Recent changes to the Yahoo TV section of the Yahoo website drew irritated responses from users and several screeds from bloggers denouncing those alterations.
Yahoo TV Changes To Peanut Butter Channel
Or did they?
The users may not have received the memo, especially the part that told them they now have to sign in, or sign up for a Yahoo account if they don’t have one, to see the TV listings that had been available without a login through a relatively simple search form.
Changes made to the site without accounting for their users’ preferences or tastes make the recent Peanut Butter Manifesto, a diatribe against Yahoo’s internal practices penned by a senior VP named Brad Garlinghouse, look far more credible with its complaints.
At Yahoo’s corporate blog, Yodel Anecdotal, most of the anecdotal remembrances of Yahoo TV hankered for a simpler experience. A smattering of commentary from those postings should prove educational for site publishers who would prefer not to anger their userbase:
I can’t believe that you are now forcing an inconvenient signin to view localized listings! What a cheap, worthless stunt!
After trying to figure out your new tv site, I now know why your stock is falling and Google is beating you…
Why did you try to fix something that wasn’t, to our minds, broken? Worse yet, why did you break it in the process?
The new site isn’t just a little buggy here and there. It’s not even just bad. It’s Waterworld bad, it’s Iraq-occupation bad, it’s ‘62 Mets bad.
Unleashing a site update before an event like SES Chicago, where lots of people who pay attention to Yahoo and the major search companies, may get more people talking about the update and the company behind it. Ideally one would want that talk to be good, not bad.
Well known blogger and Yahoo staffer Jeremy Zawodny wondered how this update and the less than joyous response could have happened.
“Why was there no trial period so that die-hard tv.yahoo.com users could voice their opinions before being forced to use the “improved” interface?” he wrote. “Why did we manage to toss both “simple” and “useful” aside and substitute “flashy” for them?”
But Sal Taylor Kydd of Yahoo TV posted on the Yodel blog that a tryout did take place. “The listings did go through usability testing and if these concerns had surfaced we would have of course addressed them, but to everyone’s disappointment they didn’t,” he said.
That seems to indicate the testing took place with Yahoo account holders, and probably a more Ajax/Flash friendly control group than the typical user who used Yahoo TV the same way guys approach grocery shopping – get in, get the stuff, get out.
The new service does look good. TV is a simple way to receive entertainment, but one that has become more complex with added channels and an increasing number of remotes in the household, and for Yahoo TV users, the changes at the site look like they were as well received as a paint can to the head.
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
