Facebook login

The internet was stormed yesterday by the occurrence of a ReadWriteWeb article that is about the Facebook login process and quickly hundreds of completely confused users posted comments about their hate of this redesign of the Facebook login page.

As Neven Mrgan correctly says, the amount of information people were required to ignore is staggering:

1. People google for “facebook login” to log in to Facebook. I understand that they don’t use bookmarks and don’t type in facebook.com, but note that they don’t google “facebook”; they google “facebook login”. Clearly users don’t even see logging in as a function of the site itself; those are separate in the users’ mental maps. This is perhaps partly explained by the excess of websites which use Facebook as their authentication system, but it’s not the whole story.
2. They then click the small google result which says “News results: ReadWriteWeb” expecting they’ll be taken to Facebook.
3. They land on a page with an absolutely enormous heading saying ReadWriteWeb, below which is a headline, a byline, and endless paragraphs of what is even at the quickest glance obviously a news story.
4. They scroll all the way to the bottom of this completely un-Facebook-like page, with not a single thing in the way that would indicate this is a Facebook redesign.
5. They then go past the big heading saying Leave a comment and instead focus on the small link which says Optional: Sign in with Facebook. And don’t tell me these folks searched for “facebook” or “login” on the page itself.

The implications for the design and UX community are staggering. How are you supposed to design for this? It seems that the whole webapp metaphor is fundamentally flawed for a lot of users.

However there is a flickr screenshot of the facebook login page with similar comments. When I was quickly reading through these I recognized one of the commenters. I don’t know him personally but he clearly is an advanced computer user (probably dependent on it for his living). Yet he is confused with not being able to login into the tiny screenshot. This made me think of two possible explanations:

1. Statistics - Facebook has about 80 million users (I believe). So a few hundred comments on a few websites make for about 0.0001% users confused. There are probably more who didn’t post anything, but still a very small number. These people could be high for all we know or just this is a quantum level error of the transmission :)

2. Joke - somebody’s malware idea of a joke. It wouldn’t surprise me if somebody created a virus that would take peoples Facebook accounts and post helpless comments on top Google results for “facebook login”. The internet saw weirder things happen.

Anyway if it turns out to be a case of real honest user confusion, UX may as well change quite radically.