How to log in to Facebook: An study of tecnological illiteracy

One challenge that every web developer needs to take into consideration is that of technological illiteracy. The fact that some of your users really have no clue what they're doing, and probably don't even know why they're on your site in the first place. Let me illustrate this with the example of logging into facebook:

So how do you log into Facebook? The answer is obvious. You write "facebook.com" in your browser address bar, put in your user name and password, and you're there. If you've been there before, maybe you have it bookmarked, or you just type "f", and your browser has already guessed where you're going, and are offering to take you there.

Obvious and simple, right? Well not to everyone!

Not all users have caught on to the concept of web-addresses. They don't have an understanding how it works. If they found a link to this blog post on some other blog, they would have no other means of finding back to it than to go to that other blog and clicking the same link again. They navigate in terms of procedures. If you ask them to direct you to site C, they will instruct you to search for A, scroll down to the middle of search result page 3 till you find B. Click B. Then click the blue button by the picture of the duck, and that will take you to site C.

There are people in this world who don't even know how to find Google without putting "google" in their little Google search box in one of their 18 "free toolbars" that tagged along with their various malware downloads. I'm serious!

Put yourself in the shoes of a technologically illiterate person. How do you get to Facebook? Well, the first time you went there you probably heard about it from a friend and put "sign up for facebook" in your little Google search box, right? Then next time you googled "Facebook login" to make sure you got straight to the login page, and you press one of the little links that come up. That procedure now is the only way you know how to log into Facebook. If anyone asks you for directions you'll sit down with pen and paper and write an enumerated list for them with those steps.

Don't believe me? Well, I have proof. Currently nr. 4 if you google "facebook login" is a post entitled "Facebook wants to be your one true login" from a blog called Read Write Web. The technologically illiterate sees the words Facebook and Login, and thus clicks the link. And lo and behold, the result is not as expected. There's only one possible explanation: Someone has changed Facebook! They start frantically looking around the site to find out where they put the little boxes where you're supposed to type your login information in.

they get increasingly desperate as they start fearing that they may never again be able to clog up your news-feed with updates about their achievements in Farmville and Petville and all of the other spamvilles. And as a final act of despair they find a comment box and release their frustration about the new facebook design on the comment thread of the blog post, much to the amusement of the rest of us.

The moral of the story:

• Think before you change stuff. Your change might be perfectly logical and be a much better solution than the last one, but for many users that doesn't matter. Because it's not the way it used to be.
• Be conventional in where you place elements like navigation, search boxes, logins and such. The only reason those people could find the comment field was that it was below the blog post where it always is.
• SEO is more important than you might think it is.
• Reading the rants of technologically illiterate people can be a lot of fun. Just check out the comment thread of the afore mentioned blog post yourself.