ReadWriteWeb's own analysis of the "Facebook login" debacle. Their primary reflection? "Users don't care about what you care about."Ugh. Selection bias much? What he's actually discovered is that "people who came here searching for 'facebook login'" and "My regular readers" have different web expectations.
Dear Sir,posted by signalnine at 11:28 AM on February 11, 2010 [21 favorites]
I am Prince Otumfuo Zuckerberg, the elder son of the late Facebook King Mark Zuckerberg whose demise occur following a brief illness. Before the death of my father, I was authorised and officially known as the next successor and beneficiary of my father's property according to Facebook Traditional rite.
Due to a recent redesign, I find myself trapped inside of a ReadWriteWeb article, unable to log in to Facebook to collect my inheritance. This ugly situation made me to secretly move the gold dust having the above mentioned qualities into a security and finance firm with the assistance of my uncle whom serves as a secretary to Facebook council of elders.
If you are interested to buy it just contact me or just look for a buyer for me. I have promise to run the deal with you, base in the degree of sincerity and trust in you. Having receive your reply, I will feed you with the relevant information covering the consignment.
Please reach me through my e-mail address oneborneveryminute@onebox.com to avoid much publicity.
Thanks. Yours faithfully,
PRINCE OTUMFUO ZUCKERBERG
I don't get it... how hard is it to understand what a browser is and what a URL is and how to use a search engine? Is it just that people don't bother to try and blindly flail their way through life?You know I had an interesting experience with my mom when she started using the computer. She wanted detailed instructions for everything, which she would write down. Literally like "click on icon that looks like X, wait, click here, type this." Ironically GUIs are a disaster for people who actually don't want to know how to user a computer. With a command line interface you just say "type this, type that, type the other thing" and they can remember those steps. The instructions I gave her for browsing the web once left off the "wait" step and once she asked me why she was getting dozens of browser windows popping up. Turns out she was clicking on the icon multiple times when it didn't come up right away.
I don't like the new face book page. I want the old face book page back. Plus the updates run slow or the pages freezesSince they have been rolling out the new Facebook organization system, you may not be aware that there even IS a "new face book page". Be assured that there is, and a lot of people don't like it. In fact, they've been complaining about it everywhere.
All I wanted to do was LOG IN TO MY FACE BOOK ACCOUNT! I don't like this new way! "If it an't broke why fix it?"Lots of people are clearly just trolling. Comment #12 is a good example:
I just want to log in to Facebook - what with the red color and all? LOLLLOLOL!!!!!111posted by muddgirl at 12:13 PM on February 11, 2010 [1 favorite]
Whatever numbers you choose to make up for those percentages doesn't matter a whole lot; Facebook gets a lot of traffic, and a fraction of a fraction of a percent is probably a lot more visitors than your blog usually gets.Um sure, but so what? The point is, generalizing from a tiny subgroup into "users" (as in, all of them) is absurd. There are ways to study this scientifically, or at least in a way that's statistically valid. And this ain't it.
I'm not sure that's really the wrong move, though. The part of my brain that's responsible for habits finds it disconcerting, because That's Not How It Works, but building a smarter single-input box makes a fair amount of sense if you start from the position of not considering it automatically wrong.Sure, and just as a total coincidence it gives google a ton of control over where people actually go on the Internet. It might be "easier", I suppose, then remembering URLs, but is it wise to give so much control over the web to a single entity? Instead of trying to educate the user. For example, if someone made the mistake of entering a search term in the URL bar, they could get an information note with a little demo or something.
The real question here is how many people searched and failed, which I'm guessing (ungenerously? realistically?) is a much larger number than on the order of one in a million. How many facebook users actually searched on this? How many landed there? How many landed there, were just as confused as the folks commenting, but didn't bother to leave a comment? Etc. Numbers are horribly mushy.Yes. we don't know the numbers which is why we can't draw a conclusion. Instead this guy has learned that the number of people who have made this mistake is "more then one" and has decided that "more then one" is equal to "most". It's completely ridiculous. This guy isn't presenting the results of careful study in a controlled setting -- and perhaps experiments might bare this out -- instead he's extrapolating wildly and drawing completely inappropriate conclusions. Might be true, might not be true. In either case we have hardly any more information then before this happened.
We're like mechanics laughing at old ladies for not understanding the difference between a cam and a crankshaft. Sure, the old ladies are stupid about what's under the hood. But who cares?It's more like getting confused about the gas pedal and the break pedal. People don't know about different shafts because they never see them. But the "URL bar/search bar" thing is really simple, and right in people's faces every day.
Agreed. This whole thing confirms for me that bloggers for whom "no multitasking"=fail speak for a tiny percentage of the people who actually use computers and the web day to day.Once again, it doesn't confirm anything, because it's only a tiny non-random sample. There's obviously a huge difference between what people are capable of understanding and what they will understand if they don't care. And a lot of people don't care.
This isn't a one-bar-for-both thing, it's an individual-company's-ethics thing, though. Don't muddle the two;Why not? "Individual company's ethics" are not an issue if we're not using search for everything. They are completely related. Besides, the fact that we use Google now doesn't mean that every device is going to use Google for search. Obviously windows comes with Bing loaded up in IE. Apple could change the search engine behind anonymous search widgets on the iPad, and who's to say that every cellphone company wouldn't want to capture and monetize all the search traffic that emanates from their phones?
I don't get it... how hard is it to understand what a browser is and what a URL is and how to use a search engine? Is it just that people don't bother to try and blindly flail their way through life?One of the first frontline support tasks I ever had was staffing an AOL support chat room. Specifically, the AOL Macintosh Beginners Help Desk chat room. It was the muddy blog at the center of a very, very dense Venn Diagram of Not Getting It.
how hard is it to understand what a browser is and what a URL is and how to use a search engine?The problem is not that a URL and a Search Term are two different things. The problem is that that particular distinction is one of thousands that are hidden under the surface of simple computer and internet tasks. What's the difference between a "program" and a "web site?" What's the difference between a local and a remote file? What's a remote file? What's caching? How do you tell the difference between a browser window that looks like a dialog box, and a modal window that contains a browser pane? Because guess what? All of those things matter at some point -- and somewhere out there is a development team working hard to blur the distinction for their application, just for the hell of it.
I'd say the cam and the crankshaft are more akin to the CPU and the RAM. They make the computer work.Analogies are awesome until they're not, and then you realize that you've been talking to a mechanic and he took your comparisons seriously. How can the RAM possibly be like a crankshaft? I don't run out of crankshaft if I spend too much time idling, but lo, if I have a bunch of unused firefox windows open, my computer dies.
The point is that "is it too confusing" is not the be-all, end-all of interface design.So what is then? What are the goals of interface design, if not to make things easier? And who are we making things easier for? Is doing something one way make it easy for one group and more frustrating for another. Having a single bar annoys me and it's probably one of the reasons why I don't like using chrome.
- Having one place where people do both direct-url access and search, instead of having to learn to partition those activities out to separate areas in the interface.But, if you agree that the two-box model isn't confusing, then why is it a problem to partition those activities? "Learning" the two boxes isn't that hard. Someone can be shown once they'll probably be able to remember if they want too.
How are the issues independent? I don't see how you can think of them that way, they are obviously tightly related. If Google changes the interface in a way that draws more traffic through their homepage, and shows more ads to more people, then obviously you have to question whether they did it purely because it's "better" in some undefined way, or if they did it because it's not any worse for the user but much better for Google.and why are they more important then the downsides (giving more control to google, or whatever company manages to control whatever search box is being used?)That's, again, an independent issue.
Well, Malor, one can say "hold down the flower key and click the mouse" and that's pretty clear, but when you say "click the right mouse button" some brains explode. Which one is the RIGHT mouse button?Oh come on.
Not to jump on you or anything -- metaphors are a great on-ramp for understanding but they can also be dangerous. Just like on-ramps! Metaphors also have tolls associated with them on occasion, and sometimes the metaphors are under construction, and you have to drive a few miles down until you get to the next metaphor, one that isn't as good but is probably close enough to work, and...Hahah.
A whole great big crapload of people are never going to be willing take the time to develop an understanding of how the web works, because having an understanding of how the web works will never be important to them or worth their time. They want to sit down at a computer and do the thing they want to do. They don't care how they get there as long as they CAN get there. Choose to accept this or choose madness.Well, that would be fine if search were flawless, but as this example illustrates, it's not. And in any event, it's not all that clear to me that the majority of people don't understand the difference between a URL and a search term. All we've seen here are anecdotes.
The point is not that the one-bar approach is some crazy awesomeness or whatever, it's that it seems to solve the actual problem of servicing naive user input in an effective way that's a bit more streamlined as well than the existing two-bar system. The two-bar system isn't some kind of usability disaster, either. But your entire defense of it seems to amount to "it's not bad, and I distrust search engine companies", which is hardly a defense at all.Why not? Haven't you heard the phrase "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"? And as far as trusting search engines, you still haven't explained why you think it's a non issue. Presumably because you trust Google and all other search-bar providers? Or some other reason?
Good point. Why did they go fucking things up by adding a search bar to browsers in the first place? You could already visit the search engine of your choice by going right to the site by typing it in or loading a bookmark, and that had the advantage of not letting some browser manufacturer pick your default search engine for you.It saves time.
"If it ain't broke, don't fix it" is a lovely aphorism but a plainly insufficient philosophy to software development in a developing field. If you mean "don't fuck it up, that thing you are doing is going to fuck it up", just say that. If you mean "don't change it because I like it the way it is", say that. Leave the cutesy bullshit at home.Well, wait a minute. Lets go back a few steps. You paraphrased me as saying:
"it's not bad, and I distrust search engine companies", which is hardly a defense at all."And then you said that "is hardly a defense at all"
not ONE BAR RULES, TWO BAR DROOLS, nor any kind of concession to an insistence that somehow ONE BAR = CORPORATE OVERLORDS or whatever. It's a relatively minor evolution of what's already an ongoing UI trendOf course. It's better for Google if people use search terms instead of URLs. It's better for whoever is developing the software because they get to control what terms go to what pages, which they can't really do with URLs. And it usually means showing people a search results page, with ads, more often. So of course people who choose how people interact with browsers are going to gravitate to that model.
The argument is really utilitarian: if the people using the software don't care, trying to either pretend they care or force them to care is an unconventional move compared with basing design decisions on what they actually do seem to care about. Which means if people spend years and years typing shit that is not urls into your url bar, you might try accommodating non-url content in an intelligent way by e.g. automated search. Which is why that's already been happening. For a while. Even with two-bar systems.Right, so what we really have right now is two bars with a slight semantic difference. But if you mess up and type the wrong thing into the wrong bar, it doesn't actually cause any problems. I would agree it was a problem if typing a URL into the search bar didn't work, or if typing search terms into the URL bar didn't work. But that's not the case.
If it gets the user more quickly and unambiguously to their search results, it's certainly better for the user.Like I said, I don't really think that's the case. Especially since, as you said, you can type search results into the URL bar if you want right now.
And, again, the problem with search companies controlling what happens when people invoke search, directly or indirectly, has so much less to do with where those people type the shit that gets searched for than anything else that worrying about it specifically in the context of whether or not there's a secondary search bar that tons of those folks don't give a shit about and never use anyway seems silly.Well, is see your point. But I do think firefox's URL bar works well at guiding people into using URLs for commonly visited sites, rather then searching for them over and over again. It would be interesting to see stats on how often Chrome users vs. Firefox users visit pages on Google. (and I would imagine most chrome users are more tech savvy then firefox users today) It would also be interesting to see real stats on how frustrated users actually do get as they use different interfaces.
You kidding? I'm under the distinct impression that this particular population of idiots is the entire reason that the ad-based internet economy functions at all. Who the fuck clicks ads on purpose?I swear, every time I read this thread I get angrier. It's all well and good to make fun of someone who, say, can't find Iraq on a map. But until learning how to distinguish between CNN.com's internal promo banners and Time.com's external sponsor banners is civic duty let's cut people a little slack, you know?
We're arguing over degree. No one is saying everyone should be able to hand-code syntactically-correct HTML 4.0 to use the web. But these people need more computer literacy than they have now. To use your language metaphor, this is akin to tourists who don't speak a word of the language, don't know any local customs, and nearly break local laws.A fair point. The angry "WHO ARE YOU? TAKE ME OFF INTERNET" folks are definitely wandering into another country and demanding the locals translate.
Hello my name is crystal gutierrez i am 27 years old .i have lily(11),breanna(10)adrian(8)maya(7)and samantha(9)weeks old. I really could use help this year.... i know there are alot of familys out there but i hope that by some small chance my children could be on your list too.any little thing will help. thank you and god blessGod! How can someone be so stupid that they can't tell the difference between a blog post about a charity and a post on a blog maintained by the charity? Some people.
Sites like Clients From Hell only reinforce this ugly view. For every truly onerous client quote on that site, there's one from someone who just doesn't understand visual design and is asking a legitimate question. "Can we just use one color to make it cheaper?" is a question that actually gets mocked on that site. It's a perfectly valid assumption with print work, but a client asked a web designer, and woo! It's a laugh riot.I find that pretty obnoxious as well. And the thing I've noticed is that a lot of the people who make those complaints don't know WTF they're talking about. I remember reading one once from a guy who was making fun of a woman who called her PC (as in the box itself) the "Engine" because it was the part that made noise, like an engine. LOL. Except he called the box the CPU, which is also wrong, and even stupider.
So basically if you're not familiar with blogs, and you're not familiar with URLs, it honestly doesn't strike me as that unobservant not to realize what's going on.You're totally right -- I was actually being sarcastic about that: the skill of "figuring out the official source for a piece of information when lots of places are talking about it" is not exactly intuitive...
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posted by ocherdraco at 11:07 AM on February 11, 2010