Daring Fireball: "Facebook login"

Slightly akin to getting in a taxi, saying "Joe's place", ending up at in a house that is entirely unlike that of your friend Joe's, the furniture is different, etc and still being confused at why those in the house aren't happy to see you.

I'm early 30s and already prone to delegating rather than learning new technology, but I at least make the effort to read instructions, warnings and errors so I know what's going on.

Interesting. How much effort have these people put into acquiring computer literacy though? It is hard for me to believe that anyone with average intelligence who applies him/herself for a day or two cannot master browsing the web. I mean, if you can look up a road directory and navigate to an address, or consult a phone directory and find a specific phone number, you already possess the required skills to understand web browsing. It is not really that alien, is what I'm saying.

The fact that it appears alien to the people you mention is probably due more to having some sort of mental block against exploring computers than to computers being actually alien to them. My mother, for instance, had for the longest time an aversion to trying stuff out on a computer for fear of damaging it. She only started getting it when I gave her an old laptop and assured her that it was ok if she totally junked it. She would still have her desktop and I no longer needed that box. Now she's happily discovering and playing games on Facebook and wasn't even fazed by the recent change in the UI. :)

Would this have happened in ReadWriteWeb looked more like Daring Fireball?

One of the causes of this kind of mistaken identity problem is that users have become conditioned to a web full of irrelevance and distraction. RWW is typical of many sites: a huge amount of the content loaded for any article is stuff meant to distract you from the article itself. Not just advertising, but crap. How much of that singing, dancing circus is actually necessary? If it isn't necessary, why is it there?

Is it not ridiculous that RWW's message to these confused users is placed in bold black text in the article that they demonstrably did not come there to read and not anywhere amid the colorful parade of nonsense and not anywhere near the text "Sign in with Facebook". It's even below the fold on my system. Do people still want to blame user stupidity alone? Please.

Like all humans, when these users wind up somewhere unfamiliar, they reach for whatever is familiar. In this case, the article has not one, but two Facebook logos above the fold. One in the article text, reading "Facebook", immediately below the word "Facebook" in the headline. Why is this necessary? The other is in the header, and links to RWW on Facebook. But so does the huge Facebook sidebar widget a few scrolls down. Just in terms of pixels, Facebook has already carved out a nice chunk of the page, competitive with that of the body text. And then there's the text itself, the little Facebook logos on all of the user pictures of people who likewise thought this was somehow related to Facebook, and most damning of all, the text "Sign in with Facebook" right above the comment form.

A person who has just Googled for "facebook login" and who just saw a half dozen Facebook logos, and just saw dozens of other people who made the same mistake complaining, who then mistakes that username/password field as meaning "Sign in to Facebook" is not making an epic error in judgement. They are making a simple mistake based on a limited understanding of things they have never had a reason to understand. They aren't stupid, they're human.

I don't really mean to single out RWW, though. This is a web-wide problem. You will never be able to eliminate stupid mistakes or the "better fool", but you can stop gently assisting such confusion and illiteracy by thinking about why what you're doing isn't helping.

Facebook has no consistency to its navigation

My uncle is an accomplished Orthopedic surgeon. He's smart, well read, well-respected (and deservingly so).

And it's almost painful watching him operate a computer sometimes. Basic tasks like moving around a Window to uncover another one needs to be explained. Some people are lousy drivers. Some people are just really bad with using a computer.

But: He would never leave the type of comment you see on the linked site. Have you seen those? I'm not convinced that these are the same accomplished people that you and I are talking about.

There's no denying that a lot of people still get confused about websites and google and the internet as a whole. But if you're using facebook and using it enough to complain about the 'new login page' then you really should be held to higher standards.