Users Don’t Care About What You Care About

Read Write Web had a post earlier about Facebook becoming the default identity for online users. Due to the magic of SEO, they were one of the top search results for facebook login leading hundreds of people to think that Read Write Web was a re-designed Facebook and much ALL CAPS excitement. Such as:

I WANT THE OLD FAFEBOOK BACK THIS SHIT IS WACK!!!!!

or

I LOVE FACE BOOK CONNECTED W/PEOPLE I WENT TO HIGH SCHOOL W/ESPECIALY ONE CLOSE FRIEND.KNOW LET ME LOG IN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This helps to reinforce the lessons that:

People online are incredibly un-web savvy and it’s easy to make fun of them but if your paycheck depends on them you better figure out how to dumb it down or simplify.

People don’t know what browsers are (they often confuse them with ISPs or search engines).

People don’t look at interface cues. The Read Write Web site design is completely different than Facebook and many users simply didn’t get that.

People go to the familiar. The users scrolled until they found something familiar – the Facebook login box.

Nobody reads copy. And they don’t care about your branding. And a thousand graphic designer brains just exploded.

Great quote:

[A] huge amount of startup CEOs and designers… make product decisions that appeal to their own interaction behaviour with such applications or what they think their friends will find cool…. Users have been calloused by 15 or so years of surfing through bad ads and marketing babble, and they are unconsciously tuning out everything but the one thing they came to find. [in this case the Facebook login button]

via Open Thread: The Internet Is Hard.


Posted

in

by

Tags:

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *