Yahoo! and Its Poor Usability Testing Process

Yahoo! & Its Poor Usability Testing Process

WHAT?

What is? http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20081106113130AAmGCrW

Official link: http://ycorpblog.com/2008/09/17/testing-testing-a-new-yahoo-com/

This is a poor usability testing from Yahoo! Users complain about this a lot. In my opinion, it’s a really bad design process and strategic planning. What they call “bucket testing” looks like a “bad surprise,” testing without giving any clue or explanation to the users, and without a clear instruction on how to go back to the original homepage.

Also, it seems like someone is trying to make a “Microsoft + Yahoo!” theme. I have a sixth sense here [e.g., letter “M” in the URL of the testing homepage (http://www.m.yahoo.com/) [cannot access directly from this link], look & feel of the new layout is similar to this: http://www.msn.com/ from Microsoft, and so on]. Is this a tricky game in business too? I believe perhaps some employees or some stakeholders are still trying to make a change or convince some other people selling Yahoo! to Microsoft.

FACTs:

Some poor sentences on the Yahoo! blog:

Yahoo! says: “What does all this mean to you? Since we’re testing with a fraction of homepage visitors chosen at random – starting in the US, UK, France and India – you may be one of the testers!”

[<<< see my comment about this sampling technique below – PK*]

Yahoo! says: “Testing is an ongoing process across the Yahoo! network because of our desire to improve our products and serve you better. There is no completion date set at this time.”

[<<< Do they really understand what the on-going process in design is? – PK*]

One of the comments:

“Apparently, I was one of the randomly selected test subjects for the new page design.

Is there any way to remove myself from this list? I like the classic generic yahoo page. I refused to use the My!Yahoo page when it was introduced… Fortunately, at that time I had an option of going back to the classic page. I can’t access that page now. And that really aggravates me. – [Dylan | December 17th, 2008 at 10:52 am]”

PK* Says:

Sampling technique

In market research, this random sampling can be used to collect the data in a business which users don’t have much difference in their profiles. The researcher may assign a number to each of the user accounts and randomly select the testers.

Is Yahoo! a kind of these businesses? Not really. This is just easy for them to make a research for the usability purpose only – not a professional one yet! Nowadays, the user identity and the related information based on the statistic research is also a very useful data for the online advertising and the future marketing. Why don’t they create a little more complex research on this, to classify the groups or targets of the users, which also can help promote the cross-functional team too? This helps reduce a waste of time and resource in the long run. Moreover, it leads to the topic in organizational management.

Usability testing

Since last year, I have seen “Google” testing the “sign in” & “sign up” buttons for their “Gmail,” and they could have done that without making any interruption to the users. Don’t forget that the user experience is very important when you are trying to test something new. What Yahoo! can do better, in my opinion, is to break the testing areas to small pieces, collecting data only in specific areas that are needed, evaluating, redesigning something, and then they can put together pieces of the satisfaction (the new design) making a full testing as an option to the classic theme first.

Compared to Facebook.com, the Facebook team is much smarter than Yahoo!, creating the “New Facebook” as an option first, and then recently they turned it to be a default setting with having the “Old Facebook” as an option instead. Meanwhile, they got good and bad feedbacks from the real users, so they could be able to redesign their stuff effectively. For example, after testing the first “New Facebook” for a few weeks, I have seen them adding a mini bar at the bottom of the page because many people need the quick access, and so on. Finally, they deleted the option and everyone got a new Facebook with a better usability. This is a good on-going process in design.

EASY!

PK* [Dec.18, 2008]