ExperienceLab

UX Gold Star: Yahoo Fixes Ancient Email Problem

We live in a UX era of big rewards for big innovation. New form factors for phones, new cloud services come out every month. They deservedly are heaped with praise and cash.

But for those of us who use interfaces, small improvements can make big differences. I’d like to introduce the Gold Star award for the people and companies that address small issues that would be just as easy for them to ignore. 

Let’s start with a gold star for Yahoo.

Yahoo Mail recently added an innovation to their web mail interface that was really clever. 

Like all other mail programs, Yahoo Mail lets you choose between REPLY and REPLY TO ALL. REPLY sends the response to one person; REPLY TO ALL sends it to everyone. But unlike any other mail program that I know of, they now also let you switch between them after you’ve started composing a response. 

It’s not a big deal, but that’s exactly why it’s praiseworthy. Mail is old. Yahoo Mail is old. And the problem of selecting the wrong kind of reply is old. It’s rare for someone to see an old problem, realize it can be fixed, and do it knowing that while there will be no PR trumpets blaring their thanks, it will save countless users countless seconds of irritation.

Thank you, Yahoo. Well done.

Who wants a dedicated ereader?

Who wants a dedicated ereader? Not a lot of people. Not yet, anyway. But there are three groups, maybe four, that are hot for the Amazon Kindle, the Sony Reader, and the other wannabe contenders.

We've talked to scores of people in our studies, and we aren't yet seeing much demand for dedicated ereaders. People almost always like the ereaders better after they've tried them, but not enough to actually want to buy one.

The Amazon Kindle goes worldwide

Amazon's ebook machine, the Kindle, has just gone international making it legitimately available in my home country, the UK, for the first time. I'm excited -- I've been studying ebook readers for most of this year and this is the one that has the most buzz.

I've already been testing one borrowed from an American friend so I know what it's like. It feels great in the hand, just the right weight and with nicely curved edges and corners. The pages turn much more quickly than with the first generation Sony Reader I was using. I like the 'read aloud' feature and the large font sizes when my eyes got tired. And when I tried it out in the States, the shopping features were head and shoulders above any other ebook reader we've seen.

Waiting for the sign to change

Timetable signs in airports and train stations started a new and unfortunate trend a few years ago, about the time they took down the old CRTs and replaced them with thin displays.

Instead of showing a single screen of information of the most imminent departures and arrivals, they began to show two or three screens in rotation. Their hearts were in the right place. They wanted to show more trains and planes. But the effect is not what was intended.

The main effect is that these signs often now cause pedestrian traffic jams underneath them while people wait for the sign to change, often in already chaotic environments full of people all in a rush.

"Take Back The Beep" Campaign

What if you were a mobile phone company and you could figure out a way to keep millions of customers on the line for an extra 15 seconds every time they left a voicemail message? You'd make millions.

In the US, when you call someone's mobile and it rolls over to voicemail, you hear their outgoing message and then an extra message from the carrier telling you, in case you've never done it before, how to talk after the beep. That's the extra 15 seconds.

David Pogue, the Personal Technology correspondent for the New York Times, does the numbers:

Stanza/iPhone make strong first impression

Stanza on the iPhone/iPod Touch makes a better first impression than dedicated E Ink devices like the Kindle or Sony Reader. (Stanza is a free book-reading and book-downloading application for the iPhone and iPod Touch, as well as for PCs and Macs. Stanza is now owned by Amazon.)

We're doing some long-term research on ebook readers, and it will be a while before all the results are in, but one thing is clear. Every user we've spoken to, from students to professionals, from 2-book-a-week pleasure readers to people who only ever pick up the occasional nonfiction book, the first impressions favour Stanza on the iPhone/iPod Touch every time.

Why?

Well designed entrance at Sainsbury's

This is the entrance to our local Sainsbury's supermarket, a model of good design.

The supermarket's site is recessed under the level of the road, having replaced an old industrial steelworks site along the train tracks. The designers chose to raise the shop up to the road level and put parking down below, so it's always been a problem how to move shoppers and their groceries around.

When we first moved here, we used to take a dingy stairway up. Then, when a Tesco moved in next door, they decided to posh it up a bit, and did a great job.

They added a big entryway with a handsome glass front, and two long travelators to take people and their trolleys up and down. The travelators are like escalators but without steps, and have a clever arrangement so the trolleys don't roll down the slope even if you let go of them.

Machines too big for your eyes

Here's a mystery. A few years back these hulking payment machines appeared in our local train station's carpark.

It looks like someone took some trouble to think through their design. They have big graphics and bold arrows to tell you what to do, and a decent-sized screen with large print and simple instructions.

But in the real world, the machines just don't work. People aren't sure what to do, the brave ones turning around to ask the people behind them. Where do I put my ticket? Did I press the right button for the receipt? Is it done yet? They try to stick their bills where the ticket goes, they leave their ticket behind or they toss it in the trash even though they need it to get their car through the barrier, they forget their credit cards. Meanwhile the queue behind grows and everyone mutters that the 20 minutes the train company shaved off the train schedule is now eaten up by the amount of time it takes to pay for parking.

Where do these problems come from?

An email by any other name

When I file something in my file cabinet, I can call it what I like. Same when I file it in my address book. Or my hard disk. Or my recipe box. So why when I archive an email in Outlook or Gmail or Thunderbird or Yahoo am I stuck with whatever subject line the sender decided to slap on it? About half the time it’s “Hi” or “Checking in” or a leftover subject line from 2 weeks ago that was at one time appropriate but now no longer is.

Email providers, let people choose their own titles when they archive an email. Sure, most of the time they’ll stick with the subject line, but let them specify something different if they like.