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Daring Fireball: "Facebook login"

230 pointsby natemartinover 15 years ago

27 comments

thaumaturgyover 15 years ago
My current primary business is IT consulting, which really means that I spend most of my time working face-to-face with people that have trouble with computers and technology in general.<p>So, this kind of behavior isn't news to me. In fact, I've tried often to convince the tech-savvy that <i>most</i> users have problems like this, and I've never been all that successful. The RWW "Facebook login" is great from this standpoint, because suddenly a bunch of web programmers have gotten this glimpse of the world outside their bubble, and have collectively gone, "Oh."<p>Now let's talk about the <i>kind</i> of people these people are. I've noticed a number of comments about their illiteracy, or implying that they must not be paying attention. While there might be a kernel of truth to that, I'd like you to know that most of these are good people, and many of them have accomplished more in their lives than many of the denigrating commenters ever will.<p>For example, one of my clients is an aesthetician that runs a relatively high-tech place. Her angle comes from surviving cancer, and advocating healthier products for people looking for that kind of stuff. She runs a busy brick-and-mortar shop, bootstrapped it from the ground up, works obscene amounts of hours, has one kid in college abroad in Japan, and another kid finishing high school soon. She's a hell of a woman.<p>But, she's totally lost on Facebook. Someone told her she should do it, so she is, and we're helping her. She can't manage her email list, and has trouble doing mail merges, so we help her with that too. When a computer puts an error up on the screen, she doesn't read it, analyze it, research it, figure it out; she simply concludes that the computer has had a problem, and she needs help with it.<p>She's certainly not dumb, but you wouldn't know it by her computer skills.<p>My weakness is cooking. I'm a reasonably competent programmer, literate, and I can fix cars, etc., but I'm a laughably terrible cook.<p>More than likely, everyone here has at least one subject which is so alien, so foreign, that they just won't "get" it, no matter how simple it becomes.
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natemartinover 15 years ago
This is fascinating... apparently users are just typing "facebook login" into google, clicking on the first link, and getting very confused as to why they're not actually on facebook.<p>How can you design a web application that is usable by people with this level of computer knowledge? Should one even try?
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ehsanulover 15 years ago
It is interesting though that many of these lost users were able to find the comment box and leave a comment. Perhaps that's something they've learned from Facebook?
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tinotopiaover 15 years ago
Netflix used to make it very difficult to find any of their customer service contact addresses or phone numbers.<p>I have an old blog post with a title that includes the word 'Netflix' and the phrase 'Customer Service', where I ramble on about a whole bunch of things; the content of the post is about a general principle that I think Netflix was illustrating, not about Netflix itself. The title, though, resulted in the post showing up high in search results for 'Netflix customer service'.<p>Three people attempted to address Netflix customer service via the comments box; one of them posted his phone number. Another posted his postal address and credit card information.<p>I posted a comment making it explicit that all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, this blog post was not, in fact, Netflix customer service HQ.<p>A year later another guy posted another Netflix customer service request, right under my 'This is not Netflix' message.
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strongsauceover 15 years ago
Not to hate on Daring Fireball but why is it that a link from his site about this topic gets more comments and points than an original HN that pointed it out in the first place?<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1116039" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1116039</a><p>Its as though no one cared too much about this until Gruber made a post about it.
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ubernostrumover 15 years ago
See also this somewhat-infamous post from 2002 which, because it discussed Maury Povich's show and ranked somewhat highly for a relevant search term, was assumed by many people to <i>be</i> the official site for the show:<p><a href="http://www.laze.net/fait/archive/2002/07/28/maurys_blooper.php" rel="nofollow">http://www.laze.net/fait/archive/2002/07/28/maurys_blooper.p...</a><p>Another example is mentioned here:<p><a href="http://www.beatnikpad.com/archives/2004/04/14/the_march_of_the_clueless" rel="nofollow">http://www.beatnikpad.com/archives/2004/04/14/the_march_of_t...</a>
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jolieover 15 years ago
D'oh... thanks for the link. The more "Facebook login" text that links back to RWW, the more of these confused/angry comments we're gonna get.<p>Don't you love SEO? o_0
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autarchover 15 years ago
I'm sure _most_ Facebook users don't do this, but enough do to make for great hilarity in this particular case.<p>This is all hilarious, but there's no reason to assume it's statistically significant.
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noonespecialover 15 years ago
I've found that the single biggest impediment to computer literacy to the "ordinary" is the somehow ingrained belief that its impossible for them to understand anything about their own computers.<p>Learning to use a computer is not like neurosurgery, its more like driving a car. A little attention, a smidge of effort and just believing that its possible is all most people need. Geeks are partly to blame for this because they (the lesser ones especially) tend to "jargonize" and "magicalize" simple aspects of computer maintenance.<p>Once people realize that they <i>can</i> understand things about their computers, its like lighting little fires in their minds.
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ltover 15 years ago
I have to admit that I used to do that in Firefox, back before I switched to Chrome.<p>Firefox address bar used to make it really convenient. It did a kind of "feeling lucky" search, taking me directly to the first result if it was the "right" search result, or to google's search otherwise. I don't know how google determined if it should display a results page or not but it used to work very well. I stopped caring about bookmarks and and memorizing URLs and just used keywords to get where I wanted.<p>Of course it's silly for really popular pages like facebook, but it worked fairly well for pages I used to visit ocasionally.
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GHFigsover 15 years ago
Would this have happened in ReadWriteWeb looked more like Daring Fireball?<p>One of the causes of this kind of mistaken identity problem is that users have become conditioned to a web full of irrelevance and distraction. RWW is typical of many sites: a huge amount of the content loaded for any article is stuff meant to distract you from the article itself. Not just advertising, but <i>crap</i>. How much of that singing, dancing circus is actually necessary? If it isn't necessary, why is it there?<p>Is it not ridiculous that RWW's message to these confused users is placed in bold black text in the article that they demonstrably <i>did not come there to read</i> and not anywhere amid the colorful parade of nonsense and not anywhere near the text "Sign in with Facebook". It's even below the fold on my system. Do people still want to blame user stupidity alone? Please.<p>Like all humans, when these users wind up somewhere unfamiliar, they reach for whatever <i>is</i> familiar. In this case, the article has not one, but <i>two</i> Facebook logos above the fold. One in the article text, reading "Facebook", immediately below the word "Facebook" in the headline. Why is this necessary? The other is in the header, and links to RWW on Facebook. But so does the huge Facebook sidebar widget a few scrolls down. Just in terms of pixels, Facebook has already carved out a nice chunk of the page, competitive with that of the body text. And then there's the text itself, the little Facebook logos on all of the user pictures of people who likewise thought this was somehow related to Facebook, and most damning of all, the text "Sign in with Facebook" right above the comment form.<p>A person who has <i>just</i> Googled for "facebook login" and who <i>just</i> saw a half dozen Facebook logos, and <i>just</i> saw dozens of other people who made the same mistake complaining, who then mistakes that username/password field as meaning "Sign in <i>to</i> Facebook" is not making an epic error in judgement. They are making a simple mistake based on a limited understanding of things they have never had a reason to understand. They aren't stupid, they're human.<p>I don't really mean to single out RWW, though. This is a web-wide problem. You will never be able to eliminate stupid mistakes or the "better fool", but you <i>can</i> stop gently assisting such confusion and illiteracy by thinking about why what you're doing isn't helping.
nico_hover 15 years ago
Out of curiosity, is it not possible that all these people are just making/perpetuating a joke? You know, improv' everywhere style, or just to have some fun? I know we all hold ourselves so smart and above the 'masses', but come on, no one wonders? And so many people leaving comments where 99% of a website visitors never leave a single comment?
mattmcknightover 15 years ago
Unfortunately I see the over application of this principle, and the general "Don't Make Me Think" approach all over the place. I build systems for people that use them all day long, every day. They become experts pretty quickly and start looking for shortcuts and other things, if you make them available to them. I have to deal with testers that assure me that if it doesn't make sense to them the first time, it's wrong. They even play dumb to make it harder on me.<p>People can't even drive a car without training. We need to use progressive revelation of complexity and capability to make things more powerful. Using simplicity as the excuse to give up power- the "who needs a command prompt, everything can be done with a GUI approach" is often a mistake.<p>Just because some people don't naturally understand something doesn't make it bad, you just have to teach them how to be more awesome, or let them stick with the defaults.
sacriliciousover 15 years ago
Speaking of Facebook, I had a client call because he said he couldn't login... due to the fact he thought the "add friends using your existing email contacts" message he was seeing after a successful login was a failure screen. He continually reset his password for a week before calling, wondering why it didn't work.
ashover 15 years ago
About the habit to type everything into Google search:<p>I thought typing facebook.com (or somesite.com) into Google is crazy. But it has an advantage. If you misspell it, Google will fix the domain name for you. This way you get the protection from phishing sites.
vishaldpatelover 15 years ago
Okay I try to bite:<p>Say I'm a "novice" user who starts up the web browser. If everything else works, then here's what I'll see:<p>A screen with a textbox that says "Search: [ ]". This textbox is at my eye level - I'm likely to see this before the "address" bar on top - which in a lot of computers isn't even labeled anymore.<p>So delightfully enough I search for something like "facebook login". If the first result isn't something I'm looking for, then I might get angry.... in some cases, at the person who authored the first result .. "hey jackass, I came here looking for the facebook login - whats going on? stop advertising as something you're not!".<p>What can I say, I'm just a spoilt baby boomer, and you want my money.
mbrubeckover 15 years ago
I think it's a mistake to generalize from those RWW commenters to "normal users." Of the millions of people who logged on to Facebook yesterday, many thousands probably got there via Google, and just a few hundred ended up commenting on various highly-ranked posts (though there were probably many more who clicked the posts but didn't comment). The commenters are not representative of normal Facebook users; they are a very aggressively filtered 99.99th percentile of the users who have the most trouble navigating the web.<p><i>[reposted from another thread, with corrections]</i>
al_jamesover 15 years ago
"All this argument over whether the iPad is too simple — if anything it’s probably still too complex." -- perfect summation off all that nonsense a couple of weeks ago.
jashmennover 15 years ago
It seems like this effect is now going on at websites that are referencing the original RWW article. See: <a href="http://www.khabrein.info/news/New_Facebook_homepage__new_Facebook_changes_and_new_Facebook_login_page__Google_Facebook_on_a_warpath_1265743727/" rel="nofollow">http://www.khabrein.info/news/New_Facebook_homepage__new_Fac...</a><p>With great comments like: "Joyce 2010-02-11 07:26:55 How in the hell do I get into my home page?"
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nazover 15 years ago
I work on cricket.com, which is clearly a site about cricket the sport. The homepage usually features a picture of a cricketer and is filled with cricket stories. Every single day I would get a feedback email asking for help with a cricket wireless phone until I finally just removed the email address from the site.
alexandrosover 15 years ago
It seems another website is now the top result for facebook login, with equally uhm.. odd comments: <a href="http://www.khabrein.info/index.php?do=comment&#38;news_id=c56ad648c2e3b13bcf2c7980f8670e7e" rel="nofollow">http://www.khabrein.info/index.php?do=comment&#38;news_id=c5...</a>
ericdover 15 years ago
That comment thread is making me sick to my stomach. I didn't understand the true extent of the power that Google wields until now. People will apparently go wherever is first...<p>Then again, the bottom 1% of 300 million users is still a huge number of users, so maybe this isn't as bleak as it seems.
FreeRadicalover 15 years ago
"Can we log into face book? This is crazy I want to get all my info off and be done with this. I recently moved from MN to SC Myrtle Beach and facebook was a great way to keep in touch with family and friends but this is getting to be to difficult."<p>This one is sad : (
Judsonover 15 years ago
Honestly, the worst part is how many 40-80 year old women are using the word "sucks".
hudibrasover 15 years ago
Just tried the AOL keyword "Facebook login." Worked fine; what's the big deal?
comsterover 15 years ago
This is just fucking great
talleyrandover 15 years ago
Unbelievable. I checked to see if it was April 1st when I read this...but, no, apparently it's February 11th.