MY SENTIMENTS EXACTLY! Yahoo! Finance's new look
Saturday, May 27, 2006
In the past week or so, Yahoo! Finance has tweaked the look of its portfolios, to the detriment of users in my opinion.
First, let me say, up front, that I love Yahoo! Finance. I have been using their website for a great many years, to track my Schwab portfolio. No other website — even Schwab's — comes close. Yahoo is fast, and has an incredible wealth of information available on each company. I always start my research at Yahoo, before going to other sources. Yahoo gets an A+ from me, and has ever since they started Yahoo! Finance.
Until now.
Yahoo has changed from displaying numeric increases in blue, and numeric decreases in red. Now all numbers are displayed in red. This makes it much harder to discern which numbers increased. Yahoo has added some tiny up-arrow and down-arrow icons, but that does not make up for the decreased readability.
To my computer-worn eyes, this single color change has motivated me not only to post this rant, but to strongly consider leaving Yahoo after many years. Not out of anger, but simply due to the vastly decreased readability. Rather than seeing the day's stock market results at a quick glance, each read of the screen requires a careful reading of each number. Previously, if I saw a "sea of red", I knew that the market, and most of my stocks, have gone down. If I saw a "sea of blue", I knew the market went up, up, up. That visual feedback is now completely lost.
Another, much more minor problem, is that Yahoo! Finance now requires me to enter my password much more frequently, when I click on a direct link to my Yahoo portfolio.
I emailed a polite note describing this to Yahoo! Customer Care, to no avail. Customer Care did reply. Their first reply indicated that they did not even read my message. I replied, indicating such. Their second email thanked me for my feedback, and that was that. Of course, being employed in the tech industry as a software engineer, I have the misfortune of knowing how unlikely it is that a single feedback email will produce change. But you gotta play the game, otherwise they won't know there is a problem.
I am now searching for a new website that tracks my portfolio in a readable manner. Google Finance is pretty worthless, so that's not a useable choice. Who knows, maybe this is an opening for me to start a new business.
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