Power to the people

Posted August 15th, 2007 at 4:38 pm by Tapan Bhat, Integrated Consumer Experiences

 8 Comments / Filed in: Trends & News

Let me start off with a big purple thanks to you, our half a billion users who visit, share, and engage with Yahoo!-branded properties everyday. As you may have read, the new University of Michigan American Customer Satisfaction Index results are in and it’s due to your regular feedback that we continue to make strides in customer satisfaction ratings. On that note, we’d like to take this opportunity to look back at some of our product milestones since last summer that were a result of your direct input.

This summer, we’re celebrating the one-year anniversary of our new home page design for Yahoo.com, which was built completely around your suggestions. You wanted to get through your daily routines faster, so we added quick previews of your email, local weather, and traffic. We also updated our featured content to highlight even more of what’s happening around the world, at a glance, so you could bring your a-game to the water cooler.

You wanted more storage on Yahoo! Mail, so we extended unlimited email storage to all users and took it one step further by enhancing speed and performance and adding integration with Yahoo! Messenger. You asked us to make it easier to find what you’re looking for in one search, and as a result we’ve rolled out new enhancements on Yahoo! Search, such as search suggestions that appear as you type into the search box on Yahoo.com, and shortcuts around popular searches like music artists, hotels, restaurants, and Major League Baseball stars.

And we’re not done! In the next week, we’ll be rolling out more broadly a cool new inline video player on the Yahoo! Home Page, so that you can watch videos without leaving the page, see other related videos, and email or IM interesting videos to your friends.

We’re committed to building products you love and making your experience even better on Yahoo!, so please continue to feed us your suggestions and stay tuned for more to come.

Tapan Bhat
Vice President, Front Doors

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8 Comments Add your own

=bg= | August 15th, 2007 at 5:09 pm

Tapan: couple questions.

I have seen these two things:

YAHOO! spread across the top of the front door as opposed to upper left corner. Search box spread below it. It was only there for a few days—then gone.

Same for a feature on the left-hand nav bar. It allowed you to customize what was there. IE, Don’t use “Yahooligans?” (As I don’t.) Uncheck it, and it’s gone.

What happened there? Those were two GREAT features.
Loved the front door search box re-do- made the box more front and center.

Doug | August 15th, 2007 at 6:07 pm

Congratulations on such a great honor. I, for one, was very happy to hear that people are gradually warming up to Yahoo again. I know that Yahoo has been hit with so much criticism lately. But with the visible improvements like the search shortcuts and the new Yahoo Local, I believe better times are ahead. My only criticism is the huge, obtrusive,square ad on the My Yahoo page. Nevertheless, I’ll be rootin’ for ya!

susan | August 17th, 2007 at 9:57 am

If you don’t get that blinking black and blue Walmart ad..for free somethings..off my email…I am going to dump yahoo completely for another….this love match is nearly over.

Tapan Bhat | August 17th, 2007 at 3:12 pm

Thanks =bg= and Doug for your helpful feedback. =bg=, the two features you mentioned are part of regular test runs we do to try new things out on Yahoo.com. What you have to say is always welcome and is an important part of the final product. As we continue to run these tests on all kinds of different features, let us know when something is working or not working. And Doug, we hope you’re enjoying the My Yahoo! beta despite the ad – keep in mind that it’s continuously evolving. We’re constantly making changes and researching better ways to ensure the time you spend on Yahoo is valuable for both you and our advertisers. Please do stay tuned for more to come and continue to let us know what you’re thinking!

=bg= | August 17th, 2007 at 5:08 pm

When test runs are done, where do you post feedback on the front door?

Yahoo! Mail User | August 17th, 2007 at 11:19 pm

Could you PLEEEASE give us free disposable email addresses?

Yahoo’s disposable email addresses are GREAT. It is not fair that domains ending with “.fr, .kr, etc.” all get them for free while “.ca & .com” do not.

Yahoo! Mail User | August 17th, 2007 at 11:41 pm

Also, please get rid of the ad taglines that are attached to all the sent messages. They are uncool (very uncool) and people don’t like them. Gmail doesn’t have them!

Please improve the RSS reader. It’s bulky and slow. Google’s reader is fantastic.

Why is it that Google can give us *almost* what we want for free (like POP3), but Yahoo can’t? Also, Google has “Google Docs”. Are you going to give us something like that too?

What’s with having three bookmarking services? del.icio.us, bookmarks, & myweb

Yahoo has a lot of potential to do well. Don’t know why it always follows and doesn’t innovate.

tom furey | August 20th, 2007 at 6:55 pm

So when are you going to fix Messenger? I, and most users (apart from the bots who are on the verge of complete take-over) are very tired of being treated as second rate citizens. We want to be able to choose the rooms we wish to go to… and actually go there! We dont wish to be bombarded with camgirls wanting us to “check out my homepage”. We’d like the user rooms back. Basically we want the service you so often say you provide