Things people try to log into
Neven Mrgan responds to my explanation of the “Facebook Login” phenomenon with disbelief (sorry for changing your <ol> to a <ul>, Neven, but it was the only way I could interpose my comments):
I understand the annoyance with Facebook Connect, but this doesn’t explain the facts I find the most amazing in this story:
- People google for “facebook login” to log in to Facebook. I understand that they don’t use bookmarks and don’t type in facebook.com, but note that they don’t google “facebook”; they google “facebook login”. Clearly users don’t even see logging in as a function of the site itself; those are separate in the users’ mental maps. This is perhaps partly explained by the excess of websites which use Facebook as their authentication system, but it’s not the whole story.
Many people have Google set as their homepage, or just go there automatically because “that’s where the internet starts.” The difference between the address bar and Google’s input field is lost on them. They’re both things where you type stuff to get places, and it takes a huge amount of sophistication to see past that superficial semantic equivalence. Want a Facebook login? Type that! Wherever! You’ll get there somehow, even if you have to click an extra link. Who cares?
The cognitive load of remembering where to type what is just not worth it to most people when it only saves you a single click (most of the time).
- They then click the small google result which says “News results: ReadWriteWeb” expecting they’ll be taken to Facebook.
Yes. People don’t read anything.
- They land on a page with an absolutely enormous heading saying ReadWriteWeb, below which is a headline, a byline, and endless paragraphs of what is even at the quickest glance obviously a news story.
Yes. People don’t read anything.
- They scroll all the way to the bottom of this completely un-Facebook-like page, with not a single thing in the way that would indicate this is a Facebook redesign.
- They then go past the big heading saying Leave a comment and instead focus on the small link which says Optional: Sign in with Facebook. And don’t tell me these folks searched for “facebook” or “login” on the page itself.
People really, really, don’t read anything. Ever. Not even when it’s in large type; not when it’s dominating their field of vision. Words? There’s a picture! Who needs words?
A more charitable explanation is that today’s novice web users have learned to ignore things they don’t understand, because there is just so much crap everywhere — ads, social networking widgets, Digg and Reddit upvote gizmos, ads, linkbars, search forms, ads, ads, ads — that triaging all of it to determine what deserves attention and what’s going to suddenly take over the entire viewport with a noisy Flash video if you so much as mouse over it is, for them, completely impossible.
So they ignore almost everything that doesn’t directly resemble the thing they need. This should be expected. It’s what we’ve taught them to do, after all, with our hostility.
The amount of information-ignoring necessary to go from 1. to 5. here is just stunning. The degree of faith people put in Google’s top result makes Catholics look like hippies.
Here’s the procedure, I think:
- Type “facebook login” into the first text field you see (sometimes the address bar; often a Google search box). Hit Enter.
- Oops, search results. Oh well, just click the first thing, that usually works.
- Words words words FACEBOOK LOGO words words.
- Scroll down — there’s got to be a sign-in box somewhere. Why is this all different? I want my Facebook! Stop making me look at new stuff!
- Words words words SIGN IN WITH FACEBOOK oh there it is CLICK.
Et voilà.
