Tuesday 28 June 2011

Missing Delete Option in the footer - Yahoo Mail

It is a bit weird. Or did Yahoo's Usability ignored it on some oversight? It is the good old Delete button thats missing. I've been using this all new Yahoo mail for quite sometime and I am really impressed with it. The performance is good, if not awesome. The interface is clean, understandable and tabbed emails are a nice approach to modern user-behaviour.

Tab Limit
One of the major issues I find is - I cannot open more tabs, once the tabs occupy all the horizontal space. That's seriously restricting to me. User like me who receives more than 30 or 50 emails a day will try to open as much as they can. I am disappointed.

Group Delete - Missing transport in the footer


Next comes, the bulk Delete. I usually do the housekeeping once in a  while. I do not use Filters as others. Now, the new Yahoo mail misses the whole transport of buttons in the Pagination's footer. Come on guys, ppl from old school still have the habit of using buttons in the footer. After I do a "Select all" and de-select important ones till the bottom, I have to scroll up to top, and click the delete button. Ugh!


Even Gmail has got it right. They have the buttons in top and bottom, still support SHIFT+CLICK pattern for bulk select/de-select. But the all new Yahoo mail does not have them now.

- UX Assassin


Wednesday 22 June 2011

the ebay user experience - Confirm Item Receipt

I regularly buy items from eBay. And for every item shipped, I receive a Confirm Item Receipt email after a week or two. And I am not happy about the interaction further. The email has a link, which opens up the ebay login screen. Once logged in, the User interface speaks too many things.  Just to confirm whether the item was received or not, why the system displays the confirmation in the last bottom end row?

The two radio buttons to confirm the item receipt are shown at the extreme bottom of the user interface, while the current status is shown on the top. In the middle there is the Shipping details, and leaving feedback options. Come on.. I am supposed to confirm item receipt. I know whether I received that item or not. Who will store all those shipping tracking nos for two weeks?


If I were about to redesign it... this would be my first iteration :

How about showing the radio buttons in the "CURRENT STATUS" column itself? would have made my life easy. Notice the green and orange boxes in the UI mock below.




Let's make things simple and easy. If there is a second iteration, I'd hide the shipping and item receipt and reveal them when clicking a link there.