William Yarbrough

So much has happened in the past few weeks (both personally and in the tech world) that I’m updating twice this week to make up for last week. I wanted to write about the iPad, but I’m going to save it for another day. I had to comment on my friend Mike Melanson’s (@rwwmike) Read Write Web article (read the full thing, especially the comments).

Because I’m a friend to Mike, and I like RWW, I subscribe to their RSS feed via Google reader. I therefore missed all the amazing comments that ensued from users. I’m now very sorry I did. Here’s just a small sampling of what comments a post called “Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login” got:

ok cool now can I get to facebook (fuccinwayne)

The new facebook sucks> NOW LET ME IN. (John Blair)

I WANT THE OLD FAFEBOOK BACK THIS SHIT IS WACK!!!!! (Nicole Gray)

What is going on? You are totally confusing me. Knock-knock. Anybody there? Let me in. Katherine (Katherine Radway Hegedus)

By now you get the idea: There are somewhere in the range of 200+ comments like these. It took me a while to understand what was going on, but it dawned on me that the RWW article ranked higher in the Google search rank than did the Facebook login page. This means someone did the following steps 100% blindly (or autopilot):

1. typed “login facebook” into Google
2. clicked the first link without looking at the link or description
3. ignored the red color scheme of Read Write Web
4. dismissed the huge article in the middle of the page until they found a Facebook icon (Facebook connect)
5. without looking at the address bar or any authentication, logged in as if to Facebook
6. finding the comment field the only place to post, ignoring all other comments, posted an angry or confused question as if Facebook were a person

David Hayes (@drhayes) has a beautiful shot that it’s much more than Facebook on his blog.

As a user experience developer, this brings up all sorts of questions, concerns, and feelings of dread. As a user experience developer I certainly know that I’m not my audience or even close to it, but I do think I have an understanding of how things work. I had no idea how heavy the reliance on Google to get a user where they wanted to go was. I wasn’t sure that so many users had gotten so adept at filtering out such amazing amounts of noise, they saw Read Write Web as Facebook.

Users seem not to use the address bar, they don’t use bookmarks, and hardly read anything. This isn’t bad, it’s not saying these users are dumb, but it brings up a need to fix these interfaces for users. This is just a time where I feel like a priest in the Dark Ages: preaching the only written word through a language no one understands. It freaks me out when I peer into the actions of users who are using the sites and I can’t begin to fathom the thought process or the use case.

Talking with less tech savvy friends and family, they are amazed that I “know all this stuff” when I myself feel I don’t know much at all until I look at it from the other end: this is my job and my life – I am of the priest class, talking in cryptic language, trying to navigate the dark for my flock. I try my hardest to treat these things as material to learn, to grow in my understanding of the philosophy of the user.

Part of me can’t help but think – did users learn the behavior that caused them to act that way because we trained them that way?