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28 Feb 2007
Poor usability is the main reason behind the limited adoption of Google's services such as Gmail and Google Talk, according to Jeff Bonforte, senior director of real-time communications at Yahoo.
"[Google] definitely is lacking in usability," Bonforte said in a meeting with reporters at Yahoo's corporate headquarters.
"They don't have this intimate connection in usability with consumers that Yahoo has had for 10 years. When it comes to consumer applications, no-one is more successful than Yahoo hands down.
"And it happens over and over and over again. In every application, we are number one or two."
December market share data from comScore puts the number of worldwide Gmail users at 60 million. Yahoo is the world's largest web mail provider with 249 million users.
A similar picture is shown in the instant messaging market, where last May Google Talk accounted for 3.4 million users. Yahoo's 77.9 million users makes the company trail behind only MSN Messenger with 181 million users.
Google is receiving a lot of attention from technical users, but its search engine and online maps services are the only examples where the company has been successful in appealing to a wide audience, Bonforte argued.
"Usability to consumers at the mass level is the most difficult problem to solve on the internet," he said.
"There is lots of stuff that we can put out there for dorks and geeks like me, because we eat it up. But actually getting to something that is usable is extremely complex."
Bonforte joined Yahoo 18 months ago and heads up the company's messenger product. He turned down a position at Google at the time, he said, because the company is ruled by engineers and refuses to pay attention to usability.
Online application providers should focus on limiting the number of features they deliver, he argued. Where adding features will alienate users, Yahoo found that removing them can increase the time that users spend using the application.
"On [Yahoo Messenger for the] Mac client, I reduced the functionality by 30 per cent and increased usage by 35 per cent. As we take out features, it tends to do better with the mainstream users," said Bonforte.
Yahoo Messenger, for instance, offers a tool that allows users to share photos and provides a platform to highlight and discuss features within the images.
But the vast majority of users send the physical file instead of using the photo tool, causing 85 per cent of all file transfers on the client to be images.
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yahoo cam girls & organised crime
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Posted by: keith jones 05 Jul 2008
LOL
Ok,You r the head at yahoo for developing messenger.. But from ur writeup, you want to say that yahoo messenger is much more usable than gtalk .. but concentrate here what u said "Yahoo Messenger, for instance, offers a tool that allows users to share photos and provides a platform to highlight and discuss features within the images. But the vast majority of users send the physical file instead of using the photo tool, causing 85 per cent of all file transfers on the client to be images." so ur photo sharing tool in mesenger isnt considered usable by the yahoo messenger users themselves?? LOL And think that gtalk is just abt 2yrs old in comparison with ymsgr-10Yrs?? And I dont think that ymsgr developed at such a pace as gtalk is doing... where is then ymsgr web widget? GoodLuck.
Posted by: Ashish 05 Apr 2007
Switching Costs
There are costs to changing your email address and your IM handle. There are none to changing what map service you use. Yahoo simply has more users on applications they rolled out first, locking in users who are happy with 'good enough' and don't want to switch. I?m surprised this wasn?t obvious.
Posted by: Andrew 23 Mar 2007
Does usability really have anything to do with this?
I'm a natural skeptic. I think yahoo mail has more users not because its more user friendly but because of all the goodies that require you to create a yahoo mail account - its all this collaboration bringing them heaps of traffic. Not to mention windows live messenger. I must say I generally find the google site more user friendly and it downloads much quicker than the yahoo australia site. Without that downloading time they wouldn't be able to deliver so much collaboration - instant chat, news, mail, games etc.
Posted by: Catherine Jenkins 07 Mar 2007
Tired of the Bells and Whistles
I started chatting online a long time ago. Since then, these instant messenger clients have added so many features that you can't get the program to do what you want it to do without looking through the configuration panel tabs for half an hour (each update of the software wants to load and login when Windows starts, and I do NOT want that because of the spam associated with IM, now). That kind of usability is useless. It's the very reason I stopped chatting online since everytime the software is updated there are new features I have to figure out how to turn off that I don't want. GoogleTalk provides only what I want, when I want. That said, Google will probably destroy it just like ICQ and AOL destroyed theres without providing a simple alternative version without all of the bells and whistles. I have better things to do than to reconfigure Yahoo or MSN IM clients with each update. But, that is me, and I am an old guy that just wants things to work, not to look pretty and make stupid noises constantly. Heck, in a work environment, IM's would be great, but no one wants them on their system because they are so distruptive to the work environment.
Posted by: Syd's Eastside Auto Parts Webmaster 06 Mar 2007
Google search is rubbish
Several sites I have been following with great interest, are no longer found with their search.Have switch to Yahoo.Why does Google deny the existent of these sites. Must be thousands of sites like these that Google for some reason (known only to them)have stopped listing. Goodbye Google Hello Yahoo
Posted by: Rex 03 Mar 2007
Yahoo! Messenger is NOT useable
Google Talk is so much cleaner and more usable than the bloat-ware Yahoo offers in the chat market.
Posted by: Strange Pants 03 Mar 2007
GoogleUsability
Yahoo may be right. I find very little reason to jump on googles band wagon simply because the geek sheep think it's the best. Their search results value is declining and they pretty much do what they want being the big gorilla. One day web masters will realize we are the tail that wags the dog. One week of removing all google adsense ads from our sites across the net should get a message across that google is a service not a master.
Posted by: Bob 02 Mar 2007
Utlimate popular software
It is proven that as you remove features, the number of users increase. The ultimate application does absolutely nothing. Yahoo! is making great strides forward in this direction. They are pioneering Yahoogroups that don't deliver email and Yahoo mail that does not deliver email either. Soon they will have Error 404 on all their pages, and that will attract the most number of users. Instead of trashing gmail, Yahoo should learn from it. They already increased mailbox size. How about free pop3 and filtering? And then they can work on delivering the mail too.
Posted by: Ami Isseroff 02 Mar 2007
Inteligence strikes again!
The few of us human beings who are, maybe, left with a little brain laugh at how desperate yahoo must be to go in public and say all that. Google used to be a joke to them but now is spreading all over the place, in fact it's spreading so fast they don't know what hit them. Whether they like it or not Google sets the rules; Gmail is the lightest, fastest, friendliest FREE email service which includes free POP (and for that only one would choose Gmail over anything or anyone else). Does anyone like the new yahoo beta environment?
Posted by: Clare O'Reilly 02 Mar 2007
I never use it
I have Yahoo, MSN and Gmail account and I only use the MSN and Yahoo emails for filling out "refer a friend" forms when surfing and I want some information. I use Gmail for everything else. Having the notifier in the bottom right corner of my screen is invaluable when I need to respond to clients fast, and the "tell me again" feature means that I don't have to waste time actually logging in to know if there is anything that I need to respond to right a way. Getting a Yahoo account is easier and I notice more Yahoo and hotmail addresses in my incoming spam that Gmail accounts. At least Gmail makes it a little more difficult to have multiple accounts which makes means that I would trust the 60 million users number as being far more accurate than the 171 million (or whatever it was) on Yahoo. How many do you think it would be if they took out the duplicate addresses and the addresses that never send any mail? I also agree with the time factor mentioned in the comment above. Give Gmail a little more time and it will pass even Yahoo's inflated number.
Posted by: Andrew Hodge 02 Mar 2007
Appealing to fear and nervousness
Hey, it worked for AOL for a long time. Won't last forever because negative advertising is self-limiting by nature, but it might give them a few years. You are right about email being the key for Yahoo. Moving email sucks, so people will stick a lot longer than they want to. I'd look for Google to lobby for legislation similar to what we have for cell phones to make it as easy as possible to move to a new email service.
Posted by: Matt 02 Mar 2007
Has anyone from Yahoo actually tried to use it?
Yahoo has the worst interface of any major site on the 'net. It is slow, ugly, and wall to wall trash ads. The navigation is obtuse. The spam filtering is defective. The search results are from another planet at times (not quite as bad as MSN). Answers is nothing short of lame; and one of the worst organized forums I have ever been in. I think Yahoo does not know how to fix things so they are attacking and hoping that no one will notice what kind of third rate site they have become. Google is not perfect, but as a user it is better than what anyone else offers. If Yahoo wants to compete they need to fix their own site and products instead of badmouthing one of the few sites on the internet that actually responds to user needs.
Posted by: Phil Howard 02 Mar 2007
trade-off
I agree with some of this, but to be fair, Google has been successful (and popular) with other programs too - not just search and maps. But without Google's R&D, and multiple features, there's really no way to push the market into designing things that really help us in the long run - Even if we don't realize it at the time. I'll trade a fisher-price interface for that, especially since everyone is learning the quirks of computers and the web each day. Useability is redefined.
Posted by: billy 02 Mar 2007
Yahoo's Smear Campaign
Yahoo claims the user population as a fact of their usability. Half the time i'm not sure what to click on when i'm in Yahoo. The clutter confuses me. The only reason Yahoo has so many people with their email is their age and nothing else. Their email has been around for over 10 years. If you look at Gmail, been around for 4 years at most and their size of storage is still expanding. What Yahoo proclaims is ridiculous, they are just using a smear campaign which I doubt will work.
Posted by: shortshire 01 Mar 2007
yahoo emails getting worse
i think yahoo has a limit of 500 for the number of spam emails you can label as spam, therfore yahoo wont block spam that gets through its filters into your yahoo inbox once youve used up your 500 limit. im getting 2 or 3 spam emails in my inbox daily which yahoo let through im already blocking over 300 spam addresses ill soon hit the limit.yahoo needs to give us unlimited spam blocking then youll be worth sticking with otherwise once yahoo no longer helps ill be off to another free email provider, well done yahoo for filtering 50 or so spams a day to the junk folder but unless you become 100% accurate at blocking spam you must offer us all unlimited spam blocking
Posted by: D c so 28 Feb 2007