Open Email to Yahoo Feedback

[Steve]

Here is a copy of an email I sent to Yahoo Feedback regarding the
recent cosmetic changes to the format.
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Date: Sat. March 26, 2005

Subject: New Groups Format Change - What were you thinking?

What were you thinking with these new cosmetic changes to the Yahoo
Groups? 

Don't you do test market and usability studies before you roll these
things out?

1.) Space INEFFICIENT - On the All Groups List and on the Groups
Message List pages, how did you manage to take LESS information and
make it take up more than TWICE as much space? Clean and compact is
MUCH better than pointless horizontal lines, equally pointless
formatting, and further pointless icons and graphics.

2.) Fonts - How arrogant are you to think that you know better than I
do what fonts I want to see on my screen? 

3. Sorting Messages - Why screw around with it? If you really wanted
to help, instead of pointless cosmetic changes, you would actually
improve the service and let each user determine their own Sorting and
Threading. Barring that unlikely event, leave things the way they
originally were. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

4.) Go To Message Number - Near the Search Box, there used to be a box
that allowed you to jump directly to a message by typing in the
Message Number. What happened to that? Certainly, it is rarely used on
porn groups, but in real discussion groups with thousands of members
discussing thousands of posts, that [Go To #] feature was invaluable.

5.) Message Numbers - Where are the message numbers on the Groups
Message List page? Again, in porn groups, who cares, but I'm a member
of a group that has over 13,000 members and 125,000 posts, and we are
involved in serious discussions. Those message numbers are critical to
finding old posts we can reference in current discussion.

6.) Search Feature - Please explain to me how a company that made it's
name as a Search Engine can have such an unbelievably CRAPPY Search
feature in its Groups? It's the worst. Nearly worthless.

If you really wanted to help, you would actually improve the service
and expand the available features (like the Search capability),
instead of dumping on us the illusion of improvement in the form of
pointless inefficient cosmetic changes. 

Further, we, your subscribers, are not stupid, and we are not fooled
into believing you have actually improved anything with superficial
changes. 

Competition is growing, if you don't start ACTUALLY improving, you may
end up seeing a mass migration to more full featured and user friendly
services.

Steve/bboyminn
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If you wish to use this in whole or in part for your own response to
Yahoo, feel free to do so.

Steve