Remember when all those people tried signing into RWW thinking it was Facebook?

Talking with Graphic Design students at Kingston University yesterday about nuances of the ‘sign in’ user experience and remembered this episode from 2010. 

The Guardian gave a it a better write up than I could, so read that for the full story. ReadWrite did a follow up of their own as well. 

Then as now, while I can understand the shock and awe of people being so ‘stupid’, I’m more intrigued by the number of people that found this so utterly surprising, and personally I’m more worried about the latter group. That inability to understand that not everyone is like you, and that what is obvious to you is not obvious to everyone else. Is there such a thing as compassionate user experience I wonder? *Googling* Ah yes, looks like there is: Compassionate UX from UX Booth.

Later in conversations with the students the issue of ugly looking sign in pages came up, with expressions of that being bad design. In turn this nudged memories of the beautiful redesigned Facebook feed that failed because it didn’t keep people on the site. What is good design? What looks good to you? To others? What works? Like dark patterns do? All great topics to be raising with students. Such a great time to be in design education. 

One last notable share with the students when discussing nuances of user experience and understand users were these two classics from Google. Both shared on here before I think, but always worth another look.