Comment by TreeInBuxton
3 years ago
> Do people still type "www."?
From my experience, yes.
I am getting merried next month - we have a wedding website via "with joy", which had a URL a bit too long to fit on our wedding invites, so I set up a redirect of "wedding.surname.tld" - the amount of people who messaged us saying the website didn't work, and it turns out they were putting "www." beforehand was staggering (until I added that as a redirect too).
If you are ever in a tech support role and have to see how people use computers, it’s actually horrific.
I think anyone working UX should spend 3-6 months minimum in tech support every couple of years. I imagine the value of those learnings would vastly outweigh any useability studies or testing.
Righteous conclusion: make computers harder to scare the normies off.
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I have an email that is firstname@lastname.tld when I tell it to people, or tech support they always first assume I’m an idiot and really meant to say firstlast@gmail.com
The tld isn’t com there’s no g in the entire address, but people have a hard time understanding that such a thing is a real email address. I do happen to have that gmail address also, but my name is uncommon and not the easiest to spell, so as long as they get my last name and tld right I’ll get the email if they send it to my vanity domain.
I have a catchall for my domain set up, and whenever I give a contact email to any organization, I offer theirdomain.com@mydomain.com. The amount of regular pushback I get from that (or people thinking I work at theirdomain.com, or that I am some kind of idiot) is insane.
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My email is first @ la.st (with the TLD being the last three letters of my last name).
People really struggle with this.
Websites sometimes reject it on principle that the TLD obviously can't exist.
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I am starting to move away from gmail to proton and I had someone ask me if proton.me was a personal domain name. I wish! People expect gmail or other common domains and don't know what to do if you give them something other than that.
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Interesting. I get a ton of others' email at firstlast@gmail.com and never thought of that as an explanation for some of it.
(The majority of it comes from people who forgot they had a middle initial in their email address.)
I have the same and it's true, some people try tacking @gmail.com at the end.
Also, all internet addresses have to start with 'www', everybody knows that. Otherwise the Internet would be confused and think it was an email address.
> I’ll get the email if they send it to my vanity domain.
Nothing vain about it; it's just a domain name being used as intended.
In Kiwi browser (which after my tests seems to be the best Android browser: chome but with good / old way to scroll cards + ublock) you can make a personalized tab with links to pages. When you try to add a new page it auto suggests http adress - not httpS. So dont blame it always on users :)
Similar thing happened to us. I had the www redirect but used a .wedding TLD. On the invites I even put the entire “http://<domain>.wedding/“ hoping it’d be clear. I’d say a majority of people didn’t recognize that it was a web address and assumed we didn’t have a website.
To be fair “.com” would probably have convinced more of them.
“.wedding” is obviously some cheeky made up thing…
My earliest domain was registered in '99 and I'd still not really believe "dot wedding" - what's next, "dot muffin"?
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not https?
I suppose that could also be an indication that they haven't typed in a URL in a very long time.
A shocking (to me) number of people I work with don't know the URLs of websites they visit every day or that they can go directly to a site by typing in the address in "the search bar". And I mean people who use their computers for a living, not the "smartphone generation" or strangers to the web.
Indeed.
Me: Hey checkout <website>.com
Them: type <website> without .com in address bar, click on search results link that may or may not be correct.
That's not a terrible approach for some things. If I get a call from my bank telling me to login to my-bank.us or something to deal with a pressing issue, it may well be a phishing attempt, and it's generally a safer approach to google my bank and get to the login page that way instead of using the domain a caller tells you to.
In cases like this I'd just make a QR code of the url
Then your tech support simply changes to guiding people in the use of QR codes.
Those numbers have to be very low now that we are post 2020.
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Open camera and point here. Done.
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having www. is a nice quixk way of saying "this is a website address" without having to say it.