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Daring Fireball: "Facebook login"

daringfireball.net

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Re: Daring Fireball: "Facebook login"

#71

Post by guelo »

noonespecial wrote: post #68

I've found that the single biggest impediment to computer literacy to the "ordinary" is the somehow ingrained belief that its impossible for them to understand anything about their own computers. Learning to use a computer is not like neurosurgery, its more like driving a car. A little attention, a smidge of effort and just believing that its possible is all most people need. Geeks are partly to blame for this becaus…

Hmmm, maybe there should be a "driving test" before you're allowed on the internet.

Re: Daring Fireball: "Facebook login"

#72

Post by madair »

Groxx wrote: post #60
madair wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prejudice (1) : preconceived judgment or opinion (2) : an adverse opinion or leaning formed without just grounds or before sufficient knowledge Yep, sounds like you are prejudiced.

I did just admit it. Many of the worst-behavers I've encountered act similarly or worse on the internet, and the reverse has been quite accurate for the few I've encountered in that manner. It's certainly prejudice, but that doesn't make it wholly (or even mostly) invalid. Prejudices have a prejudiced opinion applied to them. That snarling dog? It may not bite you, but it's rational to be prejudiced towards believing…

There is nothing good about this at all, this is class warfare and culture warfare all wrapped up together, both very bad and both ripping America, among other places, apart right about....now.

You have absolutely no clue about this person and yet you are prejudiced against him, her, it. Is he/she/it 10 years old? You have no clue. You don't know background, you know nothing except that this person just feels that they got cheated, and they are not experienced enough to know that they are simply on the wrong page.

But hey, it's okay, because you admit it, huh?

Re: Daring Fireball: "Facebook login"

#73

Post by Hexstream »

noonespecial wrote: post #68

I've found that the single biggest impediment to computer literacy to the "ordinary" is the somehow ingrained belief that its impossible for them to understand anything about their own computers. Learning to use a computer is not like neurosurgery, its more like driving a car. A little attention, a smidge of effort and just believing that its possible is all most people need. Geeks are partly to blame for this becaus…

Well, my theory is that learning to use a car is easier because it's a physical thing that obeys the laws of physics, whereas in computer science we don't have to obey the laws of physics, which means we have much less constraints, more freedom, so we're basically free to just "make up stuff" as we go, so of course someone who isn't familiar with that world of ours are having a bit of a hard time keeping up.

Re: Daring Fireball: "Facebook login"

#74

Post by [deleted] »

Groxx wrote: post #60
madair wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prejudice (1) : preconceived judgment or opinion (2) : an adverse opinion or leaning formed without just grounds or before sufficient knowledge Yep, sounds like you are prejudiced.

I did just admit it. Many of the worst-behavers I've encountered act similarly or worse on the internet, and the reverse has been quite accurate for the few I've encountered in that manner. It's certainly prejudice, but that doesn't make it wholly (or even mostly) invalid. Prejudices have a prejudiced opinion applied to them. That snarling dog? It may not bite you, but it's rational to be prejudiced towards believing…

[deleted]

Re: Daring Fireball: "Facebook login"

#75

Post by ubernostrum »

pyre wrote: post #59
ubernostrum wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seeing as this phenomenon -- even to the point of people literally typing URLs into Google and then clicking the first result -- is old, well-known and well-documented, I'm gonna guess you need to broaden your usability reading. Here, for example, is an article from 2007 pointing out that the top search term on Google was... "Yahoo": http://www.dailydomainer.com/200742-yahoo-top-search-term-on... Here's Jeremy Zawodn…

Yea, but people also have to fail at understanding the bookmarking functionality of browsers as well. You don't have to understand the location/address bar to understand that you can bookmark a page to come back to it.

Charles Miller today commented on this:

http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2010/02/12/two_steps_forward_tw...

And mentioned his own anecdote:

http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2003/10/09/the_internet_and_und...

Choice quote:

URLs. Bookmarks. Changing your homepage. All of these things were voodoo.

As he points out, claims that people are more "savvy" today than they were then probably don't hold up; if anything, users back then probably were more knowledgeable on average, simply by virtue of even having Internet access.

Re: Daring Fireball: "Facebook login"

#76

Post by mechanical_fish »

jrockway wrote: post #3
natemartin wrote: post #2

This is fascinating... apparently users are just typing "facebook login" into google, clicking on the first link, and getting very confused as to why they're not actually on facebook. How can you design a web application that is usable by people with this level of computer knowledge? Should one even try?

This is why I don't get too excited about Internet entrepreneurship. In order to be successful, you have to appeal to this type of person. And I don't want to. (Is there even a single comment there written in correct written English? I don't see one; everything is misspelled, mis-capitalized, or just plain incomprehensible. Depressing! So very depressing!)

I can't create a single sentence in correctly written Chinese. Or Russian, or even French for that matter -- I can cough up some random French words on paper, but they will likely be misspelled and "just plain incomprehensible."

What "type" of person am I?

Written communication is a stunt that is mastered by a relative handful of people, and polite, formal written communication by even fewer. The others communicate by more traditional and universal means: Talk, music, dance, art, games, cooking, commerce.

Re: Daring Fireball: "Facebook login"

#78

Post by mbrubeck »

I think it's a mistake to generalize from those RWW commenters to "normal users." Of the millions of people who logged on to Facebook yesterday, many thousands probably got there via Google, and just a few hundred ended up commenting on various highly-ranked posts (though there were probably many more who clicked the posts but didn't comment). The commenters are not representative of normal Facebook users; they are a very aggressively filtered 99.99th percentile of the users who have the most trouble navigating the web.

[reposted from another thread, with corrections]

Re: Daring Fireball: "Facebook login"

#79

Post by patio11 »

pyre wrote: post #48
patio11 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to assume your users actually have the ability to get to your website before you can worry about what they do when they get there. Yes, but for most businesses you'll want them to be able to get back too, and that is non-trivial and worth optimizing for. Get their email address and send them opt-in lifecycle emails. This is, far and away, the best alternative. Have them bookmark your site. Many of them will…

> Have them bookmark your site. Many of them will not understand bookmarks. Teach them to understand. Isn't that really advocating that each and every website on the internet should teach their users basic computer skills? I mean if these people had bought a magazine from the news stand, and it said "Popular Mechanics" instead of "Playboy" on it, do you think that they would just say to themselves, "I guess that Play…

A hypothetical engineer might be emotionally invested in "Everyone should know enough about computers to do basic things, and they should have learned that years ago, so if they can't do them it is their fault." That hypothetical engineer might bristle at being told "You should help them succeed, even if it means teaching them the basics."

A hypothetical business owner, told that there was an issue that was preventing his customers from paying him money, would probably say "Fix it."

Some days we have to pick whether we want to be engineers or business owners. For my part, I spent time yesterday teaching a PhD how to open PDFs.

Re: Daring Fireball: "Facebook login"

#80

Post by [deleted] »

madair wrote: post #72
Groxx wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did just admit it. Many of the worst-behavers I've encountered act similarly or worse on the internet, and the reverse has been quite accurate for the few I've encountered in that manner. It's certainly prejudice, but that doesn't make it wholly (or even mostly) invalid. Prejudices have a prejudiced opinion applied to them. That snarling dog? It may not bite you, but it's rational to be prejudiced towards believing…

There is nothing good about this at all, this is class warfare and culture warfare all wrapped up together, both very bad and both ripping America, among other places, apart right about....now. You have absolutely no clue about this person and yet you are prejudiced against him, her, it. Is he/she/it 10 years old? You have no clue. You don't know background, you know nothing except that this person just feels that th…

[deleted]
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