Software Journal

The brainchild of 1990s was called “ineffective” in 2000s and should be considered plainly out of mode in the 10s. Why does the software bring up a modal window and wait for the user to do something, rather than doing something about it itself? Well, I should classify that as “bad software”. Good software simply doesn’t do that.
Example bad software – Yahoo Messenger.  Consider this stupid piece of software that tells us of a broken connection, but blocks itself from rechecking the connection by bringing up a modal window and thus blocking for user input.  Very likely the network connection has resolved and if it was simply able to try again, it would likely get through.

Guess Yahoo engineers should be going through the user interface basics again rather than spending all their time on messing up the users’ browser settings.

Considering that this is my 3rd post on Yahoo’s user interface deficiencies, I expect to be getting a big fat check from their product manager – though I might just settle for a word of thanks.

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Posted on Monday, August 30th, 2010 at 10:50 PM in review, user interface   |  RSS feed |  Respond  |  Trackback URL