By far the most common and seemingly reasonable objections to my recent post about internet applications and users have been along these lines:

Well, a ReadWriteWeb article about Facebook login is certainly not the same as Facebook's actual login page. So if people are looking for Facebook's login page, using Google, and are getting to a blog post instead, Google has indeed failed them.

Guys, gals, listen. This sounds very reasonable. It sounds empathetic. It feels right.

It’s wrong.

Stop and think, for a second, what it means to hold the conclusion that Google has failed their users in this case. It would mean, first and foremost, that in an ideal world, Google should never have returned any other result than the Facebook login page as a response to the query “facebook login.” Okay; if that were true, what does that mean? Either:

1. Their algorithm is not good enough. It's easy to say this, but let's remember that this algorithm that is "not good enough" is the same algorithm that catapulted a startup out of nowhere to complete domination in a field (search) that was well saturated by large successful search engines, even in the late 90s; this algorithm that is "not good enough," was nevertheless good enough to pull users away from every other established search engine. In this case, for an algorithm to be "good enough" to anticipate this particular scenario, I think it would basically need to be fully fledged artificially intelligent. So great, good luck with that; have fun on the research staff at the major university of your choosing. Also, I'd dare to suggest that if you can come up with a better algorithm, you have a corner office and a stack of VC money with your name on it waiting for you any time you want it, so get cracking.
2. Google should have anticipated this and manually set a top search result with the correct site for this query. It seems that people actually think this; it seems outrageous and unthinkable to me. There's no way Google, or any other large service, could anticipate this. I mean, it would be insulting to even suggest it: Engineer 1: Wait... wait... what if people are searching for a website login, and they query that? We should make sure that it is returned as the first result. Otherwise they might go to another page and think that they are on their website, and they will be confused that they can't log in. Engineers 2-999: Wait, now, the users may not be technical, but they aren't that clueless. Engineer 1: But... Engineers 2-999: Man, are you ever condescending. Engineer 1: I just... Engineers 2-999: Why do you hate users so much? Engineer 1: But I'm just trying to help... Engineers 2-999: Come on, users are going to know that they are not on the webpage they're looking for. It won't look the same. It'll have a different name. Unless it's a deliberate phishing scheme, and we are implementing this to detect and remove those... (long technical discussion about programmatically detecting phishing sites begins) Seriously, stop and think about it. You would need to be horribly and resolutely cynical about the intelligence level of your users to even suggest, ahead of time, that they (for example) would mistake a blog post from a different website for a web application that they use regularly, possibly daily. Besides that, there is an unwritten contract implied by Google's search listings. The fact that sponsored listings occur (reasonably clearly marked) at the top of the list, implies that the rest of the search results are untampered with. They have been selected based on their relevance to the search query which you supplied. If Google can just select any old result at the top of the list, it completely destroys the credibility of the results. But wait, you might say. They could do something along the same lines as the "Did you mean: [this]? that they already attempt to do for common mispellings...".
   Oh, yeah, that *is* what I meant.
   Yep, they could. And it's on this that I will concede, willingly, that perhaps they should try to do something like this in the future. Where I disagree is the idea that they should have already been doing this; that they should have somehow (magically?) known that this would be necessary.

So there’s that. I’m not saying “Screw the users, let them figure it out! Survival of the fittest FTW”. Really, I’m really not. Yes, absolutely, let’s make changes based on user behavior. Let’s make things easier to use when we find out they are not easy to use. Let’s do all those things.

But let’s also say:

It is okay to expect your users to have a basic understanding of the core functionality of your application. In the case of Google, this is not asking very much of the user.

Google: Okay, here’s how it works. You type something in the box. User: Okay, I’m typing. Google: … and I’ll try to find anything on the whole entire internet that seems to match what you’re searching for, and I’ll give you a list. User: Great, so you’ll find exactly what I’m looking for. Google: .Well, not exactly…. I’m going to find everything that seems to match, and I’m going to give you a list, and here’s the thing, it might be a humongous list… User: Awesome, so you will find exactly what I’m looking for. Google: … well, I’ll tell you what, I’m going to put what I think are the most relevant results near to the top of the list, okay, so chances are, hopefully… User: Hey, that’s just what I was looking for. Thanks Google! Google: Yes, well. That did work out pretty nicely. Actually, I hope it works that well every time, but you should understand that I’m just giving you a list of what I think will be the most relevant results, based on your query, and it might… hello? Hello?

I used to have to log on to the internet uphill, both ways.

Listen, I understand that it’s challenging. I don’t actually think “non-technical” people are “stupid,” any more than a tailor would think a programmer was “stupid” for being bewildered when sat down in front of a state of the art sewing machine. But if I’m going to insist on using the sewing machine, the tailor will try to tell me how to use it. If I continue to try to use it incorrectly, the tailor will eventually want to give up on me, unless I’m able to grasp at least the basic principles of how the thing works.

The Tailor: Look, it’s a sewing machine. See, here’s the bobbin… Me: I don’t really want a bobbin, I want thread. Or the needle. I think. The Tailor: The thread is on the bobbin… and it goes through the needle here… Me: And I push this pedal now? The Tailor: No, no, not now! Ok, so here is where you set the sort of stitch you want — Me: I just want to sew these two pieces together. Won’t it just know what sort of stitch I want? The Tailor: It’s just a machine, it doesn’t know anything. So we want this stitch here… Me: How would I know that? That’s easy for you to do. Why does this have to be so hard? The Tailor: If you’d just stop for a minute and learn to use it, it wouldn’t be that hard… Me: This all strange and unknown and mysterious and frightening and frustrating. Sewing sucks! The designers of this machine are stupid! (The Tailor gives up on me and goes to get a beer. I proceed to sew my index finger onto my jeans.)

Funkatron, whose post on this contributed to inspiring the original rant, added some points to the end of his post in response; and since he’s a smart guy, he completely understands the point I was actually making (or attempting to make):

I certainly don’t think that the computer can become (anytime soon) a magic box that determines our whims, nor do I think that people shouldn’t have to learn some things.

This is the point exactly. If we really expect that Google should “just know” what we want, we are expecting it to be magical. We are asking for something that belongs to the realm of unicorns and rainbows with pots of gold at the end.

Magic Google Power!

At the risk of sounding like an asshole again, it’s called a search engine, not a finding engine. It cannot read your mind. If you expect it to be able to read your mind, you are stepping outside the bounds of what can reasonably be expected from a machine. The famous button is “I’m feeling lucky,” not “Take me to exactly the page I’m thinking about in my brain.”

Neither You, Nor Me, Nor Google, Can Read Minds

I’m married. Inevitably, my wife will say things or ask things, and lo and behold, the thing that she really wants or means is not exactly the same thing as what she says. Ideally, I would “just know” what she intends me to get from her comment or question. And while, over time (we’ve been married 8 ½ great years), I can become a better guesser, I will never be 100% able to do this because (surprise) I cannot read minds.

Here’s the real point: if I view myself as a failure because of my inability to read minds, I am setting myself up for misery. It is not reasonable to set impossible tasks as criteria for success.

Really, if that one thing is not communicated in these most recent two posts, then I’m just not going to be able to communicate it. Expecting Google (or any software) to “know,” with certainty, my intentions, is completely absurd. And with that in mind, there is no way to call this a failure on the part of Google.

Ed goes on to say:

What I do think is that the current interface modern OSes on computers provide is simply overwhelming for most users, to the point that it’s very challenging to learn how to accomplish tasks without a very significant investment of time.

Look, here I agree completely. I have agreed with this the whole time. I’m a huge supporter of user testing, of good UX design, and of changing things based on user feedback.

In fact, I’m probably just being a bit pedantic to be stuck on this one, single atom of disagreement, that is, the idea that Google or developers generally have “failed.”

Here’s another example. When you go to a gas station to fill up your car (here in the US, at least), you can usually use a credit card at the pump to pay for your gas. A credit card has a magnetic stripe on one edge of one side of the card. So because I can flip a credit card upside down or front to back, there are four ways I can put the card into the slot, and only one way that the machine can read the magnetic stripe. Now, there is (almost) always a handy diagram showing you how you’re supposed to put the card into the machine. But people do it wrong all the time. Because the part of the card reader that reads the stripe is usually clear, there are normally only two obvious ways to insert the card: stripe up facing left, or stripe up facing right.

Now, at some point, some wonderful person who designs these machines said, You know what? People are always putting their card in the wrong way. It would be really trivial to just put a magnetic stripe reader on both sides, and then as long as the stripe is at the top, it is impossible to insert the card incorrectly. And they implemented it, and it seems to be standard on most new gas pumps.

Is the new design, where it is (almost) impossible to run your card incorrectly, better? Absolutely it is. It’s improved.

Hey, now that’s pretty handy.

Was the old design wrong? Was it a failure on the part of the gas pump card reader designers? I’m going to say no. It wasn’t wrong. It did what it was supposed to do, and asked only that the user glance at the diagram to know which way to put the stripe in to the card reader. There was room for improvement, and it was indeed improved, but it was not “wrong.”

Steve Krug’s disciples might now be saying, The old design requires you to think, so it is failing! Don’t make people think!“

Steve Krug’s work is great, and I agree completely with the “Don’t Make Me Think” mantra. But there comes a point, with anything, at which people must make a decision, and we have to assume that people will demonstrate some common sense.

Wired claims that 300,000 accidents in the UK have been caused by people following their GPS systems

So you can only take that so far.

If I want to sew, I can argue all day that sewing machines should be easier to use, and hey — maybe we can still come up with ways to improve their usability. But sooner or later, I need to accept that I must learn to use a sewing machine in order to get the results that I want. The responsibility is mine. It is not the sewing machine’s fault if I can’t stitch two things together.

And if I blame the sewing machine, I’m wrong.