Update: follow up post on why it’s not a Google failure.

If you follow the same flow of information I do, you probably saw the article Facebook login is hard, or are at least aware of the confusion it’s talking about. Just in case, for context: last week a ReadWriteWeb article became the top-listed result on Google for “Facebook Login”, and several hundred (just going off the number of comments) Facebook users wound up at ReadWriteWeb trying unsuccessfully to log in to facebook, eventually leaving comments venting their frustration. (Aside: my favorite was the one who found the “right” way to get to facebook, now: search for it on Bing instead…)

But I’ve started seeing comments and blog posts to the effect that this is actually a failure on the developers part; that bad UI or bad software/UX design is somehow responsible for this.

To which I say, bullshit.

I’m a big fan of making things that have great user experience, intuitive UI, well developed information architecture, etc, etc. So I empathize with that line of thinking, to a point; yes, if there’s a city intersection that gets 500% more traffic accidents than every other intersection, maybe we should look at the urban planners and suggest they might have screwed it up and should now fix it. I don’t find this analogous to that, though.

Not (for example) with this:

Isn't this really a failure of Google? (From We're the stupid ones)

No. It’s not a failure of Google. RWW wrote an article about Facebook Connect — about logging in with Facebook — and said article became a top result for the phrase “Facebook login” on Google. That is an example of Google working as it is intended to work.

I think it’s fine if people use a search engine field as a sort of web-based CLI; heck I use it for that, if I’m looking for a site and don’t remember if it’s .com or .net or .info, or if it’s somethingapp.com or somethinghq.com or getsomething.com, and hey, if I know that it’ll come up if I simply search for it, then yes: why not. Search is quicker than having to try even one extra URL because the first one you used the wrong TLD. So using a search engine to find your website: fine, go for it. I’m not arguing that this should be discouraged. (That said, I believe there have been studies showing that people actually also search for fully qualified URLs, like “myspace.com,” and really, it does seem like someone should tell those folks about the address bar… but I digress.)

Facebook evidently has somewhere in the neighborhood of a bazillion users, now. I don’t want to stop and look it up, so lets just say it’s one bazillion, where 100 million < 1 bazillion < infinity; in that neighborhood somewhere. So the several hundred confused and frustrated users were something along the lines of a fraction of a rounding error on a percentage point of Facebook’s entire user base. Not what I would call a UI catastrophe.

This is not to say that these people are not important, only that it is okay to expect them to learn how to use the internet. It is okay to expect people to invest a little time to learn how stuff works and to retain an adequate portion of that education.

Just because it’s photoshopped doesn’t mean it’s not funny.

Take ReadWriteWeb. I don’t know if they’d win an award for UI or UX, but they don’t suck. I think that it’s fairly clear that ReadWriteWeb is a distinct website named ReadWriteWeb. I don’t think we should have expected them to introduce a flashing banner warning visitors: ATTENTION — THIS SITE IS NOT ACTUALLY FACEBOOK. They wrote an article, that article got some google juice. All in all, they’re doing what they set out to do, writing stuff that is findable to the people who are looking for it.

Taking an event like this one and suggesting that it is somehow the fault of the designers of Google and/or developers generally, is absurd. It just isn’t. I empathize with some of what folks are saying (Funkatron, linked above, for example). If they just want to say maybe we’re being too hard on people, I could grant a well maybe, but overall, look:

If I search for “basecamp” in Google and wind up at a mountain climbing equipment supply store instead of the 37signals product I wanted, it is not Google’s fault (or 37signals', or the camping store’s) if I start banging my head against the screen and asking “Wheerre are my prooooojectsssss?????”

It just isn’t.

Update: follow up post on why it’s not a Google failure.