exist here like it did for the Yahoo homepage or like it still exists for Yahoo Mail. This is extremely important because very few people seem to understand how hard it is for humans to embrace change, especially with technology. New things are shiny and great, but typically we fall back on the old and trusted until we’re ready as individuals to “upgrade”. For example, I still use the old version of Yahoo Mail. I’ve seen and used the new version and even dare say I like it, but I have some old applications that allow me to interact with Yahoo Mail but don’t work with the new version (yet). As a User Experience Professional I find my strength in my profession by being someone who understands the affect of change and the need to regulate it - I know I’m not alone.

Another mistake I see here is the loss of features. It’s hard to analyze this having not experienced the previous version, but I’ve read the comments of people on Yahoo’s blog speaking about the loss of a “Favorite Channels” feature. Apparently people were using this feature and liked it enough to be angry at it being gone. Some even speak of using competitors’ sites instead just for that feature. While features do come and go, someone didn’t do their homework. It sounds like it would have been important to keep this feature and go out of the way to make sure things such as existing data and preferences were seemlessly transferred to the new version. It’s great that Yahoo has employees responding to the comments on their blog with statements about usability testing before the release, but I question who they tested with.

Now I wouldn’t be a person who is biased against Flash if I didn’t question its use at Yahoo TV. I’ve come to embrace Flash in certain implementations, such as the new Yahoo! Maps, but I find its use here to be frivolous and apparently detrimental according to some of the people who’ve openly complained. There are three instances of Flash on the TV home page: the top-center content panel, the top-right video teaser panel, and the advertisement space below the video. I recommend limiting Flash to about one use per page - anything more and it should be used in a way so insubstantial that I ought to not be able to tell I’m seeing Flash. Now, the top-center content panel could be implemented without Flash. It might be more difficult to implement, but it’s still possible and so there’s no utility or Flash “coolness” factor there. The top-right video panel requires Flash to present the video and would probably be what I would reserve its single use for. However, I think a lot of lessons have been learned from YouTube’s success and one of those is that people like very lean and very simple control interfaces for watching video. This is a preference of users and may even help the performance of the page loading (which is currently laggy) with a possible smaller Flash file. The advertisement space uses Flash to jump and grab attention in a way that’s just obtrusive. It’s instances like this one that led to the creation of flashblock - which some of the Yahoo users spoke of using. I find this to be a kind of obuse of a technology that can often lead to its demise.

This is all for now. They say “there’s no such thing as bad press”, but I wish the circumstances were different since I’m so passionate about the subject of complaint. I do believe however that Yahoo’s awesome User Experience team will rectify the situation and hopefully take away from the experience something positive in learning from their mistakes.