Yahoo! iPhone Browser Redirects Considered Harmful
Jan 5, 02:38 PMThere are times I just don’t get what the folks at Yahoo! are up to. It’s like they roll out changes without any regard for user testing or feedback. It’s like either their QA and HCI departments don’t exist, or aren’t listened to if they do.
Take, for instance, this morning’s change to their home page for iPhone viewers.
Yesterday, the Yahoo! Home page was the same on both Safari and Mobile Safari. This wasn’t necessarily optimal, because the Yahoo! home page is cluttered… but at least you could get to the same content on your phone as you could on your computer.
Now, yahoo.com redirects to m.yahoo.com, Yahoo!‘s crippled mobile site when viewing with Mobile Safari.
This means:
- You get only the menu of the original page, without any of the content.
- When selecting a menu item, you get no more than three headlines for that category (unlike the non-mobile site, which gives you dozens of options.)
- When reading actual content, you get truncated versions that require you to click through multiple pages.
And, worst of all,
- There is no way to go to the regular home page on the iPhone!
It’s this last part that seriously irritated my wife this morning, which, by extension, gets me seriously irritated. Removing user choice for which experience they would like is a great way to alienate your existing user base, which Yahoo! has (unfortunately) plenty of experience with.
This is just a bone-headed move by Yahoo!. I’d like to say that I’m surprised, but really I’m not.
Amazon’s iPhone site at least gets this part right: there are big buttons that let you choose which site you want, and toggle between the two. (If anything, I’d like more of those buttons, because I often want to use the iPhone interface to search, and then use the regular interface to read up on a product. But at least I can choose.)
But Yahoo! didn’t even roll out a new site for this; they just put a browser redirect in place to their existing mobile site, which is at best lazy, and at worst, requires us to invoke Hanlon’s Razor on any conspiracy theories. There was no effort beyond a small change to a browser sniffer. The mobile site is exactly the same as it was on my Cingular Sync A707, which was decent only because the iPhone and Mobile Safari didn’t exist yet.
But now they do.
I’m not advocating a return to the whole “This Page Best Viewed In…” mentality with respect to iPhone web design. Far from it. The rule is: optimize, don’t restrict. But this browser redirect achieves exactly the opposite. They may as well have put up a page at yahoo.com telling iPhone users that their browser is no longer supported.
Nice.
Yahoo! doesn’t have a great history of rolling back their mistakes. I only hope that maybe, this time will be different.
I’m not holding my breath, though.
Update 1/12/08: Fred Stutzman points out a workaround — http://yahoo.com/?a will bring you to the old home page. No sign of Yahoo! actually fixing! it!, though.
Update 1/15/08: Merrystar reports that there’s now an opt-out section to the mobile site.
(I still maintain that the product guys aren’t listening to the HCI guys at Yahoo!.)
