So, this kind of behavior isn't news to me. In fact, I've tried often to convince the tech-savvy that most 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."
Now let's talk about the kind 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.
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.
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.
She's certainly not dumb, but you wouldn't know it by her computer skills.
My weakness is cooking. I'm a reasonably competent programmer, literate, and I can fix cars, etc., but I'm a laughably terrible cook.
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.
While true, I'll still be prejudiced against people that leave comments like (#14):
wtf is this bullshttttttttttt all about. can i get n plzzzzzzzzz
and I'll actively argue that many who spell and act this poorly in public are probably at least as much of a detriment to society as they are a boon. Most of those smart-but-not-tech-savvy people can at least communicate properly.
edit: the comment prejudice applies to bashers too. Poor behavior is poor behavior.
I was about the go to a summer school on computer science research and the organizers have set up a mailing list in advance. People generally wrote friendly introductory messages, but there was one guy who seemed totally incoherent. He was like: 'yo gouys, hope too c u soon, i wil com by trein, ll ariv at 7, rlly xcited'. I was about to send a reply and lecture him that writing in this way was disrespectful and annoying, but luckily I was too lazy to do it. When I eventually met him, it turned out that he was completely blind (since birth), managed to go through school in a really unfair school system (mostly with the help of a few good friends) and went to college to study computer science and he uses all sorts of inadequate tools to type and use the computer in general. Turned out he was an extremely intelligent person, able to visualize and solve differential equations in his head that I could not work out on paper, and in all fields he was very knowledgeable and articulate. I wish I could say that after this event I'm more careful in summarily judging people.
Yep, sounds like you are prejudiced.
Prejudices have a prejudiced opinion applied to them. That snarling dog? It may not bite you, but it's rational to be prejudiced towards believing it may harm you. Though it may often be wrong, it proves valuable in the long run. The same goes for the person with a knife out, glaring at you, looking drunk. It could be totally harmless, but it may not be. By all means, go into the dark alley with them if you are wholly against prejudice.
Unless, of course, they're never examined. They can be wrong or detrimental just like anything else. But broken down, all rational behavior towards anything alive is effectively prejudice, because you can't have sufficient knowledge to predict it perfectly.
The "News results for facebook login" section on Google is very clearly marked, with, umm, well theres a picture, and a bit of indentation? In this case, I must lay some blame on Google for putting laundry detergent in paper sack with an off-blue stripe rather similar to one flour comes in.
Google could improve the situation by having the news results be in a more clearly marked section, perhaps with a different background color and a solid outline.
The real failure here is Mozilla, for releasing a "feature" that, as usual, appeals to computer power users, and royally fucks over computer novices.
This means that if you middle click anywhere in the window that isn't a link, it instantly redirects you to the "I'm feeling lucky" result for the contents of the last text selection you made. I cannot think of a single creepier usability clusterfuck.
Added fun: until a few years ago, http://www.microsoft.com was the first google search result for "http". This meant that malformed links (missing the colon, for instance) almost always pointed directly to Microsoft, on all platforms. It's a bit less baffling than it used to be, as not the wikipedia article on HTTP is the first result.
However, what leads you to conclude they're using the address bar? The default Firefox homepage is a Google search page. You open a Firefox window and start typing and the text will be entered in the main text box on a Google search page.
I'd actually argue that Firefox's awesome bar feature is actually _for_ computer novices. Start typing 'facebook login' and before you even hunt-and-peck your way to the double O it shows a list of Facebook related pages.
Hell, what's got me confused is type in "facebook" into the Firefox address bar and press enter. It goes to http://www.facebook.com. I'm curious then - why add the "login"? (That they should be forcing ssl is a whole 'nother problem.)
Why is this OK? Why is it OK to laugh at and discriminate against less intelligent people?
What have less intelligent people failed to do, that would have made them more intelligent, that makes them deserve to be looked down on? Is it their fault that they're less intelligent?
How is this different from laughing at people because their skin is a different color, or they speak a different language?
Disclosure: I'm guilty of this. But I've been wondering about this question for a few years now.
There's nothing wrong with discrimination in and of itself. It's actually desirable in a lot of cases. For instance, discriminating based upon competency/intelligence is a good thing. Discrimination only becomes a problem when you're discriminating based upon an |irrelevant| characteristic. (Relevancy is determined by your priorities and/or values.)
"Is it their fault that they're less intelligent?"
Nope, it's not. But that's not the issue. A lot of people think society condemns racial discrimination because race is an attribute outside one's control. That's part of it but not the full story. The real reason it's maligned is because, all other things being equal, race should have nothing to do with an individual's competency or worth as a person. The fact that someone has no influence over their own racial makeup just adds insult to injury when they're judged by it.
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I've often wondered the same thing you mentioned about intelligence. Everybody is born with their potential; how can you laugh at a part of somebody that they can't control? But life would be rather joyless if you couldn't occasionally celebrate favorable comparisons between yourself and the rest of the world. :)
For the record, I don't think it /is/ actually any different, just that it's more socially acceptable.
And it's almost painful watching him operate a computer sometimes. Basic tasks like moving around a Window to uncover another one needs to be explained. Some people are lousy drivers. Some people are just really bad with using a computer.
But: He would never leave the type of comment you see on the linked site. Have you seen those? I'm not convinced that these are the same accomplished people that you and I are talking about.
There's no denying that a lot of people still get confused about websites and google and the internet as a whole. But if you're using facebook and using it enough to complain about the 'new login page' then you really should be held to higher standards.
To my amazement such seemingly trivial things like double clicking turned out to be a problem. She tapped the mouse button twice, but too slowly to register. While my first reaction to this was embarrassment, the whole thing turned out to be a learning experiment for me - in human condition.
The funny thing is, you can turn most people away from the computer and read the error message verbatim (or any other dialog) and they'll be able to answer you. It's merely the fact that it's displayed on the computer that confuses/scares them. Once they've answered you (say "Yes, I want to cancel") you can turn them back to the computer and they'll still have trouble picking the right button.
There is some kind of mental block here -- but I believe that most people can get past it if they're forced to interact with computers. I rarely just click on a dialog for people -- I make them read it. I make them think about it. I make them pick the right button -- over and over. Eventually they gain more confidence and can do it themselves. And slowly they do begin to "get" computers. Dropping someone into facebook without them having the confidence is probably never going to work. But smart people don't have to be dumb with computers.
She's a smart women with 2 masters degrees, but when an unexpected dialog box or popup box appears on the screen, her brain shuts down and fear takes over.
Is that really so bad, though? I don't know about anybody else, but I've never liked the Facebook UI. I always thought it was a confusing mess. Lite Facebook is about as close as they've gotten to something user-friendly.
Granted, that's a bit different from the ridiculousness involved with the RWW post, but they're already trying to log in to a confusing website that has been changing it's interface recently.
The point was, let's dispense with this notion that intelligence and general ability are somehow related to computer literacy. If anyone's not sure about this, I'd be more than happy to talk about one of my other clients, a guy who used to build floating homes -- not little houseboats, but multi-story works of art, on water. And he's completely lost on a computer.
The fact that it appears alien to the people you mention is probably due more to having some sort of mental block against exploring computers than to computers being actually alien to them. My mother, for instance, had for the longest time an aversion to trying stuff out on a computer for fear of damaging it. She only started getting it when I gave her an old laptop and assured her that it was ok if she totally junked it. She would still have her desktop and I no longer needed that box. Now she's happily discovering and playing games on Facebook and wasn't even fazed by the recent change in the UI. :)
I think when dealing with the general public, specialists too often confuse "don't care" with "is stupid".
I daresay, if something I am not familiar with pops up with an error message, I would at least read it!
Are you really that positive that there is no subject which is so baffling to you that you wouldn't even attempt to diagnose something related to it? 'Cause I've met plenty of programmery-types that don't know a fuel pump from an alternator, and when their car breaks down, they're as stuck as everyone else.
You're ignoring the fact that computers are filled with text. Menus, window titles, commands, icons, etc. etc. -- your brain has already been trained to filter through all that. You do it without even thinking about it.
Lots of other people do not. So, to them, the directions, or that pop up, is just more words on the screen.
It's one of the main problems with user interface for the really tech-inept. It's a fundamentally hard problem, because you don't know what they're expecting, and you can't predict it 100% of the time.
That said though, most programmery-types are problem-solvers at heart, and would be looking for information when their car broke down. Many people don't even look for the word "help" when stuck on a computer, they just make a fuss and wait / storm off because they fully think it's incomprehensible to them (usually because they haven't tried learning anything about it).
As complex as computers are, take a look at OLPC and similar projects, where a supremely back-water pocket of a society is introduced to computers for the first time. The kids look, poke, and are up and running within minutes because they're learning how to use it. Adults who try achieve the same in roughly the same amount of time. Many non-tech people though won't even approach it as something new, they expect it to be a "magic box" that does what they want, not what they tell it to do (like employees?). Nothing in the world works that way, why expect this to be any different?
People don't see each popup with fresh eyes, they associate them with most of the other popups they've seen; overly technical, they didn't understand them, the options made no sense, and they had to call for help.
People ignore all the cruft on screen and only scan for the one thing they're familiar with in order to get by, this is the behaviour that the Windows operating system has conditioned them into adopting. They know from experience that you shouldn't touch things you're not familiar with, because often enough things go wrong. Suspicious behaviour is a sign of malware.
A lot of this is Microsoft's fault. Really.
If you look at the people who mistook the RWW article for Facebook they're almost invariably over 30, and I didn't see a single teenager or college age person.
How can you design a web application that is usable by people with this level of computer knowledge? Should one even try?
This is not trivial but it also is not impossible. Trust me if my users can do it then yours can too. Help them succeed and take their money for it.
"Hey user, it looks like you came to us today from Google searching for [Facebook login]. Did you know that there is a better way? Type facebook.com into [blah blah blah]. Try it now and we'll give you 5 free credits for [without loss of generality: FarmVille]!"
"Great job! You should do that every time. If you do that to log into Facebook the next five days you use the service, we'll award you a Facebook Diploma and give you another 10 free credits for [without loss of generality: FarmVille]!"
On the back end, you show the above prompts to N% of your users who you detect coming to the login page from Google search results (this is trivial -- check the referer). You then compare any user metric you want for the "Was Shown Facebook Login Course" population and "Complete Facebook Login Course" population with the population at large. Kill the test if it hurts your metrics, deploy it sitewide if it helps them.
Sorry, but this whole thing is a whole new level of idiocy I had not previously encountered: Even my mother (whose sole computer skill is that she can get to amazon.com to buy gifts for people) would be able to determine whether or not she was at amazon after searching Google and clicking a random link.
My God! RWW isn't even BLUE for heaven's sakes.
Facebook users who have made this mistake are also confused by this. Clearly something is amiss--they know they aren't at the Facebook they desire--but they don't know where the mistake was made, or by whom.
Even the basic error is not egregiously stupid. Generally speaking, wouldn't you expect, from years of Google usage, that the first result for "facebook login" to be the Facebook login page? In fact, it is, if you ignore the news results. If.
Consider that: RWW is a top result for "facebook login" (not a "random link"), it does have multiple Facebook logos and the text "Sign in with Facebook" directly above the comment form. These things conspire to aid the user's confusion along with the most damning setter of expectations: the fact that it used to work.
You may understand that Google's results are not always perfect, that the Facebook logo appears on sites unrelated to Facebook, and that "Sign in with Facebook" does not have anything to do with using Facebook. But does Gladys? Evidently not. And why should she? Until yesterday, she didn't need to.
Yes, but for most businesses you'll want them to be able to get back too, and that is non-trivial and worth optimizing for.
Get their email address and send them opt-in lifecycle emails. This is, far and away, the best alternative.
Have them bookmark your site. Many of them will not understand bookmarks. Teach them to understand.
SEO for whatever users thing your business name is. If you think your app is called Foobar and users think your app is called Fubar then you had better be at the top of the results for [fubar], too.
Get desktop/dock/launch bar real estate. (Desktop apps: not dead yet! They can still open websites. :))
Isn't that really advocating that each and every website on the internet should teach their users basic computer skills?
I mean if these people had bought a magazine from the news stand, and it said "Popular Mechanics" instead of "Playboy" on it, do you think that they would just say to themselves, "I guess that Playboy changed their name, logo, and stopped showing pictures of naked women. Interesting. I'll have to tell me friends about this?"
I'm early 30s and already prone to delegating rather than learning new technology, but I at least make the effort to read instructions, warnings and errors so I know what's going on.
(Is there even a single comment there written in correct written English? I don't see one; everything is misspelled, mis-capitalized, or just plain incomprehensible. Depressing! So very depressing!)
I agree that it's actually difficult to get into this mindset. I tend to say that you can get money if you can "cater to the stupid". I thought it was kind of harsh but that Facebook login story proves me that it's not necessarily.
Google ads can be useful from time to time, random ads not really, I think most of the random ads I click on are non purchase interesting looking things or ads for physical stores I know because they have a decent deal in the ad.
What some people do in public without even realizing it is truly hilarious.
But you'll never get to facebook-level with a niche audience like that. It certainly avoids some of the problems with dealing with stupidity though.
I have a user population with 50% masters degrees which disagrees with you. Violently.
What "type" of person am I?
Written communication is a stunt that is mastered by a relative handful of people, and polite, formal written communication by even fewer. The others communicate by more traditional and universal means: Talk, music, dance, art, games, cooking, commerce.
Less sarcastically, maybe people would like a system for posting voice comments to blogs. Startup opportunity for ya.
Anyway, go to Facebook and you have to log in. No need to search for it explicitly.
However I do actually read my search results and refine my criteria if necessary rather than just clicking on the first link.
Look at the interfaces exposed by any general public machine/gadget outside of computing, and the layers of abstraction that the consumer needs to grasp.
Automobiles are one of the rare gadgets that expose an internal system layer (the engine) and right there you clearly see a divide between the users who can only interact with the general purpose (simple wheel, pedals, key, gear shift) interface, and the automotive geek ("grease monkey") who also has a clue what's going on under the hood.
As soon as any sort of symbolic interaction is required (remote/vcr programming) you again lose a whole chunk of the population that simply can not get it.
A "consumer product" has to be an appliance, not a general purpose computing machine, hosting a general purpose operating system, hosting a general purpose application (web2.0 browser), hosting yet more general applications.
The fact that the "farmville" crowd even manages to get to interact on the web (and leave hysterical comments on RWW) is by itself a major accomplishment of the geek set! ;)
This is all hilarious, but there's no reason to assume it's statistically significant.
Here, for example, is an article from 2007 pointing out that the top search term on Google was... "Yahoo":
http://www.dailydomainer.com/200742-yahoo-top-search-term-on...
Here's Jeremy Zawodny in 2008 musing on the fact that people neither know about nor understand the address bar:
http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/010453.html
I could go on like this for a while, but the takeaway is that if you know what your browser's address bar is for and actually type URLs into it, then you're probably in a small minority of web users.
Search, on the other hand, has failures, but those failures are rapidly fixed.
http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2010/02/12/two_steps_forward_tw...
And mentioned his own anecdote:
http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2003/10/09/the_internet_and_und...
Choice quote:
URLs. Bookmarks. Changing your homepage. All of these things were voodoo.
As he points out, claims that people are more "savvy" today than they were then probably don't hold up; if anything, users back then probably were more knowledgeable on average, simply by virtue of even having Internet access.
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.
Once people realize that they can understand things about their computers, its like lighting little fires in their minds.
Neurosurgery on the other hand, is hedged by an impenetrable wall of background knowledge that must be mastered in order to achieve even basic competency. It takes a dedicated expert a lifetime of study and practice. It really should be left exclusively to experts.
My point was that most people think operating to computers is closer to neurosurgery than driving so there's no point in even trying to understand. Just call the expert. Once they realize this is not the case, they often learn the basics fairly quickly.
17 comments and not a Facebook logo in sight.
Some of the worse comments:
I don;t understand, new facebook sucks! WHere are all of my friends and why are there all these ads for khabrein? How to I get to my LOGIN?!?!?!?!?
I don't like Facebook's new logo. Why did they change their name to Khabrein!!!???
this is awful. more useless crap i don't want. if i wanted news info i would go somewhere else, but i don't want it, any of it. thanks for spoiling my one outlet in life.
With great comments like: "Joyce 2010-02-11 07:26:55 How in the hell do I get into my home page?"
It's like accidentally walking into a Burger King but
thinking that it's a McDonald's with a new logo, and then
screaming and yelling at the employees and manager
because they can't fill your order for a Big Mac.
{edit} Someone non-techie that I know in real life made the comment that these are probably the same people that call 911 to complain that the local McDonald's ran out of Chicken McNuggets.
Having worked at McDonald's before I've seen this several times. We got one of these people every other shift I worked (mostly drive-thru) and most of them got rather belligerent and insisted we weren't a McDonald's with the sign staring them in the face thirty feet in front of their car.
Don't you love SEO? o_0
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'.
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.
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.
A year later another guy posted another Netflix customer service request, right under my 'This is not Netflix' message.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1116039
Its as though no one cared too much about this until Gruber made a post about it.
http://www.laze.net/fait/archive/2002/07/28/maurys_blooper.p...
Another example is mentioned here:
http://www.beatnikpad.com/archives/2004/04/14/the_march_of_t...
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.
Of course it's silly for really popular pages like facebook, but it worked fairly well for pages I used to visit ocasionally.
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 crap. How much of that singing, dancing circus is actually necessary? If it isn't necessary, why is it there?
Is it not ridiculous that RWW's message to these confused users is placed in bold black text in the article that they demonstrably did not come there to read 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.
Like all humans, when these users wind up somewhere unfamiliar, they reach for whatever is familiar. In this case, the article has not one, but two 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.
A person who has just Googled for "facebook login" and who just saw a half dozen Facebook logos, and just saw dozens of other people who made the same mistake complaining, who then mistakes that username/password field as meaning "Sign in to 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.
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 can stop gently assisting such confusion and illiteracy by thinking about why what you're doing isn't helping.
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.
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.
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.
Say I'm a "novice" user who starts up the web browser. If everything else works, then here's what I'll see:
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.
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!".
What can I say, I'm just a spoilt baby boomer, and you want my money.
[reposted from another thread, with corrections]
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.
This one is sad : (