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While I was working for Dell, we had this saying that each one of us were sharks all swimming in a relatively small ocean. If anyone one of us started to slow down or stop, we would be eaten by another. It might of been a little over the top, but it did make the point crystal clear. Keep pushing forward, never stop, never be content.
A couple of months ago I posted a story on the new Yahoo! Mail Beta and the issues I had with it. As the story explained, I have been using Yahoo! Mail as my primary personal email address for many many years and it seemed to me that Yahoo! released this new Beta without any consideration of the customer experience people would have. The entire user experience on this application was terrible and to be honest, a bit embarrassing to release this as a Beta.
Since I wrote that story several months ago, I have been sending Yahoo! Mail feedback on all my thoughts, issues and suggestions for this new email application. They have a little feedback button, so I thought I would share. I believe I have sent them at least 6 different emails with thoughts and suggestions. These were not bitch emails, they were my personal suggestions on what could make their new application better. I received exactly zero responses from Yahoo! on any and all of my feedback. Not even a fricken form letter. And more importantly, in the last couple of months, I have seen absolutely no changes to this Beta release, nothing.
So what happens when a company turns it’s back on longtime brand evangelists as well as giving the impression that they are doing absolutely no work? They tend to become irrelevant and fade quietly into obscurity.
So what could Yahoo! do to rectify these issues with very little effort?
- KEEP US INFORMED! - Send out a progress email to all members. You know a little status report. Tell us what you are working on, what’s going on.
- KEEP US INVOLVED! - Just like how every open source application does today. Create a online request log that users can add feature suggestions and thoughts.
- KEEP YOURSELF RELEVANT! - Show some sort of progress. Change something, fix something, let us know that you are still breathing.
You are running out of times around the track here Yahoo!. Personally, I see my Yahoo! email address becoming my spam email address if things do not change in the future. As always, I am here Yahoo! if you actually are interested in communicating with your users. Please send all correspondence to my Gmail email address. Sorry, I couldn’t resist. 
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Technorati Tags: Dell, Yahoo!, Yahoo! Mail, customer experience
Cord, sorry you’ve never gotten anything back from the feedback system. That’s pretty rude not to even say thanks.
As for keeping users informed/involved, we do actually have some channels for this. They’re just not well publicized. The first act was back in November when I was made an evangelist for the beta. I’ve always done updates on my personal blog, but since I took over evangelism duties I’ve been doing some posting on our updates blog, http://ymailupdates.com. In particular, I posted release notes for our last major release in mid-December, which is just now making it to the last of our users (it takes a little while to get the new stuff pushed out to everyone).
Additionally, I’m always involved in the Y-Mail Yahoo! Group (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Y-Mail/). I try answering as many questions as I can there. Additionally, I’ve offered to anyone who mails me to migrate them to one of our early bird farms where they can get updates sooner.
As I said, I know it’s not terribly public but I’m working on that. In the coming weeks you should be hearing even more.
Anyway, I hope that meets your “keep us informed/involved” requirements.
Ryan Kennedy
Yahoo! Mail
Ryan,
Thanks for the feedback once again. I think this information is great, as you said, it should be made a lot more public, but I do really appreciate your feedback. Thanks.
Well, all of the information is public. It’s just not well publicized. The information is free for everyone to check out, we just need to do a little more to make it visible.
Ryan Kennedy
Yahoo! Mail
Hey Ryan,
Government documents are “public” but how many of us know how to get them?
And if it isn’t clear where, how or by what method to reach said documents, are they really public?
It’s a requirement of every citizen to know the law and to take an active role in their government. So the government has an excuse to be difficult to reach/engage. Do you?
I would love to see you argue and nitpick on how public this data is. But it might serve you better to just focus on making the data public, available and known to your users.
In fact, that’s likely part of your role, no?