An analysis of the Facebook “Request for Permission” dialogue as a barrier to application uptake.
I have always wondered how much of a barrier the “Request for Permission” dialogue presents to uptake of Facebook applications. So two months ago I set up a simple one-page app to gather some statistics about user behavior.
My sample group consisted of 4000 unique visitors who spoke English, Dutch, Spanish or Portugese. Visitors came from 82 countries but the largest groups were from Portugal, Belgium, the Netherlands and Argentina.
The idea of the application was very simple. Users were asked to enter their birthday with one of two input methods, either (a) through a series of dropdown boxes or (b) with a button that gave the app access to the birthday on their Facebook profile. The app then calculated how many days, weeks and months the person had been alive for and allowed them to post the result to their Facebook profile.
This is what the input screen looked like:
And the resulting profile story:
So what were the results? For whatever reason, 96% of users chose method a – the dropdown boxes. That’s a pretty significant majority, but it doesn’t tell us why users chose this option. They probably had different reasons, but I think some would have been:
- “The dropdown boxes look quicker and/or easier”
- “I don’t want to give this application access to my personal information”
- “I don’t know what will happen if I click the Facebook button”
Personally, I can understand people not wanting to grant the application permission to access their information. Even the lowest level of authorization gives an app access to the user’s name, profile picture, list of friends and other “public” parts of their profile.
Much of the time when we develop Facebook apps we can’t avoid asking users for authorization. But we need to be aware of the barrier this creates. We should delay the authorization request in our application flow until the point where we really need it. And hopefully by that time the user will be able to see the value of authorizing our app.
Just adding more options
Alternatiive option could be a standard usability situation where viewers read in a Z-way left-to-right-to-bottom. The above in combination with the fact that “Enter your birthday” is a question, it might also be a logical one if you see interaction as a conversation.
Other option: Birthday not completed in FB.
You could have ran an A/B test with Google Website Optimizer to benchmark individually one to an other to really have seperate results.
Oh well.. just some sweet comments on your test! Nice work though!!
Face book is correct on their side. Even the maximum numbers of users see for the authorization and skip the steps if they find it risky. By the way i am 8000 days old.
I think people choose the drop down option, because they are lazy to type.
I also think many people will ignore the facebook option simply because they are unsure on how the app would behave when they are redirected to facebook. Will they return properly? How many steps would they have to walk through? Its obviously much easier and safer to simply select their birthday using the dropdown.
I wonder how many people clicked the facebook button, but then decided to return using their browser’s back button when they saw the permission request.
I am not sure if it would fit correctly into your research, but you might want to add a second step, a poll, which optionally asks the user exactly why he/she chose to use the dropdown over the facebook option.
Nice research, makes you think twice when it comes down to accessibility.