Yahoo Mail: Update now to downgrade the experience

Clueless as always Yahoo is a few days away from forcing the latest version of it's web-mail interface on users. To call this an upgrade is a real joke.

Touted as two times faster (but only for inbox listing load time according to the small print on the Yahoo Mail upgrade teaser page), email messages, which are what most users are actually interested in, now load about four times slower. They have decided to truncate the incoming mail address displayed but still show the user's complete address (like we don't know our own address) and have relegated email headers to a stupid little popup window.

Yes the new interface has shiny new (dare I say web 2.0) buttons and is a lot more colorful. After a few days of use those are the only good changes I can see. Let's face it, when an old web standard like SquirrelMail is faster and more usable you need to wonder what Yahoo was thinking, or if they actually were thinking at all.

At one point Yahoo was the king of the social internet, however over the years they have truly excelled at doing one thing well... slowly ruining the best parts of it's most important social offerings, first with massive changes to their Yahoo Messenger user rooms (they closed the most used categories and removed the ability to create user or private rooms) in what they claimed at the time was response to "advertiser concerns".

What is missing? User based input. I doubt that any user testing was involved in their latest email system design decisions, it looks more like a "we need to do something to the interface" corporate decision rather than any attempt to give users what they truly need or to enhance the experience of those using it.

How about letting users select the features that we want? Where is the real innovation?

Over the years I have resisted the urge to switch to Google as my primary online email provider. In my opinion the label-tag/search paradigm is simply inferior to folders. It's a whole lot easier to move a message to a folder than it is to type labels over and over. I like having all of the mail from a particular person or site grouped together in one place.

Now I seriously need to reconsider my choice of web-mail providers.

Perhaps Yahoo and HP should merge. Then we can watch as they fumble and screw-up their businesses together.