The other day, the tech blog ReadWriteWeb published a piece entitled “Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login“. Shortly afterward, the editors noticed something strange: the post attracted a number of comments from users upset for reasons that had nothing to do with anything the post said:
when can we log in? …
I WANT THE OLD FAFEBOOK BACK THIS SHIT IS WACK!!!!! …
please give me back the old facebook login this is crazy…
I am going to delete my account (IF I CAN EVER LOG IN) as this SUCKS BIG TIME ! If this does not get back to NORMAL you are going to lose a lot of folks who hate this and as you can see from all the comments they think it sucks too !!! facebook was great for connecting with old friends …now, NOT SO MUCH. SO HOW DO I LOG IN ?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
It turned out that the post had briefly appeared at the top of Google results for the phrase “Facebook login” (as I write this, it’s currently No. 4), and users were clicking on it thinking they were being taken to Facebook. Once they got there, some of them scrolled down to the comment form, saw the Facebook Connect prompt (which reads “Sign in with Facebook”) and were confused when entering their login information didn’t take them to Facebook. Even after RWW put up a disclaimer at the top of the page explaining how to get to Facebook, complaints continued to pour in; there are currently 620 (though most of the later ones are people poking fun at the mistake).
The next day, Jolie O’Dell, RWW’s community manager, did a follow-up post explaining what happened, and trying to draw some lessons from the experience. At a general level, I agreed with most of what O’Dell said: “Users don’t care about what you care about,” “users don’t read your copy or look at your branding,” and “users gravitate toward the simple and the familiar.” It was also classy of her not to simply make fun of the commenters for being dumb. But the fact is, they were being pretty dumb, and I would have liked to see her grapple a bit more with what that says about the usability paradigm. Read the rest of this entry »
