SourceBottle

Last month an article on ReadWriteWeb was getting a lot of press, not because of the article content, but instead because thousands of people were ending up on the article page under the impression it was the actual Facebook login page and something weird was going on. Read the comments to get some idea of how these users reacted. Comments like:

• "I just want to sign in............"
• "wtf is this bullshttttttttttt all about. can i get n plzzzzzzzzz"
• "Nothing like being taken hostage on our own computer :-("

Now at first glance you may think that the problem was between the chair and the keyboard, but it turns out that it was exposing a curious user behavior which is becoming more and more common. Because of the article content, it was now the number one result in a Google search for 'facebook login'. Rather than typing 'facebook.com' into the address bar, people were typing 'facebook login' into Google and navigating from there.

Interestingly, this URL blindness is not something which is uncommon. Over the past few months I have been working with our customer support team in order to improve processes and automate key requests. After spending time reading emails from our customers, one of the things that stood out was that a good handful of people, each day, would write to us asking how they can get the web address of video player pages so they can go and share it with their friends.

After raising an eyebrow and doing some investigation in our web analytics data, the bulk of the requests actually originated from the very page the customer was inquiring about the URL for.

Weird, yes? Now the obvious answer to this query is that you can simply cut and paste the URL from the browser's address bar, and then do whatever you want with it. Is this too technical for the average user? Initially, I thought that might be the case, so we made a few changes to test this.

On our player pages we added a text field containing simply the URL of the page, making it easy for a user to cut and paste the address. We didn't promote this addition - it was still something which a user would need to discover. To my surprise, since adding this a month or so ago, I don't recall seeing a single customer email asking for a page's URL.

Our customers seemed perfectly capable of discovering this addition to the UI but did not necessarily understand the concept of the browsers address bar. Why is this? I spent many hours scratching my head over this, putting myself in the shoes of users who may not be as computer savvy as myself.

Changing times

The past decade has seen a massive change in how content is presented to the user, and shared on the web. Could these be responsible for the changing mental models of users?

The growth of sharing

If you look towards the bottom of this blog post, you can find links to digg it and post it to various social networks. If you look on other sites you have visited today, I would wager that similar tools were present. A whole industry and ecosystem of tools has sprung up, designed to make it easier to share content, led by companies such as ClearSpring, AddThis, Digg and Gigya. 

To share a site, users are more often posting it to those social networks where they already interact with their friends rather than manually exchanging links via emails or instant messages. Users can now share a link without even being aware of the link itself.

This is having a knock on effect on how users discover web content. Often users will respond to a friend's sharing and follow links directly from social networks. In other instances we see social networking sites consuming external web content such as videos and photos, presenting them in situ and allowing interaction without users ever having to leave the walled garden.

The evolution of address bar to awesome bar

Another reason for this URL blindness is that search engines have a much more dominant position within modern browsers. Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari all have a search box on the upper right of the window. Search engines are often set as the browser homepage. Third party plugins and toolbars provide easy access to specific search engines and web services. Even the address bar has morphed into the 'awesome bar', providing a search interface and easy access to such things as search history and suggestions.

There are so many other more efficient ways to navigate to and discover content compared to typing URL into the address bar.

Even for users who do not use this functionality, from a pure visual perspective we are also seeing changes to the address bar - text coloring highlights the domain name, a feature introduced to attract the users attention and hopefully prevent phishing attacks. We often see badges, icons and color being used to indicate a secure connection and levels of trust.

Rather than a simple text field where a user can type in an address, the address bar's functionality and visual appearance has been transformed into an advanced tool for navigating the web. The URL itself resides in this advanced area, and is regarded as such. 

URL complexity

It has not been helped by so many web applications presenting their URL's as complicated constructs, polluted by parameters and internal jargon. To some degree this is unavoidable, but should be a consideration of any good UX designer. To the user, it has turned the URL into something which looks complex, and its association to the page not be understandable.

Conclusions

Whilst those of us who have been with the internet for the past decade and beyond may not have any difficulty identifying a page URL, it is important for us to consider the current generation of users, whose primary concept of simple navigation on the internet is search. We must ensure that we reflect on the shifting mental models of our users and adapt accordingly.