Comments on: Picking On Yahoo, Part Two

By: Oliver Zheng

Oliver Zheng — Tue, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

It’s not just Yahoo’s surveys that are like this. I’m in university and some of our surveys are hand made by script kiddies and some are by those survey sites. Either way, it’s just as bad. The really shitty thing is they will never tell you the progress, they tell you, “you are almost done” when you are actually only a third way.

By: Dustin Diaz

Dustin Diaz — Tue, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Wow. That is bad. I can still say that I’ve seen worse in other places of Y!, but most of the new wave of developers that have come into Yahoo! see all these things and most definitely want to fix them. It’s just great that you’re bringing them into the light because it perhaps puts more attention to it.

And btw, thanks for not disturbing the tetris experiement ;)

By: david gouch

david gouch — Tue, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I just had this experience with a survey at school. I wanted to help and give the information, but I really didn’t have half-an-hour to spend answering four pages of questions.

So now the school doesn’t get my input and ends up with much less representative results.

It’s like asking for money: people will give you a dollar, but they’re gonna walk away if you ask for a thousand.

By: Oliver Zheng

Oliver Zheng — Tue, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

David, it's more like asking for a dollar in 100 pennies instead of a loonie (that's what we call a dollar coin here in Canada).

By: Bradley

Bradley — Tue, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Mike, you were the first to turn me on to ABC’s streaming media player. Since then, I’ve noticed a couple of issues, one being that the commercials are drastically louder than the features (just like regular TV!), which is a byproduct of preserving dynamic range in the feature and compressing the audio to hell on the commercials. Bottom line, don’t watch ABC’s online stuff with headphones on. (Or, do this and sue.)

Needless to say there are other things that need attention, so I jumped at the chance to take a survey. It turned out to be 15 pages long. All the questions were like, “Since you saw commercials from Ford, how does this make you feel about Ford?”, with possible answers like, “I feel that Ford is a major player in the technology world because they sponsor online video,” and “Ford cares about emerging technologies.”

So they went all touchy-feely on me, and basically tried to pay the bills. I understand why they ask the questions they do… I used to work for an ad agency so I get it. But still, 99% of the questions had nothing to do with the quality of the service, usefulness of the UI, availability, etc. I think only one question was on whether they had an adequate number of shows available. And everything was a radio button, with not one textarea for me to state, “The commercials are too loud.”

So all they will know is that I have been watching Alias at 2am, and that I could give a crap about Ford. What they need to know is that when watching Alias at 2am, I need to use headphones, but can’t. As a result, I haven’t watched the last episode or season finale, and might not get to it anytime soon. If they knew this, they could fix the problem and probably deduct that I haven’t seen any Ford commercials either.

It’s sad when people like us who actually want to give feedback end up walking away feeling like we haven’t been heard. I don’t know about Yahoo, but I care about what Mike Davidson thinks about Yahoo’s services and so should they. At the least, it’s good that people like Dustin read your blog, and hopefully this “new wave of developers” can make a difference.

Sigh. I don’t use Yahoo.

By: Sean Sperte

Sean Sperte — Tue, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Yeah. And have you seen Yahoo's captchas?! Ugh.

By: PanMan

PanMan — Tue, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I had a similar thing: I got a personalised email, to ask me to fill out this
hudge questionaire (which, atmittedly, they said would take 15 minutes). The plus side is that they give money to some charity if I complete the whole questionaire. So I have this running in a firefox tab, doing the questions one page at a time, in between other browsing. When I’m at 85% (it did say that), Firefox crashes.
When I click the personalised link in my Inbox again, it starts right back at the beginning! While I’m sure they sended me some user ID, and I’m guessing they are saving the results in between (otherwise they would be Really stupid). Then why not give me the chance to continue where I was? I’m not going to the first 85% again (taking some 10+ minutes), to finish the last questions.

By: Collin

Collin — Tue, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

The company I work for does a lot of online surveys. I have not ever gone though one until you got me wondering how effective our surveys might be compared to Google. From the one I just looked at it was 5 screens, no more then 5 questions, all multiple choice. Not to bad I guess.

It seems like what happens with Yahoo is we have some marketing guy that puts the survey together, passes it off to the web guys to put online and at no point did anyone consider making it quick and painless to get the largest percentage of participants from end users. Kind of sad but I can imagine how the web guys wouldn’t care so much about the content of the survey since it’s probably presented as some big priority just to get it online.

From the looks of that screen shot the survey was put together entirely by a marketing guy and some 3rd party survey service/program so all the web guys probably got was a URL.

I guess you would be better off interrupting Dustin if you want your opinion to really be heard because the same careless person/group that created the survey will be recieving the results.

By: Corey Spring

Corey Spring — Tue, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Please, please, please dear God, let ‘Sweet Fennel’ become a catchphrase.

By: MrCorey

MrCorey — Tue, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been using yahoo! products for years in one capacity or another. Since my ISP (Rogers in Canada) decided to get out of the content game and farm it out to Yahoo!, they’ve been more of a part of my life, as its a tad harder to avoid the “content” (shame there aren’t larger versions of quotation marks for greater emphasis).

What I’m wondering, aside from the obvious Yahoo! trend of obfuscation for profit, is how you ever thought that they grew a sense of humor! :-D

By: Zappo

Zappo — Tue, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I had exactly the same type of survey from eBay recently. It ALSO promised to take just a few minutes and went on page after page.

Soon I started answering every question with the worst rating. By the time I finished it I hated eBay which sort of defeated the point of the Survey.

The third party that provides these is a site called http://www.tpolldirect.com.

Someone should tell Yahoo and eBay that this kind of market intelligence is about as popular as sending SPAM to customers.

By: Meetha

Meetha — Tue, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

i cant stand capthchas

By: Erythisis

Erythisis — Tue, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

The all or nothing approach makes sense by me. However, I was ready to use one of those “funny” fly swatters, with a shoe for the swat part, on the Yahoo people for having an annoying survey. The problem is really what they use to process the questions. Instead of making use of available technology which curves the survey to the user, it’s some basic form coding with a hint of something more. Ie. I can say I got fired two months ago and the next question will ask if I’ve gotten a pay raise in the last week. o.0
I do HarrisPoll and NPDOR surveys one to three times a month and they’re great. They can be a tad longer than Yahoo, but they’re much more worth the time.

I did get a kick out of the “Decipher Privacy Policy” too. At first I was awe-struck that such a thing existed. I’m sure you understand how disappointed I was to find out what the link really led to. ;)