Yahoo!’s Delicious Fails at Usability

Not completely, but enough for me to blog about it.

When making changes to your site infrastructure or architecture, it’s important to consider links coming into your site.

For example, I may want to change the URL structure for my blog posts, to include the year and month in which they were posted. This post’s URL would change to;
http://philipjohn.blog/blog/2008/10/yahoos-delicious-fails-at-usability

I would need to consider that there may be some links to this post would be broken. In order to ensure my visitors (or, rather, potential visitors) have a smooth user experience I create appropriate redirects. For example, my .htaccess might include this line:
RewriteRule ^blog/yahoos-delicious-fails-at-usability$ /blog/2008/10/yahoos-delicious-fails-at-usability [R=301]

This would create a permanent redirect from the ‘old’ URL to the ‘new’ URL without the visitor noticing a thing. It really is that simple, too.

So why is it that one of the foremost web companies can’t do that? I was looking for the Delicious bookmarklet today, so I searched Google:

That looked good, so I clicked on it. Here’s the page that Yahoo took me to:

Hmm… no bookmarklets. Oh, but there’s a link to bookmarklets. TWO clicks later I got to the right page:

That’s one search and three clicks which should have been one search and ONE click. -10 usability points for Yahoo. Sort it out, guys!