Who Designs Yahoo! Mail Beta? You Do!

Ever wonder how we decide what features to build? How Yahoo! Mail Beta should work and look? It’s democratic: we ask our users.

Here in the User Experience & Design department, we constantly study how people work with email and what they want and need. We invite them to our Design Research Labs on a regular basis and let them tinker with the latest features and enhancements we’re developing.

What happens? We get reactions ranging all the way from confusion (wait…what?) to elation (Yes!). And often, we get concrete insights.

For example, we removed the familiar browser buttons (Forward, Back, etc.) and address bar (http://www…) in an early version of this Beta. We thought: strip that stuff out. Make it feel more like a desktop application, and less like a web page. But what did we find? In usability studies, people felt abandoned, lost. “Where are my browser controls?” they asked. So we returned the buttons to their appointed place on the page. Ahhhh.

It’s uninhibited feedback like this that helps us make Yahoo! Mail more useful and easier to manage.

You can play a pivotal part in how Yahoo! Mail and other Yahoo! properties are designed. Interested? Sign up here.

With interest in how you do things, we are

The Yahoo! Mail User Experience & Design Team