[Sigia-l] Suggesting a site to Yahoo

[Stewart Dean]

Mike,

In my view the biggest enemy to the user experience is not designers trying 
to impress their friends, and it's not a technical teams who are insensitive 
to user needs.  The biggest enemy I find are business models - the constant 
drive to performance and targets - often at the expense of long term 
perfomance.

In the case of Yahoo the drive to registration is one of their metrics - and 
as they view that being included on Yahoo is a perk - they will use this as 
a drive to registration.

So they get more registrations - short term goal achived.

Long term their seach engine suffers a bit - but then Yahoo isnt really 
about search anymore because they moved themselves into the portal market 
leaving space for the likes of google. Yahoo moved themselves to where the 
money was - and where everyone else is trying to compete (such as msn).

Meanwhile Google, so far, have kept things much simpler and user focused - 
because that what matters in the long term and it works.  Or at least that's 
what I believed until I saw the mess they made of their newgroup browsing 
interface - version 2 of  google groups.

Stew



>From: Mike Brown <mike at signify.co.nz>
>To: 'sigia l' <sigia-l at mail.asis.org>
>Subject: [Sigia-l] Suggesting a site to Yahoo
>Date: Mon, 13 Dec 2004 11:43:17 +1300
>
>so, I just went to suggest a site to the Yahoo directory - the "standard - 
>free!" version - and it appears I need to have a Yahoo ID and password to 
>do so.
>
>At the bottom of the "suggest a site" page, there is this:
>"To continue, click the button below.
>If you are not signed in, we will ask you to sign in with your Yahoo! ID 
>and password." just above the "continue" button. And sure enough, 
>"continue" takes you to the Yahoo login page. I don't have a Yahoo ID, so 
>didn't continue.
>
>Of course the information page on adding a site:
>http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/dir/basics/basics-05.html
>doesn't mention you need an Yahoo ID to do so.
>
>If this something new? If so, surely it's going to increase the speed of 
>Yahoo's irrelevancy?
>
>
>
>Regards
>
>Mike Brown
>
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