Why does Yahoo Mail make it so hard for me to use its iPad-friendly interface?

I got an iPad a few days ago. When I tried to access Yahoo Mail on it by typing mail.yahoo.com on the browser, here’s what happened.

1. Yahoo Mail didn’t recognize the iPad browser and alluded to a problem with my screen resolution. It offered me to switch to an older version of Yahoo Mail. Because I don’t like the old 1990’s-style interface of the old Yahoo Mail, I opted to bite the bullet and stick with the new Yahoo Mail.

2. Now I’m on Yahoo Mail. But the site is not optimized for the touch screen. I can’t scroll through my emails. At this point, I realized I needed the mobile version of Yahoo Mail. Ah, there’s a link to go there at the top right corner of the window. Can you see it? Don’t blame yourself if you can’t. I’m guessing most people would have given up using Yahoo Mail on the iPad by this time. 

3. After clicking on the “Mobile” link, Yahoo Mail takes me to this screen. For some reason Yahoo thinks I’m using a feature phone and asks me whether I’d like to receive the link to Yahoo Mail via SMS on my phone. Oh, alternatively, Yahoo Mail says, I could go to “m.yahoo.com/mail” on my phone’s browser. I thought: Okay fine, I’ll just go there. BUT I CAN’T CLICK ON THE LINK. I literally needed to type it in on the browser.

4. After typing “m.yahoo.com/mail”, can I now read my email? Not yet. I need to pick between the New Yahoo Mail or the Yahoo Mail Classic. Whatever, I’ll pick the New one.

5. Now, I’m finally ready to read my emails. Well, look at that. It’s a nice interface after all. I don’t understand why Yahoo made me jump through all the hoops before taking me here. 

There are a few design decisions that I’m not crazy about, like the 5 icons you see at the bottom of the screen towards the right side. 

(a) The first two icons look very similar. The first one is supposed to be a shield. You click it to mark an email as spam. The second one is supposed to be a trash can, but it’s more like an ugly trash can.

(b) The third icon is a purple circle. What does it mean? I had to click it to know what it does.

(c) The right-most icon (the three dots) is an ellipsis. If you click it, you’ll get a pop-up for more actions. But why have an ellipsis there? There’s still plenty of room for more icons.

By the way, how does Google give you Gmail on the iPad? Here’s what happens if you type mail.google.com on the browser:

iPad-optimized layout in one step.

Update: Not long after I posted the above, Yahoo made changes to their Mail service. Now if you use the browser on the iPad to go to mail.yahoo.com, you’ll get the iPad-optimized layout.