I moderate a few special interest groups on Yahoo Groups, and I’m subscribed to a couple of dozen others. There’s nothing flashy or exciting about the service: it’s been relatively stable for years, with few changes or disruptions. For most users, this has been ideal. This week Yahoo not only introduced a new logo, they also tossed a stink bomb into the placid Yahoo Groups with a new user interface called “Neo”. They apparently rolled out the changes to a few groups last month, but most users and list owner/moderators hadn’t been given any notice that the change was coming. The Register‘s Kelly Fiveash on the diabolical scheme to annoy long-term users of Yahoo Groups:
‘WTF! MORONS!’ Yahoo! Groups! redesign! traumatises! users!
‘Vile, unfriendly interface’ attacked by world+dog. But format staysYahoo! has told thousands of users who are complaining about the Purple Palace’s pisspoor redesign of its Groups service that it will not be rolled back to the old format — despite a huge outcry.
The Marissa Mayer-run company revamped Yahoo! Groups last week, but it was immediately inundated with unhappy netizens who grumbled that the overhaul was glitchy, difficult to navigate and “severely degraded”.
In response, Yahoo! told its users:
We deeply value how much you, our users, care about Yahoo! Groups … we launched our first update to the Groups experience in several years and while these changes are an important step to building a more modern Groups experience, we recognise that this is a considerable change.
We are listening to all of the community feedback and we are actively measuring user feedback so we can continuously make improvements.
But the complaints have continued to flood in since Yahoo! made the tweak by changing its “classic” (read: ancient) interface to one dubbed “neo” that appeared to have been quickly spewed on to the interwebs with little testing before going live.
And — while the company claimed it was listening closely to its users about the new look Yahoo! Groups — it has ignored pleas from thousands of people who want it to reverse the update.
For users who access Yahoo Groups through the website, the new design has completely befuddled many, hiding functions (and even group names) and making it far more difficult to search for older posts (you reportedly have to search by message number: no other searches are supported). Even for those who only receive email updates, the Neo redesign included odd and sometimes completely unreadable email formatting, broken links, and other highly irritating issues.
This is the real problem with “free” services: when things go wrong, as a user of the service, you don’t have much leverage to complain or to get things fixed.
This comment was posted long after the post’s comments were auto-closed (if I don’t do that, the spambots quickly fill the comment sections with their excrement). The commenter is J T Taylor (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/sayno2neo:
Comment by Nicholas — March 27, 2014 @ 06:47