Tabs Bad Design: Yahoo! Shopping

A horrible example of tabs design can be found at Yahoo! Shopping. It’s weird to see these kind of things at Yahoo! but it’s true.

Here you can see two tabs highlighted at the same time. If you don’t want to confuse your users please don’t do this.

Yahoo Shopping Screenshot 20071127

Clicking on “Holiday Gifts” the tab labels change, “More” disappear. Another usability problem I find is that they use so many words written in capitals everywhere on the site. Without doubt words written in capitals are harder to read. Plus, “SHOP FOR” is highlighted, it just looks horrible.

Yahoo Shopping Holidays 20071127

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Simple Forms Improve Usability

Make your forms short and simple if you really want users to fill it. That sentence is a mix of common sense and usability principle. Lets see an example.

Live Documents is a new web based office suite, so it has already many competitors. Why making the sign up process complicated. Don’t ask for too many details, why would you need people’s names for a try out of your product?

They use improper wording too, asking the people for an “Email Id”. What is that? My email address or what?

Live Documents 20071126

They also placed a nerdy and unnecessary comment at the bottom of the form, telling users that passwords are protected by the “SHA 256 hash algorithm”. Who cares?! You don’t have to include in your interface comments about how powerful your application is, at the end that’s going to confuse users.

Mojaz, a feed aggregator, has a better usability approach making it simple. Just enter your email.

Mojaz 20071126

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