A little of everything professional. This site contains the largest online collection of electronic signature laws and research, my views on Time Management & GTD life hacks for improving productivity, and my After Thoughts on bad decisions and business improvements. Personal thoughts and casual comments are pushed to my SEO project, The World's Greatest Guy.

Yahoo and where is my mobile phone

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I would like to make some obsevations on usability, or rather the lack there of in product design. For the past 12 months I have been working on a web-based electronic signature service. I sat on every meeting, discussing design, layout and usability. Making sure that our product 'made sense' was very important to me. What's very frustrating is seeing a huge company with very large developement budgets just simply fail to think things through.


Take Yahoo for example. My wife and I just switched from T-Mobile to Cingular (keeping the numbers mind you) and her Yahoo weather alerts started arriving 5 times a day rather than the usual once in the morning. I thought this was odd, but went to Yahoo to edit her old SMS settings. I searched on Yahoo for "weather alerts" and was taken to the Yahoo Alert Homepage. Good start, but all I was given was option of adding alerts and no where to be seen is an option to adjust the phone itself. The icon for her phone is there but no link to the settings.


You have to go back to Yahoo Mail to setup a mobile device! And it gets better... I cannot figure out how to delete the old device! You can add more devices but you can't get rid of that nasty little pain in my side.


Now this is just plan maddness on so many many levels. Why would Yahoo Alerts think that people would want to actually edit their phones in the Yahoo Alert Homepage? And why wouldn't the Yahoo design team think that users would not want to delete the old phones when they switch services?


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