GregoryBowers.com

When Marco mentioned people mistaking an article about Facebook for the real deal, it took several readings of the actual page for it to sink in what was actually happening. Gruber distills the essence nicely:

Fascinating. ReadWriteWeb has a weblog post that ranks highly in Google’s search results for “Facebook login”. The comments on the post are filled with complaints from confused people who think that this is the new Facebook login page.

It’s funny, yes, but it’s a fascinating glimpse at just how confused many people are about how web sites and browsers work. They don’t use bookmarks, they don’t type “facebook.com” in the location field. They just Google for whatever they’re looking for and assume the first result is correct. All this argument over whether the iPad is too simple — if anything it’s probably still too complex.

People—LARGE amounts of people—utilise the web the same way they watch TV: turn it on, turn your brain off and mash buttons until you find something you like. Click “The Internet” and start typing into Google, clicking on the first thing. Neven Mrgan nails it with the following analogy:

It’s like… Like if you asked a friend if there was a Starbucks in his neighborhood and he said, yeah I think there’s one half a mile down, maybe. And you drive half a mile and see a big carwash place, and you park and walk in and ask to speak to the manager. And you tell the carwash manager how unhappy you are with this terrible new Starbucks redesign.

People aren’t just ignoring the obvious signs that they’ve done something wrong, they’re complaining loudly that someone has done them wrong.

My head has been spending some background processes on this today and the main issues to address break down like so:

1. People default to complaining about something before they will stop to think they may have been the erring party. This is a much bigger problem with society than I want to get into here, but it makes me think “Conan was right.”
2. We (UI and Interaction Designers, especially those dealing with designing browser experiences) might need to take some time to explain essential details of the internet before a user gets started. Google is taking small steps to make people more aware of what a browser is (their Chrome videos and whatbrowser.org), but taking the “Don’t Make Me Think!” approach (no offence to Steve Krug, since that’s not the whole of his book) to far might be leading us to the wrong extreme. We all love “it just works” but we need to build in a little learning. Even if it’s something as rudimentary as first-load pages on a browser that explain “To visit a web site, type it’s address here.” It’s some basic physics here: If everything is as slick as a frictionless plane, we’ll never get anywhere. Once we add the right amount of friction, then progress can be made.