The site ReadWriteWeb recently did an article called Facebook wants to be your one true login. The contents of this article are something I’ll address in another post. What I want to talk about today has nothing to do with the actual contents of the article, and everything to do with the fact that this article was for some period of time one of the highest hits on Google for the search “Facebook login”.
The comments thread on the article filled up with over a thousand comments from confused and frustrated people asking “Now how do I log in?” and “The new design sucks!”.
That’s right. These people had been relying on a Google search for “Facebook login” to get to the Facebook login page. When they ended up at ReadWriteWeb instead, they didn’t know that they were in the wrong place. They thought that the Facebook login page had changed, and they weren’t happy about it. ReadWriteWeb has now put up a gigantic disclaimer on the article to explain that they are not Facebook and explain how to get there.
This whole chain of events seems destined to go down in Internet history as an amazing pile-up of failure.
Reactions seem divided into two camps. One camp is having a great laugh at the stupidity of the users – after all, how could they look at a page with a red masthead, titled “ReadWriteWeb”, featuring a news article, and think they were on the Facebook login page? How could they be smart enough to figure out how to leave a comment, but too dumb to know what site they were on?
The other camp, for example an article from blogger Funkatron called We’re the stupid ones is pointing the finger at the software world for assuming that everyone knows as much about computers as we do, and more specifically at Google – after all, isn’t this in some way Google’s screw-up for returning the wrong result?
Well, the name of this blog is “Not the User’s Fault”, so much as I would like to have a laugh at stupidity and then move on, I think it’s better to try to understand what this must have been like from those users’ point of view, and see if there’s anything we can learn from the whole boondoggle.
You and I know that the URL in the location bar is an ever-present answer to the question where am I ?. Any time something seems wrong, we’ve got a habit of checking the URL to see if we’re where we thought we were. If you’re in the habit of paying attention to the URL, then it’s hard to see how you could mistake ReadWriteWeb for facebook.
So what this mess teaches us is that there are lots of people out there who don’t know how to read a URL. The URL in the location bar, if they notice it at all, must appear to them as nothing but a bunch of computer gibberish.
Think about it from their point of view. They knew that Googling “facebook login” and then clicking the first link took them to their Facebook login. I wouldn’t call it the best way of getting to Facebook, but it was obviously working for these poor souls. Until one day, they saw something they didn’t expect. If you don’t know how URLs work, then all you know is that your expected Facebook login page has somehow been replaced with… something else.
You know how, in Firefox 3, you can type something that’s not a URL into the location bar, and it’ll invisibly do a Google “I’m feeling lucky” search and take you straight to the result? (I just checked and, as of right now, typing “facebook login” there does indeed take me to the Facebook login page.) Great time-saving feature, right? But what if you come to rely on that feature without really understanding how it works… and then one day the result changes? I don’t know if any of the confused users on ReadWriteWeb got there using Firefox 3, but it seems plausible that some of them did just that.
This “time-saving feature” is great if you know what you’re doing… but isn’t it a bit dangerous to give to people who don’t understand URLs?
Above, I said that the URL was the answer to the question “Where am I?”. Actually, that’s not quite true. The URL is looked up in a DNS server to determine an IP address, and then the browser connects to an HTTP server on whatever computer that IP address points to. The IP is the real location; the URL is just a human-readable way of looking up the IP. It almost always works the way you expect, and you don’t have to think about it…. except that DNS servers can be hacked. URLs can be spoofed. You can enter a URL and end up connected to a different server than the one you wanted.
When people type “facebook login” into the Firefox URL bar, or into a Google I’m-feeling-lucky search, then aren’t they really just using Google as a sort of higher-level DNS lookup? One that turns their English description of what they want into a URL? From their point of view, what happened to them with ReadWriteWeb is no different from a spoofed URL or a hacked DNS server taking them to the wrong place. It doesn’t seem so funny anymore, does it?
Is there anything we can do about this? A while ago I wrote a post about doing user support for Firefox, where I said:
You can simplify the material down until it reaches the student’s current level of understanding. Or you can raise the student’s level of understanding until they become capable of grasping the material.
So right now we’ve got people who don’t understand URLs. Do we simplify the Web for their benefit? Or do we raise their level of understanding?
I think it has to be the latter. The idea of navigating by URL is so fundamental to how the Web works that it’s hard to imagine abstracting it away. More than that, trying to abstract it away is dangerous. Imagine someone who doesn’t understand URLs clicking on a link in a phishing attack that takes them to a fake PayPal or whatever. If they don’t know to look at the URL, how are they going to have any idea that they’re not on the real PayPal?
People using the Web without understanding URLs are quite literally putting themselves in danger, just as if they went out driving on the road without understanding how to read road signs.
I’m not suggesting that we, like, make people take a driver’s test or earn a license before they’re allowed to use the Web. I’m not sure what solution to this is, but I know it involves doing a better job of educating people. Maybe Firefox could do more to teach first-time users what URLs are and why they should pay attention to them.
If there was ever something like a video-game tutorial level for the Internet, then reading URLs surely ought to be one of the skills that the “player” needs to master before moving on.
Not The User's Fault 
February 18, 2010 at 4:03 am
AOL Keyword: Facebook Login
February 18, 2010 at 4:06 am
As far as abstracting URLs away, haven’t you answered that in the first part of your post?
Because that’s exactly what happened. People use the web through Google searches without even looking at URLs, and this is the consequence – if the search results change, those people can no longer get to the page they want.
February 18, 2010 at 4:08 am
So perhaps it about time for an about:internet? 🙂 I volunteer Boriss for the job 😀
February 18, 2010 at 4:16 am
NOW HOW DO I LGONIN???????
February 18, 2010 at 4:55 am
“I think it has to be the latter. The idea of navigating by URL is so fundamental to how the Web works that it’s hard to imagine abstracting it away. More than that, trying to abstract it away is dangerous. Imagine someone who doesn’t understand URLs clicking on a link in a phishing attack that takes them to a fake PayPal or whatever. If they don’t know to look at the URL, how are they going to have any idea that they’re not on the real PayPal?”
Doesn’t all of this apply to DNS? Sure, there should be a better system than Googling. But a well-engineered abstraction would work reasonably well most of the time and be a lot more friendly than https://addons.mozilla.org/services/install.php?addon_id=testpilot
February 18, 2010 at 5:16 am
This is also directed at the patronizing attitude in the funkatron article, especially Michiel’s remarks that:
I don’t think so. This isn’t about asking people to write a heap sort and laughing in their faces when they can’t. This isn’t even about people who entered “facebook login” into their address bar and were frustrated when they were directed to the ReadWriteWeb article. This is about people who entered “facebook login” into their address bar, found themselves at ReadWriteWeb, and proceeded, without realizing they were not on Facebook.
Computers are tricky. It’s nice that these days a great deal of people spend a great deal of time philosophizing about our interactions with them. But the involvement of computers doesn’t make every act that includes them forgivable. If this were something occurring in the offline world concerning a different subject, no one would be trying to absolve the commentors.
This is akin to someone being handed a freshman’s literary criticism paper and remarking “I was really enjoying the novel, but Jane Austen really seemed to change the focus after chapter 14. I think I’ll write her about it.“
February 18, 2010 at 5:34 am
Actually, that list bit there, would probably end with “THI NEW SuuuCK!!!”
February 18, 2010 at 5:35 am
Oddly enough, I think a US congressman just suggested there be a *required* test before people use the internet.
Perhaps there could be a way for Firefox to help a user understand the URL better. The first things that come to mind are a simplified version of the URL that pops up if you hover your mouse over the URL bar. Or maybe they could click the logo never to the URL and read information parsed from Whois searches, or at the very least be told the last two parts of the domain name (example.com)?
February 18, 2010 at 7:21 am
WOW. Just plain wow…
Thank you for the very intelligent analysis of this… interesting incident.
However, you are actually missing one possible cause for some of this. Once upon a time, I had a user complain to me that he couldn’t find the Flagfox icon in the address bar. I walked him through troubleshooting to try and diagnose the problem. I thought it was a bug, but then a screenshot was posted. He didn’t even have an address bar in his toolbar. (no, I don’t know why) The user didn’t even know what an address bar was and just assumed that when I said “address bar” I was referring to the Google search box. The problem we’re talking about here goes WAY deeper than some people realize. I think some users actually make a point of removing their address bar from the toolbar because to them it’s technical info they don’t need.
February 18, 2010 at 7:23 am
Maybe what happened is that Google got too successful.
Once upon a time we used to *type* URLs into the URL bar, we gave one another the URLs of “nice” sites (with http://www. and all), and it was only from time to time that we used Google or Yahoo or whatever to find a URL (and the right one was not always the top result). And once we had the right one we bookmarked it, or as I used to call it before I tried out Netscape 4.72, we added it to the Favourites, so we could get back there without having to search again.
Nowadays, for some people, Google’s “I’m feeling lucky” is hiding the meaning of the URL behind a layer of “computer magic”. Maybe we need a Hogwarts school of computer literacy (for Muggles), which seems to be what jonoscript is after.
February 18, 2010 at 7:43 am
Is this the kind of computer users we want? Does the all-time audience of computers need to adapt to a new generation of dumbed-down, flashy silly apps with huge YOU ARE HERE address bars with 50 types of styling so Average Joe can understand he’s HERE and not THERE?
No, users need to be educated. I work with them, I know what they do, and most importantly, what they DON’T do. The average user refuses to read anything on-screen, first of all, no matter how pretty it is.
If the message doesn’t come from fleshy being (weird grammar intentional), they will just ignore it as technobabble. And do incredibly silly things like spending 30 minutes calling tech support instead of reading the window telling them what is happening. Productive.
I don’t want a future where computers are aimed at illiterates. Sorry. Educating them is the only way to go.
Also users LOVE, for some reason, to skip the address bar and directly type into whatever start page is default. No wonder phishing is effective.
February 18, 2010 at 7:57 am
Anon: Did you read what I wrote? We are in agreement. I am also advocating education.
February 18, 2010 at 10:12 am
The people who commented there must be a very small minority. But of course even a very small fraction of all Facebook users is a lot of people.
That article has become a honeypot for the stupid and arrogant (it takes more than stupidity to write comments like those).
I don’t believe that any of those people I know who use Facebook would fall into this trap, despite several of them not being very good with computers.
February 18, 2010 at 10:27 am
I think one of the problems is that today most software is designed with the philosophy that users will not read documentation anyway, so documentation isn’t even necessary. Just look at the Firefox help: it contains barely any information for those who actually *cannot use a web browser yet*, and it is almost not organized at all. It relies on searching. You have to know what to search for to find any useful information. The only relevant part of the documentation page for newcomers is the quite small Browsing basics link.
It is assumed that people shouldn’t need to make an effort or read any docs to learn to use the program. Which is of course good to some extent, but there are a few basic concepts even for an easy-to-use program like a browser that one just has to learn first. The URLs, that you talked about, are one thing.
I think that the traditional, book-style, linearly readable documentation should not be removed in favour of a search box, because it cannot be replaced by it. Only complemented.
The Browsing basics section of the docs just lists the basic features of the browser, but it isn’t written with someone who can’t actually use it in mind.
February 18, 2010 at 11:26 am
I wonder what percentage of those people knows what browser they’re using?
February 18, 2010 at 12:17 pm
zach: of course they do. Some of them use Google others use Microsoft or Windows and a few use Yahoo, broadband or AOL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4MwTvtyrUQ
This is a hard problem to solve, some of the interviewed were teenagers, not seniors.
February 18, 2010 at 12:35 pm
The fact is that mozilla (just as other browser vendors) didn’t do much to raise internet literacy among users. We do much to support users who have some basic knowledge, but those who have no idea about basics, were left behind.
One solution that crosses my mind is to help begginer users to find valuable help. Maybe there should be links added to all locales, pointing to: a) tutorial how to safely browse web; b) place when users can report abuse or seek help when they are endangered.
Of course it doesn’t have to be mozilla run, some NGO’s do a great job here, but real lamers have no chance to even learn about their existence. Providing link in out-of-the-box browser, could help here a lot.
February 18, 2010 at 1:07 pm
Part of the reason why so many people are uneducated about URLs is the fault of how browsers and URLs are designed. Since the very first browser, the URL has been placed in a text field at the top of the window. It’s not connected to the page in any way, and it’s not labelled. Without being told what it is, most people have no incentive to try to figure out what its purpose is. Attaching a page’s URL closer to the page itself and actually labelling it might actually go a long way towards educating people.
The other big problem is that URLs themselves look like gibberish. Even for people like us, parsing a URL is not always instantaneous. Admit it, page-headings tend to answer the question of ‘Where am I?’ more quickly (though less reliably). URLs are supposed to be “human-readable”, but they’re barely that. There are no spaces and generally no capitalization. They bare little resemblance to natural language. And subdomains are placed in an order that’s completely backwards from how the rest of the URL’s hierarchy is presented (so ‘com/wordpress/jonoscript’ would be more logically consistent). So, I don’t think abstracting URLs further would be bad, but it does seem unlikely. However, if browsers displayed URLs in a more human-readable way (perhaps as a breadcrumb trail), people might be more likely to notice them and to remember them. Sites might even have an incentive then to make URLs more readable. That should at least be the goal.
February 18, 2010 at 1:31 pm
It would be nice that web authors could provide a human-friendly description of the current page in the markup, so a browser instead of showing
in the address bar, it could show something like
Not The User’s Fault > Some people can’t read URLs (Feb 2nd, 2010).
I think there is already a way to do this, since I have seen Google search results that replace URLs with such a breadcrumb-like description.
I think also that any fresh installation of Firefox should come with sites like Facebook, Gmail, and YouTube put into the bookmark toolbar. The only thing easier than googling “facebook login” is to have a Facebook button ready to be pushed right under the address bar.
February 18, 2010 at 1:59 pm
I’m not really sure users are as blame free as we make them out to be. When you remove “computer” and replace it with something else… users are held much more responsible.
If a driver speeds on an icy road, or drives drunk… we don’t blame the car’s inability to limit speed, or not start when the driver is drunk… we blame the driver exclusively. Technologies for both technically exist, but aren’t implemented for various reasons. Measuring slipping wheels, looking for black ice via censors are hardly as reliable as we’d like, breathalyzer ignition systems are costly and a PITA. Both are technically possible.
If we talk about a person cutting themselves with a knife… we blame the user, never the knife or the vegetable that they were trying to chop. There are devices out there that aid in cutting, as well as less sharp knives. There’s also pre-cut foods. One can also just keep their fingers pointed in away from the knife. Again completely avoidable. User is never faulted.
For sports we can blame weather for things like wind conditions, temperature, or fans for making distractions in the crowds. But we still blame the team for not working through it.
Even your job… boss likely doesn’t care why it doesn’t work. It just needs to work. No excuses.
The only place other than computing where the blame is never on the user is finances… tax fraud is always an accident, the accountants fault or software glitch (turbo tax). Bad investments are always due to taking bad advice (who does their own research?). Everyone always said credit card debt tells creditors your a good customer! Individuals are never responsible for their own mistakes.
Whether your trained or untrained, professional or unprofessional your expected to ensure you have enough knowledge to conduct the task at hand… most of the time.
For some reason, things that involve math, either directly (finances) or indirectly (modern day computers) are exempt from user blame. I think the real question is why culture has exempted these two, and why users are still responsible for everything else?
FWIW if Steve Jobs ran a financial firm, an auto manufacturer, or a culinary supply store… those products would be much more intuitive than they are. But nobody with such a user focus has stepped up yet in those industries.
February 18, 2010 at 2:18 pm
Roberto: exactly! Your example, though, is not unique enough to replace URLs. Any site can call itself ‘Not The User’s Fault’. This would be better:
WordPress.com > Not The User’s Fault > Some People Can’t Read URLs
Imagine if you could actually enter that in any location bar—and that it actually worked reliably.
February 18, 2010 at 3:04 pm
Err, putting non-mozilla URLs in the bookmarks toolbar is about the dumbest thing you can do to promote Mozilla’s Manifesto. Some people don’t use Facebook (I don’t because it banned my email…grr), Google (Bing anybody? Or Yahoo?), and YouTube (My computer overheats and dies when videos play, and I have no plugins).
Still, when users do not take enough time to learn the interfaces they are working with, then why do we have to go out of their way to make it understandable for them? If they have too low of time-preferences, I’m not going to try to bring the ability to use it down to theirs. Especially when I’ve already done the efficiency vs. usability analysis to find the best (minimal) time-preferences to get the work done.
February 18, 2010 at 4:08 pm
I bet more people use Facebook than read Mozilla’s Manifesto. I’ve been using Mozilla and Firefox for 8 years and I didn’t even know there was such thing.
February 18, 2010 at 6:35 pm
Roberto: fascinating, but that’s a line of reasoning you might like to submit elsewhere. Mozilla has an explicit goal of openness that comes before anything else, even at the cost of a degraded experience; look at Robert O’Callahan’s posts in particular about open video and H.264.
So something along the lines of “well, maybe if things like the Mozilla Manifesto are presenting barriers to do these things to build a better product for most people, we should consider not being bound by it,” won’t come into play. It’s an idea, but not within the predefined parameters. It can certainly be undertaken elsewhere, and I’d say it has a non-trivial chance of creating a successful product (where “success” is defined in numbers), but Mozilla places other things at a higher importance, regardless of whether any given person will look at at it and say, “That’s silly; you won’t fulfill your greatest potential as long as you keep concerning yourself with things nobody cares about.”
(I realize you have yet to say either of the quoted sections in the previous paragraph, and I don’t mean to put words in your mouth. But I feel that addressing a similar, generalized argument as I did is sufficient to communicate a point that can be easily adapted to whereever you may have been going with that or may have already gone.)
February 18, 2010 at 7:57 pm
Sorry, I misread Havvy’s comment as “new users should be told about the manifesto”. I think it is a great thing that openness is such an important goal.
My point is: if there is a facebook button below the address bar, people won’t need to google for it.
And my suggestion would be: don’t teach your grandma to google “facebook login”, just add facebook to the bookmark toolbar and teach her to click on it.
February 18, 2010 at 8:29 pm
Havvy wrote:
> Err, putting non-mozilla URLs in the
>bookmarks toolbar is about the dumbest thing
>you can do to promote Mozilla’s Manifesto.
Your dedication to the Manifesto is inspiring, but I don’t understand why you think that it’s some kind of violation to put non-mozilla URLs into the default browser configuration. You may notice that the search bar in the upper-right corner of Firefox has a drop-down menu with several search engines, none of which is a Mozilla URL. So we’re obviously not opposed to integrating other services, including commercial services, into the Firefox UI, if – and here’s the important thing – if we think it improves the overall user experience.
That said, I don’t think a Facebook button is necessarily a great thing to build in to Firefox. We can’t exactly build in another button for every site that becomes popular.
I agree with David Regev’s point that Firefox doesn’t currently do anything to introduce the concept of URLs in an understandable way; as well as the point that several commenters have raised that a typical URL is not exactly intuitive.
So, coming up with a more human-readable way of displaying URL information is certainly an approach worth looking into. On the other hand, (most) URLs aren’t that hard to read – it’s a specialized skill that has to be taught, sure, but it’s not any more inherently difficult than learning to read and write postal addresses on envelopes, and that’s something we teach to elementary school students. It’s getting to be something that should be considered part of basic literacy, so the question I’m most interested in is, how can the browser best teach it?
February 19, 2010 at 12:29 am
Just a nitpick aside:
“The IP is the real location;”
No it’s not. One can run lots of different domains on a single IP, and many do. On the other hand, a single domain name can resolve to multiple IPs. So the primary “where am I” identifier in fact *is* the domain name.
February 19, 2010 at 1:44 am
[…] Some People Can’t Read URLs […]
February 19, 2010 at 2:46 pm
I very much agree *but*…
The biggest pile of nonsense in a URL is the http/https/ftp/www/whatever gibberish at the start. (Why can’t the protocol be negotiated in the background in some way? Everything else is.)
A URL would be much more readable if it looked like this in the address bar:
facebook.com
Messing around with URL syntax, you could then make this a valid URL:
facebook.com: JohnSmith
(By requiring a colon after the server name, rather than slash, and auto-clipping the initial whitespace.)
In non-address bar contexts (such as in HTML source or emails, etc.), you could just add a symbol like @ to the start of the server name.
Anyhoo, just some wishful thinking about what could have been…
February 19, 2010 at 8:11 pm
[…] are a ton of great responses to this piece, but I think that Jono DiCarlo captured my reaction: The idea of navigating by URL is so fundamental to how the Web works that it’s hard to imagine […]
February 19, 2010 at 10:23 pm
Well, voracity, such a change would be possible even now, but it has a cost I’m not ready to pay: namely, taking away from the user the ability to connect to a single site by http or ftp (an example of this is http://ftp.mozilla.org, where connecting by http –with e.g. Firefox– allows various sort options but connecting by ftp –with e.g. the command-line utility “ftp”– allows downloading several files in one command); or by https or http (e.g. to some site whose certificate is “untrusted”, depending on whether I’m ready or not to add it to my permanent store). IOW, it’s a step taking freedom away from the user and into the hands of some I-know-better-than-you-what-is-good-for-you authority. I would even say it’s a step away from the Bazaar model and towards the Cathedral model.
February 19, 2010 at 10:39 pm
Tony, there is an easy solution for that: assume that http://www. is the standard and override it when you receive https:// or http://ftp.
But yes, I do see that all the time: people have no idea what that strange bar with that gibberish in it actually does. They know addresses like yahoo.com or amazon.com or ebay.com and of course they enter those addresses to the field in the middle of the screen. Yes, that’s the Google search field.
February 20, 2010 at 1:20 am
Perhaps the main Firefox-related flaw is the whole automatically-go-to-the-I’m-Feeling-Lucky-result. I’ve had that feature turned off since probably before Firefox 2. I’ve modified the about:config variable to point anything non-URL to a regular Google search and let me figure out for myself what I’m looking for.
(On a related note, I almost never use the Firefox built-in search box, because it leaves my query there forever if I don’t manually delete it.)
February 20, 2010 at 3:13 am
@abdulkadirtopal:
The Google search bar? Oh, yeah, nowadays the default start page of Firefox is a Google search page isn’t it? I never used that. On Netscape (from NS4.72 to NS7) I may have used “My Netscape” for some time, but IIRC when I discovered Firefox (shortly before Fx1 got released) I already had my own frontpage, the one which you can still see (in a very slightly updated version) if you click my name above. I guess you’ll call me old-fashioned (see also my “once upon a time” comment, #10 above), and at 59 years old I won’t refuse the epithet.
(IIUC, if I omit the protocol, Mozilla will try http:// or even http://www. before and .com after; but please don’t take away the possibility to use file:/// chrome:// about: or even a javascript: bookmarklet without trying http:// first 😛 )
And BTW, I expect that typing mozilla.org or amazon.com into the Google search bar will yield the “right” result, even with that kindergarten “Feeling Lucky” radio button. But maybe not if you type just “Mozilla” or “Amazon”, or not as reliably, which IIUC is the point jonoscript makes.
Best regards,
Tony.
—
May Euell Gibbons eat your only copy of the manual!
February 20, 2010 at 3:35 am
@Gordon:
I did use Firefox’s searchbox (and still would if I hadn’t gone over to SeaMonkey), but with a vastly expanded list of search engines, and opening the search in a new tab, so that when done with the search I would just close that tab and go back to wherever I was coming from.
On SeaMonkey there is no “search box” /per se/ next to the URL bar, but there are two possible ways to search: by using the URL bar as a search box (and using the bottom line of the autocompletion drop-down, wich searches by means of the “default engine” set in the Preferences), or by means of the sidebar (where changing search engines is much more “painless”) and the latter is what I mostly use, except when searching en.wikipedia.org which I’ve set as my nondefault “default engine” 😉 in the Preferences.
Best regards,
Tony.
—
GOD: That is your purpose Arthur … the Quest for the Holy Grail …
“Monty Python and the Holy Grail” PYTHON (MONTY) PICTURES LTD
February 20, 2010 at 11:05 pm
David Regev, voracity: We’re talking about people who see a completely different site design and name/logo at the top of the page, and can’t figure out that they’re not on Facebook. Sorry, but some ‘better URLs’ system ain’t gonna make a damn bit of difference here. If they can’t even read the logo at the top of the page, they ain’t gonna read *any* URL-like construct, no matter how readable it is.
And frankly, I have zero sympathy for them.
February 22, 2010 at 12:10 pm
Basically, you are suggesting replacing “read URLs to determine site identity” with “read something else to determine site identity”.
That’s what EV certificates do 🙂 They produce a hard link between a site and a particular company, allowing us to augment the URL bar with a text description of who the site owner is.
Gerv
February 23, 2010 at 5:05 pm
When i read this article several things come to mind, most of them having to do with common sense.
We’ve been lowering the standards and ignoring common sense. You use a driver’s licence as an exemple, i’m gonn keep using that exemple.
My granma has a driver’s licence (they were just given away in those times) => Mister Foo has a computer
There is a car in my granma’s garage (it’s her husband’s) => Mister Foo has an intenet connection
My granma, dispite the fact she has a driver’s licence and a car doesn’t know how to drive => Mister Foo dispite the fact he has a computer and an internet connection doesn’t know how to browse the web.
My granma DOESN’T drive because she does not know how to do it => Mister Foo surfs the internet and complains it is not user friendly enough
February 25, 2010 at 9:13 am
[…] Some People Can't Read URLs « Not The User's Fault Posted in Latest Websites | Tags: Creating, ShadyURL.com, Sinister, URLs […]
February 26, 2010 at 9:27 am
As I read this I thought at first you were going to grandstand about how people “don’t read URLs *and shouldn’t be expected to.*” However I was greatly relieved to read: “People using the Web without understanding URLs are quite literally putting themselves in danger, just as if they went out driving on the road without understanding how to read road signs.” Kudos!
I was then going to reply with some analogies about how web users are mollycoddled but auto drivers, for example, must learn the basics of driving a car. But other’s beat me to it. Kudos again!
So let me just say this: I thoroughly enjoyed this post and the intelligent comments that it has attracted. KUDOS!!!
March 2, 2010 at 5:32 pm
[…] Serving as a follow-up to the “Facebook login Quandry“. Also by the same author: A tutorial level for the internet. He uses Metroid as an example, so I am bound by law to link to it. […]
March 2, 2010 at 6:14 pm
I think your fundamental assumption is incorrect. I suspect precisely zero users (not a hyperbolic estimate) typed anything into any address bar. They don’t know what it is and have never seen it in their lives.
In the majority of cases, these users had Google (for example) set up as their homepage. They know only four ways to navigate online: Enter a Google search, use the Back button, use Bookmarks (advanced users only), and click links.
These users, then, Googled “Facebook login” and were indeed too stupid to understand they were not on Facebook. They didn’t need to read an URL to come to that conclusion.
March 2, 2010 at 6:58 pm
You should notice in the comments to this ReadWriteWeb article that these users have used Facebook Connect (OpenID) to sign in to leave a comment – that’s why they might have thought they were logging in to Facebook. The “Sign in with Facebook” text in the comment form could have been understood as “sign in to Facebook”.
So it’s not just the Firefox’s awesome bar or lack of understanding how URLs work. It’s also the lack of understanding how OpenID works.
March 2, 2010 at 8:56 pm
@joe clark: “I suspect precisely zero users (not a hyperbolic estimate) typed anything into any address bar. They don’t know what it is and have never seen it in their lives.”
Aside from being wrong (one is more than zero and I know *I* do it) you being sadly myopic. URLs are used for far more than typing in the browser; they are displayed in print, recognized in word processors and email clients, displayed in many other contexts, shortened for social networks when they are long, etc. Ignoring your own URL design only hurts yourself and others who use your sites; advocating that URL design is unimportant hurts all those who are foolish enough to listen to you.
P.S. Still, typing URLs into browser is a huge use-case and browser type-ahead makes it even more important than you acknowledge.
March 3, 2010 at 2:11 am
@mikeschinkel: I believe what “joe clark” meant was that none of the users who commented on the RWW article used the address bar or know what it does. Joe is not suggesting that the URL and the address bar is not important, he’s just saying that the people who tried to get into Facebook but landed up on RWW likely do not know of the existence of either the URL or the address bar.
March 3, 2010 at 5:14 am
@KX “I believe what “joe clark” meant was that none of the users who commented on the RWW article used the address bar or know what it does.”
If so then forgive my reaction, but if so also he was stating the obvious.
I believe strongly in the URL is fundamental to the web and that anyone using the web really should learn what it means. Without it the web would be far less rich and capable, and anyone not understanding the URL is potentially harming themselves (for example, phishing sites.) So when I read people implying the URL is unimportant I want to make sure the opposite argument is heard.
March 3, 2010 at 10:05 am
@mikeschinkel
“[…] anyone not understanding the URL is potentially harming themselves […]”
Yes, like a person who would say “I took my car to go to ” to mean a car driven by a chauffeur, except that Google ought not to be expected to be as accurate as a human chauffeur, and that when a chauffeur-driven car arrives at a place with a totally unknown look it is not assumed that the Earl of Foobar has had his castle rebuilt overnight.
March 3, 2010 at 2:14 pm
http://dangrover.com/?action=view&url=toward-a-grand-unified-theory-of-n00bs
March 3, 2010 at 7:15 pm
Daryl: That’s a fantastic article! Thanks for the link.
March 4, 2010 at 5:11 am
An interesting bit of extra confusion in the case of that article is that the comments has a “log in with Facebook” function next to the comments box, so confused people though that (at the bottom of the page mind you) was the place they were supposed to log in. The it told them “leave a comment”, so… they did.
Yes, people need to become educated in this stuff. Computers can be confusing, but they can only bend so low before the user has to take some responsibility for knowing how to use it.
Really, in high schools “basic computing” should be the Home Ec of the twenty-first century. (Actually, they should still be teaching Home Ec too, but c’est la vie.)
March 4, 2010 at 4:12 pm
URL should be more user-friendly, in order to people to understand it.
1. To browsers, drop the “http://” as it is the default protocol scheme.
2. To DNS servers, make yourself understand “com/facebook/www/” instead of “www.facebook.com”.
Then we can teach people to look at the beginning to the string “com/facebook/” to know “where they are”.
March 4, 2010 at 4:32 pm
please, sometimes, let us laugh at the user stupidity. Some of them just doesn’t read anything and don’t even try to understand. If i’m using a coffee or a washing machine without even looking how to use it, and i don’t have what i want (coffee or clean laundry), then it’s only my fault.
People have too much of an easy life today and tend to do as little effort as possible. Some consequences are obvious…
March 4, 2010 at 4:43 pm
maybe the solution is browser-based. (and firefox did a giant step this way a few months/years ago without even knowing)
The Awesome bar.
Why not parsing the URL as it’s written. If it’s an URL, then change nothing, if not, start it by “ask google for” in a grey font ?
So, people will know what’s happening when they press [Return].
March 4, 2010 at 6:20 pm
I wonder if things like Mozilla Prism (http://prism.mozillalabs.com/) won’t make the “some people can’t read URLs” issue worst.
Prism is a chrome-less (mainly, URL-bar-less) browser, so it hides the URL to the user. This will open new security issues for the end user. People will click on a Facebook or Gmail icon on their desktop, and they will be presented with an exact copy of the website they expect to see. But coming from a malicious server…
“Shortcut spoofing”, I’ll call it that way.
March 4, 2010 at 9:47 pm
And how will it turn with
– URI(->IRI)->WebId http://esw.w3.org/topic/WebID
versus
– XRI->i-names http://www.inames.net/
?
Anybody to give interesting links about that please ?
March 5, 2010 at 3:47 am
“People use the web through Google searches without even looking at URLs” How do they reach Google if they don’t know about URLs?
March 5, 2010 at 9:47 am
@zach ( https://jonoscript.wordpress.com/2010/02/18/some-people-cant-read-urls/#comment-2766 )
who said
“I wonder what percentage of those people knows what browser they’re using?”
-> maybe less than 8%… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4MwTvtyrUQ
@Huh ( https://jonoscript.wordpress.com/2010/02/18/some-people-cant-read-urls/#comment-3037 )
who said
“How do [people] reach Google if they don’t know about URLs?”
-> https://jonoscript.wordpress.com/2010/02/18/some-people-cant-read-urls/#comment-2998
March 5, 2010 at 1:38 pm
@Huh:
“How do they reach Google if they don’t know about URLs?”
– By having it as their homepage (as per Firefox default)
– By having it as their default search engine (as per Firefox default)
– For the really bright ones: by having a desktop icon labeled “Google”, which brings up the Google search site in a browser.
I don’t know what IE defaults are, and I can’t check them because I’m on Linux.
March 5, 2010 at 1:45 pm
Oh, and I forgot:
– By having any non-URL typed in the URL bar used as a Google search query (as per Firefox default)
March 6, 2010 at 1:38 am
[…] Comments about that incident filled the tech blogs for a few days afterward. […]
March 7, 2010 at 7:25 am
Most of the problems have been stated in the comments already:
– URLs have been designed to be readable by humans by computer scientists. So they actually have been designed to be read by computer scientists. To any “normal” human, they look like disposable gibberish.
– The browsers have done a very bad job (though till this day I hadn’t noticed it) to make users understand what is important:
* they don’t even display the domain name in the title bar of the application or in the tab name. It should be the _first_ thing displayed, before the page title.
* they show the whole url the user is on, which looks like gibberish, while anything your average joe will ever need to know from the url is 1) the domain name and 2) if they are on a trusted site or not (where trusted means “HTTPS and Verified by a third party”)…
* …and they don’t even emphasize the domain name in the url they display
* they have visually separated the location bar from the content of the window
* they allow the user to hide the location bar completely (at least Firefox does), and then the user has no easy and reliable way to know in what domain he is.
Google has addressed some of those issues with their browser Chrome, but the situation still is very bad.
It made me think of the way recent versions of Nautilus (the Gnome Desktop Env. file browser) shows the path you are in: they display a button per folder (http://gilir.files.wordpress.com/2008/07/nautilus-tabs.png).
However, advanced users can still access the “real” path easily by pressing Ctrl-L.
It’s not perfect, but it’s still more readable than a path for most people (though I would maybe prefer an option to display the path by default, but this is a different matter).
Maybe we could fix some of those issues, and there could even be some kind of meta tag (or HTTP header) to help the browser in the presentation of the data (to correctly capitalize the domain name for example ).
March 7, 2010 at 7:31 am
BTW, while we are talking about usability issues, WordPress just thrashed anything in between “less than” and “greater than” signs, without any warning.
Do we have to escape those by hand ?
<meta name=”domain-name-capitalization” value=”WordPress.com”>
March 8, 2010 at 4:36 am
[…] by their browser. They were not using the URL to access FaceBook As Jono points out at Not the User’s Fault: This whole chain of events seems destined to go down in Internet history as an amazing pile-up of […]
March 8, 2010 at 5:02 pm
[…] are a few people who are claiming it’s the users at fault for not paying attention to which website they were […]
March 10, 2010 at 1:53 am
@jor – Phone numbers were designed to be readable by humans by telecom engineers, and they work because they uniquely identify a phone. Most normal humans have no problem with phone numbers; they are not perfect but they are exact. Similarly URLs work so well because they uniquely identify a resource, which is a fundamental and indivisible aspect of the web. Rather than wish we can create something that’s not exact and won’t work well to replace the URL, it’s better to accept that normal humans need to learn URLs just like they learned phone numbers and thus emphasize URLs vs. deemphasize them.
The other thing we need to do is hold web developers accountable for their URLs designs. Those who create URLs that are complex rather than understandable are doing their users a disservice and thus delaying the cultural understanding of URLs. When people see URL like below they assume they can’t understand it (yes, I’m talking about you Joomla and ASP.NET…)
http://download.cnet.com/mac/most-popular/3101-20_4-0.html?tag=rb_content;contentNav
If web developers instead had URLs like this more people would come to realize that URLs can actually be understandable:
http://download.cnet.com/mac/most-popular/
March 10, 2010 at 2:37 am
@jor: It is better, for security reasons, to have the URL bar clearly set apart from the page content. If it weren’t, it would be all to easy for evilsite.com to craft something looking like the URL of the Bank of America (or of PayPal, etc.), place it in content near where people expect a URL bar, and make n00bs believe they were on, say, the login page of the Bank of America (again, or of PayPal, etc.) when in fact they were at evilsite.com being phished for bank credentials.
March 13, 2010 at 12:09 am
@Mike Schinkel
I don’t know. I think phone numbers are more like mail adresses, and everybody understands mail adresses, because they all had to type one some day or another.
I would compare URLs to physical adresses, but physical adresses feel more “natural”, because they go (roughly) from small to big. URLs are way more complex. David Regev @18 explained it better.
Also, it is not always possible to have “pretty” and readable URLs, it often requires something like mod rewrite and a server administration, which is not accessible on every server (many web hosting, especially free ones, won’t allow you to do that), and it is not always easy to set up. There are also beginners web developpers.
@Tony Mechelynck:
True, however putting the location bar _outside_ of the tab makes it feel like the URL is not dependant of it, which is wrong. Maybe browsers should put it inside the tab, but still separate it from the main content with something else ?
I am not saying that abstracting URLs is the solution. But I have to admit that, nowadays, even I, as a web developper, rarely look at the URL when I am browsing (except when I am debugging my own pages, but this is a different matter). Actually, I only look at the URL when I want to know on which domain I am, or when I want to create a link to a page (to send it via email or to post it somewhere for example).
I don’t even have to worry about ULRs to bookmark pages, since I can just type two words of the title of the page I was on and get back to it (thanks to the “awesome bar”).
If I could make the URL control display just the domain name (and subdomains, maybe ?), correctly capitalized, I think I would turn the option On most of the times, because most of the times I need no more information than that, and it would save so much space on my location bar that I could put controls I use more often on it.
March 13, 2010 at 12:35 am
@jor “I don’t know. I think phone numbers are more like mail addresses, and everybody understands mail adresses, because they all had to type one some day or another. I would compare URLs to physical adresses, but physical addresses feel more “natural”, because they go (roughly) from small to big.”
That sidesteps the point. The point is that in life there are things people just need to learn because they are fundamental to society. URLs are one of those things.
@jor “URLs are way more complex.”
In 1995 I did not understand URLs; they looked like “greek” to me. But now it’s very obvious to me what they do. Understanding URLs is not hard; I can teach anyone who is actually paying attention how URLs work in 15 minutes. This is not rocket science. It’s not like we are expecting anyone to learn the TCP/IP protocol or similar.
They are considered to be complex because apologists say “People can’t understand URLs” so developers who don’t want to worry about making URLs understandable use that as an excuse. The first step is to admit URLs are important and that people should be able to read them then developers will finally be expected to make them usable. Fortunately, more and more people are moving in that direction with CMSes.
@jor: “Also, it is not always possible to have “pretty” and readable URLs, it often requires something like mod rewrite and a server administration, which is not accessible on every server (many web hosting, especially free ones, won’t allow you to do that), and it is not always easy to set up.”
It is *ALWAYS* possible; in the case you think it’s not is when someone made a decision (conscious or otherwise) that URL understandability was not important. If the person selecting the web host or select the web app or the person designing the web app decides that URL understandability is critical then priorities change and what was deemed impossible suddenly becomes so.
It people started saying en masse “I won’t use a web host/app that doesn’t support understandable URLs” you can be damn sure that it would quickly become possible.
@jor: “There are also beginners web developers”
Again, that’s apologist speak. Let’s make those beginning developers understand that it’s important and more of them will learn it sooner.
@jor: “If I could make the URL control display just the domain name (and subdomains, maybe ?), correctly capitalized, I think I would turn the option On most of the times, because most of the times I need no more information than that, and it would save so much space on my location bar that I could put controls I use more often on it.”
That really scares me that you see the URL as so unimportant. I really hope you don’t influence too many others with your disdain for the benefits of understanding how a URL works.
March 13, 2010 at 9:37 am
I am not saying that URLs are unimportant.
Actually, I think you are right when you say that people need to understand them. I just wanted to explore the other possibilities.
However, when I say that most of the times i don’t need more that the domain name, I say it from the point of view of someone knowing URLs: I think that showing me the whole URL is (somehow) a waste of space, as I look at it about once or twice an hour. The domain name could be enough most of the times. When I need to see or copy the location, I could just click on it, and the URL bar expands to its full width.
This is just some random thought. I am not saying this is the way it should be, only some feature I would like to try.
And, BTW, about how Facebook (or other services) could avoid this kind of problems, they could just try to detect if the person is coming from an external link (with the HTTP Referrer) and force those people to just write “facebook.com” in the location bar before they can login. This would teach people the basics in about 30 seconds.
(This is just an application of
https://jonoscript.wordpress.com/2009/12/14/a-tutorial-level-for-the-internet/ ).
March 13, 2010 at 9:06 pm
@jor “I think that showing me the whole URL is (somehow) a waste of space, as I look at it about once or twice an hour.”
I look at the URL for every single page I visit. Every one. For sites with well designed URLs it helps me understand the structure of the site and it also helps me fix certain broken links. And it bothers me when I see URLs that are unintelligible. Hiding it would only make that worse.
@jor “And, BTW, about how Facebook (or other services) could avoid this kind of problems, they could just try to detect if the person is coming from an external link (with the HTTP Referrer) and force those people to just write “facebook.com” in the location bar before they can login. This would teach people the basics in about 30 seconds.”
Agreed, but that would but it will never happen. Facebook isn’t interested in helping people learn things, they just want to minimize friction and dominate. Fortunately they finally realized that understandable URLs were important for their user’s branding but unfortunately that hasn’t extended to their entire site.
A site that does a good (but still not perfect) job is Meetup.com. Except for their member URLs and their Meetup URLs (all numeric), they have really thought about their URLs and it makes a huge difference for someone who uses their site many times a day.
March 29, 2010 at 10:02 pm
Maybe Rather than seeing for example:
It can show the page title in the URL box, then when a user clicks on the box, it shows the URL string again. This helps people who don’t use the url area see where they are, and if they do, they can click the area (or even a hover) and edit the URL location.
Title bars (very top) need to be much bigger and prevalent I think. I need to point that out to people on many occasions where they don’t know what page they are on.
I just solved the world.
March 29, 2010 at 10:27 pm
Also – ICO’s should be larger as well. Browser UI’s are too small for typical users – look at Microsoft Office’s “Ribbon” interface as an example. (Did I just use M$ for a design example? Weird…)
Anyways, they do a great job of big, clunky, easy to comprehend buttons. Google Chrome’s UI is very minimal and easy to traverse, they also keep the settings at a minimal for decreased ability to FSU. While Firefox is great for most Internet users, Chrome can be great for straight up internet ignorance, and quick fast browsing. This sounds like a chrome plug, but I’m a FF user, and I’m just trying to use examples that Mozilla might take a hint from.
March 30, 2010 at 1:10 am
Well, maybe some people are too myopic or too inattentive to notice a normal-sized titlebar; for me the larger the font, the fewer characters can fit, and the less information. On this page my titlebar reads today “Some People Can’t Read URLs « Not the User’s Fault – SeaMonkey 2.0.5pre (1.9.1.10pre) 20100329001104 (1W, 81T)”, of which the part after the dash is a user customization, with the help of the MR-Tech Toolkit extension. So I like the density of information, I don’t need things to be big, flashy and knock-in-the-eye (and I hate when they are: in particular I like SeaMonkey’s no-nonsense Preferences window with all the information in it much more than the flashy Firefox “Options” which look to me, with some “poetic caricatural exaggeration”, like pre-kindergarten kiddie toys). Now maybe I’m not your run-of-the-mill user, but I think that variety is a GoodThing™, because not everybody has the same needs and likings.
March 30, 2010 at 9:13 am
@Michael Wilson About the title/url idea… I don’t think it’s a good idea. If you take this problem using the fishing perspective, You’ll notice that:
1) power user will start to get fooled because of the increased difficulty (slight increase, but increase anyway) to find the “real” location they are on.
2) Do you really think that “low level” users will look at the title, even if it’s bigger? comme on, they’re here for the content of the page. (even if it’s fake (pishing) content, it will look like the stuff they want)
March 30, 2010 at 9:08 pm
Power users, like us, adapt to things rather quickly.
For “Low level” users, you can never expect them to learn anything, so while typically they won’t look at the title right now, it’s our job to aid the user in understanding the content, and if need be (like in this case), giving the user more hints to where their “Virtual” location is.
March 30, 2010 at 9:48 pm
The problem with displaying the page title in the URL bar when unselected is that it replaces something that the site can’t fake and which contains info about its identity (the URL) by something over which the site has full control (the title). IOW it help phishers by making the site appear as “eBay” or “Bank of America” instead of “http://evil.badsite.com/falsepages.php?id=ebay” or “http://www.phishermans.net/public/www.bankamerica.com/”.
IMHO such a practice would be both anti-pedagogical and a security risk.
March 31, 2010 at 12:41 am
Ah well met Tony…
Good points.
Maybe if a partial of the url was there, so
“Some People Can’t Read URLs – …jonoscript.wordpress.com”
The ellipsis obviously ignoring the protocol and sub-domain.
Maybe?
April 9, 2010 at 1:55 am
[…] Some People Can’t Read URLs (This one is crazy! You should read it) […]
July 28, 2010 at 10:08 am
I’m surprised that no one has notices that the reason people think they are on the Facebook Login is exactly because of the new Facebook feature which allows you to login to facebook via any other site!
You ARE actually logging into Facebook when you click “Sign in via Facebook” to leave a comment.
May 14, 2011 at 4:55 pm
I cant login wher do i type my name and passwird
May 18, 2011 at 2:05 am
People using the Web without understanding URLs are quite literally putting themselves in danger, just as if they went out driving on the road without understanding how to read road signs.I just wanted to explore the other possibilities.