read write where
Yesterday ReadWriteWeb’s post on Facebook Connect was, for a while, a top google hit for “facebook login” and as a result of this—combined with RWW’s Facebook Connect button—the site got a lot of negative comments* from confused Facebook users who thought they were looking at the new Facebook redesign.
There’s been a lot of discussion about the whys and whats and wherewithals, and ReadWriteWeb wrote a summary of things they had taken away from the experience. It’s unfortunately easy to extrapolate beyond what actually happened (“Users don’t read your copy or look at your branding”, for example), but we can take away some really fascinating truths from this debacle**:
- Facebook did a great job annoucing their redesign. Almost every confused commenter knew that Facebook was redesigning and had clearly been expecting it.
- These users don’t trust Facebook to maintain any UI consistency. This is the part that I find truly mind-boggling: aside from ignoring the ReadWriteWeb logo in the corner, aside from commenting on how much they didn’t like the red, most confused commenters genuinely thought that the changes they saw were the result of the redesign. Their expectations for brand consistency were so low that they didn’t realize they were on a completely different site even though quite a few of them had clearly clicked around in a fruitless attempt to ‘log in’.
- Perhaps less surprising to those who have come across this user mistake before: URLs mean nothing to certain types of users—specifically, any user that mistakenly commented on ReadWriteWeb today. It’s impossible to tell how they all came to RWW, but Google seems to be the most common path—which means they didn’t use desktop shortcuts, browser bookmarks, or address bar autocompletes.
One of my coworkers anecdotally mentioned that his mother had accidentally removed the address bar from Safari, and had been happily (and obliviously) using the search box for everything for the better part of a year. This is not entirely surprising, since address bars and search box often look alike and can be used exactly the same way in a lot of browsers.
Beyond that, there’s not a lot of points we can glean that aren’t speculative or specious. Here’s an excellent point from filthylightthief:
Even at work, around people who use computers every day for their jobs, get beyond the basic functions and it’s a foreign language. Follow the steps you normally take, and you’ll get to the end. The path doesn’t matter. But I think the same can be said about anything that is sufficiently complex: if you can make it work for your normal tasks, most people will be content with getting from A to B, even if it takes you past Q and Z. Computers just have a lot more options for detours.
*Example: “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.”
**This hilarious, hilarious debacle.
—Timoni
