The all-new Yahoo! Mail: Too Much?

The Yahoo! Mail team released a new version of the all-new Yahoo! Mail Beta last week. That is 34 years after Ray Tomlinson was credited with inventing email by introducing the @-sign. What he really did was to solve the problem with knowing which computer a certain email should go to, i.e. designing an address. Previous to Ray’s contribution it was only possible to send emails to users of the same computer.

The reason for this anecdote is that solving important real problems drive great product development. So what kind of problems have the ‘all-new’ Yahoo! Mail Beta solved so far?

To answer that you need to start with understanding what a great webmail experience is. I would argue an application that is reliable, secure, fast, effective in fighting spam and virus, effective contact management, easy to organize and find old messages, and intuitive to use.

The challenge for the Yahoo! Mail team or any other development team with millions of users is that every innovative step forward needs to be in harmony with the mainstream user. That is hard. A small startup can run faster and do more innovative stuff since they cater to the early adopters and have no legacy users that are paying the bills.

So what is the all-new Yahoo! Mail doing really well:

- It’s reliable and secure. All emails seems to be ending up where they should w/o to many prowling eyes (developed for Classic mail).

- It’s the best thing out there in fighting spam and virus (developed for Classic mail).

- It’s fairly easy to organize and find old messages.

- The tabs are cool and makes it easy to move between the Inbox and opened messages, even though it’s a little bit slow.

- The Autocomplete of contacts is brilliant (developed for Classic mail).

- The Attach feature is positively improved, now only including one step instead of three.

- Finding, editing and emailing Contacts is much easier than before. But the search only seem to work on first or last name, not both.

So what is Yahoo! Mail not doing so well:

- It’s slow and doesn’t update as fast as I’m getting notification (through a Flock extension). I therefore have to click on Check Mail.

- The new Home tab is awful. The reason I’m opening mail is that I want to read mail messages and not getting News, offers of meeting up with singles (I’m married) or ads. It’s very intrusive. Further more, knowing when I last launched the application is worthless data. As is date, time and how much storage I have left. I just learned that there is a way to avoid the Home tab through an upgrade to Yahoo! Mail Plus which is cool. I also got a strong and very relevant argument of why there should be a last login feature: protecting personal data. By confirming to users when they last logged in to the application you create a sense of comfort that noone else has access to your emails – or that some do. I still think that this kind of notification could be more suddle, think credit card protection.

- The Message Sent page and the opt-out for contacts is unnecessary for a web application that wants to be like a desktop client. It just slows down the whole process. Yay, these are now gone with a simple upgrade to Yahoo! Mail Plus.

- The new Calendar in the bottom bar is a cool idea but the value is limited. I don’t need to check my events while checking email, what I would need is a smart true integration between the two applications that cuts steps in the process of adding invite data to my Calendar or saving important dates that I get via email. There is an opt-out under Options.

- The Shortcut keys doesn’t work across platforms (using a Mac) and nothing that the average mail users would memorize.

- I can start an IM conversation from a message but not a VoIP conversation. Why?

- Deleting searched emails doesn’t work which is frustrating. That’s one of the best methods of cleaning out your mailbox. You have to drag’n'drop the emails into the Trash to delete emails you have found through Search. This solution is not really intuitive since a) it works differently than deleting directly from Inbox and b) the messages don’t leave the Search result tab which is an intuitive way to confirm that the task is successfully executed.

So my conclusion: Well, I love Yahoo! products in general but think that the all-new Yahoo! Mail lacks the basics: speed and ease of use. Instead of trying to cram everything that Yahoo! has to offer into the application I would start on making the core features faster, smarter and more integrated. Ajax, RSS, Ruby et cetera is very cool but for the average user ease of use, speed and security takes the front seat.

For product integration to work it needs to be relevant, seamless and fast. It needs improve the experience not delay it, it needs to cut the crap and get to the point. Web 2.0 is about making the web easier to use, more simplistic, seamless, more human and more social. Yahoo! Mail have a challenge ahead but if anyone of the big three are going to figure it out it’s Yahoo!.

Disclaimer: I worked on Yahoo! Mail in 2002-2004 and think the team rocks.

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