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Yahoo! reorders its buttons
Friday, July 5 2002
We saw two movies: Minority Report and Mr. Deeds.
Yesterday evening Gretchen and I had planned on going to the movies, sort of as if we were doing a summer version of a Jewish Christmas. (An analogy for all you Scholastic Aptitudinateurs: Jew is to Christmas as I am to nauseating displays of patriotism, not than any displays of patriotism I saw yesterday were actually nauseating.) But the picnic had sapped our strength and we couldn't muster the necessary ambition. Today, however, we made it to Windsor Terrace in time for a matinee viewing of Minority Report at the Pavilion Theaters. Part of the reason we'd been craving a movie was for the air conditioning. But suddenly today the weather was much cooler and drier than it had been.
I didn't much expect to like the ideas presented in Minority Report, because the notion of precogs psychically predicting future crimes reacts with my scientific worldview much like fingernails on a chalk board (especially the way my fingernails are these days after digging a five foot deep beach hole with my bare hands). But I'd venture to say the psychic precog part was actually handled much more intelligently in Minority Report than, say, the humans-as-power-generators-that-somehow-also-involve-nuclear-fusion crap which we were expected to swallow in The Matrix. What's more, I was intrigued by the way the precogs are portrayed, as beings so deeply-feeling that they've actually lost their humanity. Beyond that, I also appreciated the informed realism in the depiction of the year 2054. So often we're shown a future that bears little resemblance to the present, even while our own present owes an enormous debt to its past. Here in Brooklyn, for example, I'm sitting at a computer using technology that was unimaginable by the folks who built the building that surrounds me. To the extent that old stuff exists in modern times, most people seem to be grateful. In Minority Report, some people live in folksy townhomes that look like they were built in 1920 while others live in gleaming skyscrapers with highways running up their sides. While murder might have been eliminated, still no one has found a way to keep trash from accumulating in the street. And then we were given the message that no system is perfect, no matter how ingenious, utopian, or technological. Hacking will always be an available option, for good or for ill. Being a Spielberg film, I fully expected an uplifting Hollywood ending. What I didn't expect was quite the number of intriguing plot twists on the way there. Just once, though, it would be great if Spielberg could go out on the limb of reality a little and leave us with the good guys in jail and the bad guys laughing all the way to the bank. Because that's how, if you've been paying any attention to the news, the world really works.
We'd actually had to pay to get into Minority Report, which is unusual at the Pavilion. But after that was over, we managed to sneak into Mr. Deeds in the theatre next door. This was a somewhat smaller theatre and, owing to the many bodies crowded into the room, the air conditioning was far less bone-numbingly frosty than it had been in the Minority Report theatre. What a goofy movie, Mr. Deeds! I think the main reason Gretchen wanted to see it was to touch base with our movie star neighbor, John Turturro. The humor, though often funny enough to get me laughing, seemed geared mostly to children. There were indeed a great many kids in the audience, some of whom were so young that they squalled often and for no apparent reason. Looking at the various websites, however, I see that it's rated PG-13, even though I never heard any of the characters give voice to the most frighteningly child-unfriendly of words: fuck.
Gretchen was checking her email this evening and discovered that Yahoo! had switched the order of the buttons. Suddenly, among other things, "Shop" is exactly where "Mail" used to be. Since mail is the most-often (and automatically) pressed of these buttons, I imagine that this switcheroo was done specifically to lead users into the shopping site unaware.
As you know, I actually worked for several dotcoms back in their heyday (including, of course, Yahoo! itself) and I can tell you that what probably happened is that some executive in the e-commerce division held a meeting and proclaimed "We have a challenge. We're not getting enough hits on 'Shop' - somebody drill down to this problem, take ownership of it, proactively leverage some of our assets, and take the 'Shop' button to the next level. Where there's a will, there's a way. If you can give me a 20% increase in traffic, I can see to it that only 10% of your resources are dehired at the next round of layoffs."
Still,
once you realize what Yahoo! has done, how can you not sense the desperation in this action? It's nothing less than a slicing open of the golden-egg-laying goose (okay, maybe those eggs are actually plastic these days). I almost feel sorry for a company that feels the need to change a well-established user interface for the sole purpose of driving accidental traffic to the most annoying part of their website. This is right up there with worst deceptions being pulled by spammers and Pledge-crazed politicians.
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