
Daring Fireball: "Facebook login" - natemartin
http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/11/facebook-login
======
thaumaturgy
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.

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.

~~~
isleyaardvark
"But, she's totally lost on Facebook."

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.

~~~
thaumaturgy
I just used Facebook as an example because it's topical. She can find her way
around Quickbooks well enough, since she uses it as her POS. Other than that,
it's all a mystery.

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.

~~~
donaq
Interesting. How much effort have these people put into acquiring computer
literacy though? It is hard for me to believe that anyone with average
intelligence who applies him/herself for a day or two cannot master browsing
the web. I mean, if you can look up a road directory and navigate to an
address, or consult a phone directory and find a specific phone number, you
already possess the required skills to understand web browsing. It is not
really that alien, is what I'm saying.

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. :)

~~~
GHFigs
_My mother, for instance, had for the longest time an aversion to trying stuff
out on a computer for fear of damaging it._

You're really talking about the same thing. The fear of damaging the thing is
the result of not comprehending it. A person can have the skills to use a
keyboard and mouse, but until they develop a working cognitive model that
holds up in novel situations, the whole thing remains pretty alien. That's how
you end up with situations like this, where people are able to turn on the
computer, open a browser, use a search engine, log into a web site, post a
comment on the public internet, and still be completely mistaken about what is
going on.

You can get someone to that level in a day or two, maybe, but really
understanding it in a way that enables them to navigate intuitively in
unfamiliar situations is a lot harder. I don't think we've figured out a way
to teach that.

------
natemartin
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.

How can you design a web application that is usable by people with this level
of computer knowledge? Should one even try?

~~~
jrockway
This is why I don't get too excited about Internet entrepreneurship. In order
to be successful, you have to appeal to this type of person. And I don't want
to.

(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!)

~~~
mechanical_fish
I can't create a single sentence in correctly written Chinese. Or Russian, or
even French for that matter -- I can cough up some random French words on
paper, but they will likely be misspelled and "just plain incomprehensible."

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.

~~~
cookiecaper
These people are primarily native English speakers. Of course errors are
excusable when mastering a second language, but I don't think anyone seriously
believes that any significant number of those people are non-native English
speakers.

------
ehsanul
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?

~~~
pyre
They logged in using "Facebook Connect" (i.e. the Facebook OpenID-type thing).
So they scanned the page looking for their login, and found a Facebook logo so
they clicked on it and logged in. Then they were just presented a comment form
so (apparently) they assumed it was the only action they could take.

~~~
mncaudill
I think it is worse than that. I typed in "facebook login" clicked the first
link (which wasn't RWW at the time) and here's what I got:
<http://tinyurl.com/ylapbnu>

17 comments and not a Facebook logo in sight.

~~~
ehsanul
Hard to believe. Then again, these are probably the bottom 1%, as there are
probably thousands that went to that page, out of which some were clueless
enough not to be able to find the actual facebook home page, and were yet able
to comment.

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._

~~~
pyre
I'm not really sure whether to believe those ones are true or just people that
picked up on the other snafu at RWW and are just trolling.

------
tinotopia
Netflix used to make it very difficult to find any of their customer service
contact addresses or phone numbers.

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.

~~~
simonw
The absolute worst example of this kind of thing I've seen was a bunch of
years ago when a blogger posted a short note that mentioned the words "suicide
chat room" in it. The comments turned in to a chat room for people considering
suicide. Over a thousand of them.

------
strongsauce
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?

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1116039>

Its as though no one cared too much about this until Gruber made a post about
it.

~~~
blazamos
Because the original was labeled as an "Amusing Comment Thread"; Gruber (and
others) explains what's going on.

------
ubernostrum
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 _be_ the official site for the show:

[http://www.laze.net/fait/archive/2002/07/28/maurys_blooper.p...](http://www.laze.net/fait/archive/2002/07/28/maurys_blooper.php)

Another example is mentioned here:

[http://www.beatnikpad.com/archives/2004/04/14/the_march_of_t...](http://www.beatnikpad.com/archives/2004/04/14/the_march_of_the_clueless)

~~~
ilamont
Except for the trolls, that's pretty sad.

------
jolie
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.

Don't you love SEO? o_0

~~~
dmix
It would be pretty difficult for RRW to out-rank Facebook in organic search
results because of linking.

Constant news articles are another thing.

------
autarch
I'm sure _most_ Facebook users don't do this, but enough do to make for great
hilarity in this particular case.

This is all hilarious, but there's no reason to assume it's statistically
significant.

~~~
ubernostrum
Seeing as this phenomenon -- even to the point of people _literally typing
URLs into Google and then clicking the first result_ \-- is old, well-known
and well-documented, I'm gonna guess you need to broaden your usability
reading.

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...](http://www.dailydomainer.com/200742-yahoo-top-search-term-on-
google.html)

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.

~~~
cgranade
Maybe users that type in actual addresses are in the minority, but then I
consider this to be a basic literacy issue, just as I consider it a failure of
basic science literacy when people say that lasers work by focusing sound
waves
([http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2010/01/public_knowledge_...](http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2010/01/public_knowledge_of_science_th.php)).
The Internet has had a transformative effect on society, and to not even know
the first thing about it represents a failure of the educational system to
prepare people to participate in what is now a very connected world.

~~~
awkward
It's not a failure of literacy, it's a failure of URLs as a system. Which
company has which URL is determined by a long set of events having to do with
competing businesses, events and plain luck that even people here wouldn't
care to unravel for most of the sites they visit. The best example I can think
of now is when pitchfork (the music review site) was at pitchforkmedia.com,
and pitchfork.com was owned by a company that sold hay.

Search, on the other hand, has failures, but those failures are rapidly fixed.

------
noonespecial
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.

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.

~~~
Hexstream
Well, my theory is that learning to use a car is easier because it's a
physical thing that obeys the laws of physics, whereas in computer science we
don't have to obey the laws of physics, which means we have much less
constraints, more freedom, so we're basically free to just "make up stuff" as
we go, so of course someone who isn't familiar with that world of ours are
having a bit of a hard time keeping up.

~~~
noonespecial
I used driving as a way to illustrate the scale of the background knowledge
required for the activities. There is a fair amount of background information
required to drive safely that has nothing to do with physics. The rules and
conventions of the road are not based on physics. Sometimes they seem to be
completely devoid of logic as well. _Teenagers_ regularly master these well
enough to function. There is little fear that they will have trouble with
this. Everybody does it right? (But when that fear is present, it is equally
debilitating in the auto world, its just much more rare.)

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.

------
lt
I have to admit that I used to do that in Firefox, back before I switched to
Chrome.

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.

~~~
rapind
Exactly. And that's one of the things I love the most about chrome. The
traditional address bar for me at least has almost become obsolete. And I love
that chrome uses the address bar instead of a second search box. And it's also
what I hate about jumping on a friend's PC who's using IE... Bing as the
default is just plain terrible.

------
GHFigs
Would this have happened in ReadWriteWeb looked more like Daring Fireball?

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.

------
nico_h
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?

------
mattmcknight
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.

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.

------
sacrilicious
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.

------
ash
About the habit to type everything into Google search:

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.

------
vishaldpatel
Okay I try to bite:

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.

------
mbrubeck
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.

 _[reposted from another thread, with corrections]_

------
al_james
"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.

------
jashmenn
It seems like this effect is now going on at websites that are referencing the
original RWW article. See:
[http://www.khabrein.info/news/New_Facebook_homepage__new_Fac...](http://www.khabrein.info/news/New_Facebook_homepage__new_Facebook_changes_and_new_Facebook_login_page__Google_Facebook_on_a_warpath_1265743727/)

With great comments like: "Joyce 2010-02-11 07:26:55 How in the hell do I get
into my home page?"

~~~
pyre
The only thing I can really say to this is to give a metaphor that anyone
(most people) can understand:

    
    
      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.
    

I've run into _actual_ people like this in the real world. People that have
their head so stuck that they are right and you are wrong that even if an
employee would try to explain to them, "This is not a McDonald's we don't have
Big Macs, there is a McDonald's down the street if you want a Big Mac," the
person would further yell and scream at the employees for who knows what
reason.

{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.

~~~
epochwolf
People have called 911 because Burger King wasn't McDonald's. (Heard the 911
tape on a local radio show)

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.

~~~
pyre
<sarcasm> Obviously Burger King just hasn't done enough studies on their user
interface. If their user interface were up to snuff, it would be _impossible_
for someone to no know the difference </sarcasm>

------
naz
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.

------
alexandros
It seems another website is now the top result for facebook login, with
equally uhm.. odd comments:
[http://www.khabrein.info/index.php?do=comment&news_id=c5...](http://www.khabrein.info/index.php?do=comment&news_id=c56ad648c2e3b13bcf2c7980f8670e7e)

------
ericd
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...

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.

------
FreeRadical
"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 one is sad : (

------
Judson
Honestly, the worst part is how many 40-80 year old women are using the word
"sucks".

------
hudibras
Just tried the AOL keyword "Facebook login." Worked fine; what's the big deal?

------
comster
This is just fucking great

------
talleyrand
Unbelievable. I checked to see if it was April 1st when I read this...but, no,
apparently it's February 11th.

