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Facebook login issue: how Facebook shows that the web will never be conquered.

Web Design Mauritius | 09/03/2010 | no comments

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Some weeks back, Read Write Web published an article on how Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login. So far, no problem. The author, Mike Melanson, did not however cater for the possibility of indexation of the post on Google based on the “Facebook Login” keyword.

The Google trap.

What happened is that the post made it to the top of the search engine’s results page on the “Facebook Login” search. Next thing was hundreds of Facebook users flooding on the post and trying to connect to Facebook via the “Facebook connect” plugin in the sidebar. This ended with a hilarious (from a web project manager’s point of view) thread of angry/confused/insulting/[add adjective here] comments from lost users, many complaining about the forthcoming death of their cows on Farmville.

Here’s an excerpt of the comments found over there.

User interaction with search results.

This sheds some light on how the average Internet user deals with websites. Let’s get back to how these users got to the Read Write Web website: most of them typed “Facebook login” in Google and clicked on the first result. This means that the use of Google as navigation tool is now one of the trendy uses of the search engine and that people click with confidence on the first result even without reading the result! Blind usage, that would be it. This also stresses on the importance of being in the first, if not being the first, on a given keyword.

User interaction with a website.

Now things become serious. The Read Write Web interface is red and white and has nothing at all in common with the Facebook login page. Nothing here reminds of Facebook except for the article title and the logo copied off Facebook.

This however did not give the information to the people getting on the website that this was not Facebook or Facebook’s login page. Does this mean that colour branding fails? Does this mean that people not only DO NOT READ urls nor TITLES or other elements NEITHER? Does this mean that if you deliver a specific content to people when they are here to do just one specific thing, they will not read the content. So, if Facebook sets up an info saying that all accounts will be linked to the users’ bank accounts on the Facebook Login page, all these persons will automatically click “OK” and get in?

Pushing the observation further.

After a whole lot of thinking and working in the web design field, this Facebook Login issue shows that we will never really understand the web user. The latter is an entity whose usage of our tools will never really succeed in giving out the best service to all users because they will always do what they want. Another thing is that the web user is emotional. It will be browsing the web with passion and just as something unexpected crops up, the mood takes over and confusion leads to anger.

Let’s talk about this…

If you are not a web professional, do you browse websites in the way the people on Read Write Web did? Do you think that web users are credule and their frame of mind will never be understood? Do you think that enhanced usability and site building can help in such situations? Do you agree with the statement that this shows that a user comes to a website for one thing and can only be satisfied by getting that thing?