Yahoo Mail Narrow Search–Awesome

Over the last 3 years, my gmail address has become my primary email address. I hardly log into my yahoo mail address anymore, maybe once a month. My Yahoo address used to be my primary email address. So why did I stop using Yahoo mail. Well essentially because of two reasons. 
1) Search - The search feature of Yahoo sucked. I found it difficult to locate mails which I knew were there in my Yahoo inbox. I found gmail search easy and effective.And slowly I stopped giving people my Yahoo address. I stopped checking my Yahoo mail.
2) Spam - Perhaps the spam filter of gmail is more effective. Or perhaps Yahoo being the number 1 site a few years ago attracted more spammers. I don't know but my Yahoo mail always had more spam than meaningful email.
However, today I had to log into Yahoo mail to find and sort some important mails which I do receive on my Yahoo address. I don't know why but I just tried the search term that I would have tried in my gmail (from:emailaddress) and voila.. it worked. Perhaps this feature has been there for long and I did not know. But this really made my life easier. And now comes the best part.
On the right hand side, a small search options pane opened up giving me very useful options to narrow down my search to the relevant mails. Check out the screen shot below(click on image to view in full size):


These options were super useful. I specially liked the attachment type option as I was looking for a pdf and I knew it was sent sometime in 2009.
All may not be well at Yahoo but this feature sure rocks! Yahoo might just have regained a bit of its lost mojo.

An example of Bad Design

 

Looking at the screenshot below, you will be wondering why is this post titled “An example of Bad Design”. After all the design looks fine and elegant.

A wise man once said, “looks can be deceiving” and rightly so in this particular case. While the visual design of this page from the site gojiyo.com seems nice, it is the interaction design which fails. You are asked to choose you username, fill your email address and select a password, which you do. But post that you are asked to install the unity3D plugin and are given a button to download the plugin. Clicking on the button takes you away from this page and into a unity page where you can download the plugin. But what happened to the sign up process. Was that completed? NO!

If you are engaging the user in a flow, you should ensure that the flow is completed. What if I start downloading the plugin and then completely forget about why I was downloading it. It is, after all, an era of short attention spans. In this case the download link should have opened in a new window or perhaps better still it should have appeared after the sign up process.

 

What do you think?