Mr Graham the bicycle, Mr mixer and Mr Incredible (that one is probably ok) I spend a lot of time of Facebook marketplace. You never know when you’re going to find that ultimate thing you never knew you needed for a reasonable price.
There are some rules about what you can and can’t sell on Facebook Marketplace. Cigarettes, booze, drugs, pets to name but a few. There are however, quite a few human beings listed disguised as normal household objects. Over many years of scouring ads for other peoples crap I’ve noticed that occasionally a pair of shoes, a car or in the example above, a micro HiFi system will be given a human name.
I’m not above anthropomorphising my cars. I may have given one or two human names in the past but this has to be a mistake right?
Search for Mr or Mrs and amongst the Toyota MR2s (A car I used to own but never named ironically) you’ll find all manner of items with a formal prefix. I’ve not found any Drs accept Dr Martens boots.
Mr Graham the bicycle, Mr Mixer and Mr Incredible (that one is probably ok)
Mrs dog crate, Sally the Violin and a Mrs T Shutt who is clearly a dress and not a t-shutt (that’s a t-shirt joke)
Obvious criminal explanations come to mind for the reason. None of which I’ll elaborate on but in actual fact I think there’s a very simple reason why this happens.
When you click on ‘create new listing’ this is the page that greets you. The first field is ‘Title’. Traditionally (although maybe not so much these days) on the first field on a form you would enter your title eg. Mr, Mrs, Miss, Dr, Rev, Sir, Capt etc… sorry if I’ve missed yours out. This is learned behaviour especially for the older generations which most of these listings seem to be from. Usually it would be a dropdown selector rather than a text field.
Side note: I’ve worked on forms for the likes of BT, Post Office, Sky, HSBC to name but a few and I’ve always questioned why the ‘Title’ is still needed. Is some cases I’ve been able to win the fight to remove it but surprisingly it’s still used quite widely and usually it’s too difficult to remove from the creaky legacy system that stores it and uses it in email communication or something like that.
No, you be as descriptive as possible!
This is only a hypothesis but it seems like a simple copy change or some better signposting could alleviate this problem. Curiously, Vinted actually uses the same ‘Title’ wording on their form but they don’t seem to suffer from the same issue. Maybe it’s a demographic thing? A case of knowing your user? Perhaps the context is different somehow?
Vinted – ‘Title’
Gumtree – ‘Ad Title’
eBay – ‘ Tell us what you’re selling’
Perhaps an eBay style approach would work better. It’s more conversational. The steps below the field give a clear step by step walk through of the process. Gumtree just uses ‘Ad Title’ which is probably sufficient
It’s not for me to solutionise. I can’t advocate for all users but surely a company like Meta can take a tiny bit of time away from their latest big AI idea to review a wee bit of copy to help out Mrs Hodgson the micro HiFi, Mrs shoes, Mr Graham the bike and the likes who probably aren’t showing up in anyone’s algorithm and are destined to go unsold.
As Facebook marketplace says ironically on it’s form ‘Be as descriptive as possible’
I always like to think to myself when designing anything, could my Mum use this? In this case, perhaps she would struggle but she does sell on Vinted quite a lot so maybe I’m not giving her enough credit!
Possible solutions? Get me a usability testing budget pronto!
Ever been caught out by some ambiguous copy on a form? Let me know in the comments.