This week, I talked with Dan Russell, a search anthropologist at Google, about the time he spends with random people studying how they search for stuff. One statistic blew my mind. 90 percent of people in their studies don't know how to use CTRL/Command + F to find a word in a document or web page! I probably use that trick 20 times per day and yet the vast majority of people don't use it at all.
"90 percent of the US Internet population does not know that. This is on a sample size of thousands," Russell said. "I do these field studies and I can't tell you how many hours I've sat in somebody's house as they've read through a long document trying to find the result they're looking for. At the end I'll say to them, 'Let me show one little trick here,' and very often people will say, 'I can't believe I've been wasting my life!'"
(Score: 4, Informative) by Booga1 on Monday December 23 2019, @04:31PM (32 children)
I'd like to see the actual study data. I cannot imagine he really means 90%. Maybe "a large amount that surprises me" is what he was trying to express.
BTW, don't bother reading the article. There's not really anything more in it.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 23 2019, @04:37PM (1 child)
I happened to witness a guy using a mouse to switch fields on a long form he was filling out on his POS terminal, all the while cussing that it takes too long. I told him he only needs to click on the first box and then press tab to switch to the next input box. "Oh!"
(Score: 4, Insightful) by driverless on Tuesday December 24 2019, @04:49AM
Watch non-techie users using a computer some time. Menu, click, drop down, click Cut, menu, click, drop down, click Paste. Never heard of ^X, ^V. This is how a lot of the world uses computers. And the UI has been dumbed down to match and make sure even technical users are forced to use this dumbed-down interface. See for example the ribbon interface in recent Windows apps, twenty mouse clicks doing the job of two keystrokes.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 23 2019, @04:46PM (6 children)
I haven't found a recent study, but he, Russell, was responsible for a study that found that 90% stat back in 2010 with a sample size of 2,512.
http://searchresearch1.blogspot.com/2010/02/why-control-f-is-single-most-important.html [blogspot.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by Booga1 on Monday December 23 2019, @04:53PM (5 children)
Thank you for the link. For a moment I thought it was just reframeing the same expression, but then I saw this:
So, apparently he really does mean it what he says.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday December 23 2019, @08:43PM
Maybe. But it sounds like he's doing a lot of rounding.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Monday December 23 2019, @09:53PM (3 children)
Teachers, that's a relief! At that percentage, they can get to 100% by just having one of them teach the other one. Had me scared there for a second.
(Score: 4, Funny) by darkfeline on Monday December 23 2019, @11:00PM (2 children)
They're called teachers, not learners.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 24 2019, @04:48AM (1 child)
As a teacher, you have no idea how close you are to the truth on that. Even more so when you are talking about the ones that become disillusioned or stuck in their ways. For goodness sake, we had a geography teacher teach that the Czech Republic and Slovakia were the same country and refused to accept anything other than "USSR" in reference to Russia, among other indiscretions, and then lied about to the principal about it for years. The Assistant Superintendent himself ended up investigated after receiving so many complaints against the teacher.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Wednesday December 25 2019, @12:06AM
Well, hopefully, the person in Control was able to tell her to F her attitude to find a new way to do things :-|
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 23 2019, @04:48PM
I also wonder about selection bias in these sort of surveys in general.
Who voluntarily submits to surveys? I suspect those who don't know how to ctrl+f would be rather overrepresented, to put it one way.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 23 2019, @04:50PM (6 children)
I use '/'. It works in everything that matters to me. Crap where ctrl-f is needed is targeting windows.
I recently had to use the chromium browser for a broken ie6^H^H^H chrome only airline website. I was surprised that it had no support for native shortcut keys-- only windows shortcut keys worked in it. It was the first time I needed to use ctrl-f that I can remember, and it took me a while to work out that ctrl-f was what was needed.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Monday December 23 2019, @08:35PM (2 children)
I've been criticized at times [soylentnews.org] for using "\" instead of "/" since I bind "/" to ctrl+f and, along with multiple language bindings, often end up just using the wrong slash out of lazy habit.
Throw in the i3 bindings and how my laptop's touch pad is disabled since I like parking my wrists there, and you can see why no one wants to borrow my laptop. Well, that and the unmarked key caps... They say obscurity isn't security. But you try getting anything done when the keyboard isn't QWERTY or DVORAK since the damn thing keeps switching back and forth from command mode which I've scripted system wide.
compiling...
(Score: 3, Funny) by Gaaark on Monday December 23 2019, @09:33PM (1 child)
Lol, I see people looking at my i3 desktop and they can't figure out how to do anything but if I opened up a terminal, my 85 year old mother might be right at home: she taught me how to get around in DOS!
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Monday December 23 2019, @10:34PM
Try Kiss launcher [google.com]. Keeps the kids away :D
compiling...
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Monday December 23 2019, @09:21PM (1 child)
Windows specifically, I tend to use F3 reasonably frequently [microsoft.com].
Also, I don't know about you, but *I* used to use Control-F a *lot* on all platforms. Nowadays though, I prefer Meta-D and then retype an entire word instead.
(Score: 2) by dry on Tuesday December 24 2019, @02:05AM
F3 seems to be alias for CTRL-G here, using an IBM OS..
(Score: 2) by dry on Tuesday December 24 2019, @02:02AM
Using a browser ported from Windows, CTRL-F does find and / does quick find, not sure of the difference, perhaps CTRL-G doesn't work after /. There are Windowism's in the edit menu like CTRL-C for copy instead of the correct CTRL-INSERT and CTRL-V instead of the correct SHIFT-INSERT.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by canopic jug on Monday December 23 2019, @05:13PM (2 children)
I cannot imagine he really means 90%.
I can. Further, it can be a blanket statement which applies equally well to most other aspects of desktop computing. Pick a function, any function, from any well-known desktop application. Odds are that 90% of the population neither uses it, can use it, or has awareness of what it can do for them. That includes so-called trainers and teachers of said desktop applications.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Monday December 23 2019, @09:32PM (1 child)
No way. I mean, consider everyone visiting this site and the green site and the other sites we frequent. I bet 99% of the people on those sites know about using Ctrl-F to search in a web page, and they're a representative sample, right? After all, they:
I have no idea [imgur.com] what this study could be talking about. I heard from something my friend re-instagrammed me that it's those vaccines that cause scientists to create conspiracy theories and say dumb things, so I bet that's what happened here.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 24 2019, @07:42AM
You don't need vaccines if you consume enough antioxidants (reducing agents) to reduce your diseases. In societies with sufficient diets a virus like Measles is of little concern.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 23 2019, @05:29PM
It is highly unlikely that Dan Russell is not performing proper EPSEM inference. When he says “the population” and “from a sample of thousands,” it is reasonably safe to assume he has his stats right and his alpha is +/- 5% or less.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 23 2019, @05:59PM (4 children)
When I read the line, I couldn't remember offhand what Ctrl-F does, for a good 30 seconds or more. Despite that fact, I use it instinctively every day.
I took a sneaker marketing test phone call once, they asked me to name as many top brands of sneakers as I could - I got through Nike, Addidas, New Balance, and then I drew a blank - even though I had Fila high tops in the closet. I probably have owned 10+ brands of sneakers, and "know of" 25+ brands when you show them to me in a list, but to out of the blue cold call list them? Yeah, that list was about 3 items long.
Point being: it very much matters how this "test of Ctrl-F functionality awareness" was administered.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by edIII on Tuesday December 24 2019, @01:48AM (3 children)
I'd go further. No reason for me to remember CTRL+F. I'm so old I remember when they *invented* the GUI. Not like they put in an international standard and registered CTRL+F as the universal find function.
I do remember what seems to be the universal help function.... F1. Half the reason I don't remember shortcuts is because they're repeated in the menu. All the important key bindings are usually shown in the drop down menus.
Where I come from (or when), programmers actually left data within their programs to explain themselves and help the "users". Those of us that fight for the users that it is.
I'd be more interested in how many people can figure out to how to *look* for help in the first place. If your too stupid to RTFM, well.... being told some shortcuts might be like being shown snow for the first time.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 3, Informative) by dry on Tuesday December 24 2019, @02:18AM (2 children)
Actually the Common User Access, first published in 1987 was basically the standard, and yes CTRL-F was find. Most of the CUA works in Linux as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 24 2019, @07:48PM (1 child)
yeah I have to think that even prior to then, control+f was a feature, if not a standard. It wasn't new in 1987.
I remember using it to search through text when calling bulletin boards, although it's possible I am mixing up IBM and Commodore board and the terminal emulators I had used.
Either way, boards started to die off after 1987, but had peaked in the late 80s. Unless osmosis provided the skill set, I dont know where else I learned to use control f.
(Score: 2) by dry on Tuesday December 24 2019, @09:33PM
Yes, it was the obvious key binding for find on the IBM PC. The Mac also standardized using Option-F for find and it seems to me, on the Apple IIE, Appleworks used Open Apple-F for find. The Apple II's printed the actual control character when CTRL was used, eg CTRL-G rang the bell, or rather beeped.
(Score: 5, Funny) by RandomFactor on Monday December 23 2019, @06:11PM
So you are saying you can't find it?
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 23 2019, @06:44PM
Don't worry, not everybody has a good imagination.
Based on personal experience providing computer support for a few decades, and the musings of coworkers doing the same, I can easily imagine 90%. In an attempt to help people, I point out Ctrl+key shortcuts like Find, Print, Save, Cut, Copy, Paste, etc. -- things that would improve their use of the computer. Generally the response is one of surprise, followed by zero retention. Often the response is along the lines of "I can't memorize stuff like that" followed by zero retention.
A few people care. Very few. Most don't, even when it makes their work less efficient or more frustrating.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 23 2019, @08:25PM (1 child)
Obviously you've never gotten the benefit of working in a job where you get to interface with software "end users".
90% don't know X is probably a low value for just about any possible X. It is downright amazing how little many users actually "know" (vs. having memorized that if I put the pointy thing here on the screen, and push this button, something happens).
(Score: 2) by Booga1 on Monday December 23 2019, @08:39PM
I have, but for customer facing stuff I only worked at "tier 3," but it was mainly hardware support. Plus, it was over the phone. So, perhaps my experience is skewed because most of the basic stuff was already taken care of before it got to me. That, and I almost never got to actually see what the customer was doing unless we setup a screen sharing session.
The rest of my phone tech support experience was with system administrators. Definitely not the same category at all.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by toddestan on Wednesday December 25 2019, @06:55AM (1 child)
It could also just be the latest generation who does everything on their phones. It occurred to me that I didn't know how to search a web page on my phone. I found it, but it took a minute of poking around. Part of that is just me not being that familiar with my phone's web browser, given I almost never use it as I much prefer using the web on a PC - a big part of it is because of things like this. For those that do everything on their phones, using a desktop browser probably feels a bit foreign. So it's not surprising they wouldn't know CTRL-F or most other keyboard shortcuts since you can't do that on mobile. Well, not quite true - I found it does work if I have a Bluetooth keyboard paired, but almost no one does that.
(Score: 2) by Booga1 on Wednesday December 25 2019, @10:18AM
Interesting to know the Ctrl-F keyboard shortcut worked once there was a physical keyboard.
You're right though, about how rare it is. Even for myself I can count on one hand the number of times I've had a keyboard plugged into my phone(USB "on the go" adapter worked better than expected).
(Score: 3, Informative) by PiMuNu on Monday December 23 2019, @04:37PM (2 children)
Or forward slash - unless github hijacks it to do something non-standard (grr).
(Score: 3, Informative) by dry on Tuesday December 24 2019, @02:22AM
Slash is quick search, almost the same but the find bar soon vanishes here and doesn't show the metastuff like up and down arrows and doesn't work in a text entry field.
(Score: 1) by steveg on Tuesday December 24 2019, @01:03PM
Came here to say this. *I* don't know how to use Ctrl-F. A straightforward slash has always been good enough for me. It's why I don't use Chrome unless I have to.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 23 2019, @04:56PM (5 children)
Damn Microsoft and their ctrl-f choice. I learned ctrl-s / ctrl-r along with other emacs (mostly mnemonic) commands and it took years to get my brain to switch context properly.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday December 23 2019, @08:48PM (4 children)
But EMACS is unusable, because of all the multi-key commands. Two keys is (usually) ok, but three simultaneous keys is intolerable.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by krishnoid on Monday December 23 2019, @09:36PM (3 children)
Pfft -- if God didn't want you to use multiple-key combinations, why did s/he give you ten fingers? You're just whining.
Actually, do piano players have an easier time of Emacs?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Tuesday December 24 2019, @12:51AM (2 children)
No. Pianos are designed to allow multiple keys to be played at once. Keyboard require contortions that I found painful even when I was 30, and not find impossible.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Dr Spin on Tuesday December 24 2019, @01:42PM (1 child)
Emacs does not work on my piano you must have a new-fangled Yamaha or something!
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 24 2019, @04:15PM
Assuming an electric/electronic piano keyboard, it should be pretty straightforward to bind the keys to emacs. Might be nice to have a really long, linear keyboard to go with a big monitor?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Arik on Monday December 23 2019, @05:23PM (15 children)
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 23 2019, @05:46PM (3 children)
And still they somehow manage to spend their lives in their phones, and routinely jump through some impressive app-imbedded hoops doing some nonsense or other.
Is it something about desktop systems that causes learning aversion, or is it everything that is even loosely connected with the notion of day job?
(Score: 1) by RandomFactor on Monday December 23 2019, @06:16PM
I think related investigation would find that a great number of the keyboard challenged youts of today would however know how to engage search from a mouse/menu action.
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 23 2019, @08:29PM (1 child)
Much more likely it is the fact that desktop software does not have the "touch with my finger" aspect to it.
That, or the fact that the ones that spend their lives on their phone are doing little more than infinitely scrolling through a facebook feed. And that requires knowledge of just one action, swipe up/down with finger.
(Score: 3, Funny) by MostCynical on Monday December 23 2019, @09:27PM
don't forget swipe right/left for dating apps
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 23 2019, @05:49PM (1 child)
The shortcut is listed on the first level of Chromium's omnimenu, so it's not that they don't know the command but they don't know the feature even exists.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 23 2019, @08:32PM
90% of the general population has essentially zero curiosity. And with no curiosity, they don't bother to go look for things on their own (because it never even occurs to them to wonder: "Is there a different, possibly, better, way to do what I am presently doing".
The curious are the ones who find the features on their own, and they become the power users.
The rest only know how to do just what they were told by someone else, and they never even consider the possibility that there might be another way.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by looorg on Monday December 23 2019, @05:52PM (7 children)
This. They don't know ANY of the short-commands. They don't know about ctrl+c/+v/+x to copy and paste and cut, they don't know +a to select all, they don't know how to mark text without the mouse etc. The list can pretty much just like go on like this until the end. They really don't know anything. PERIOD. THE END.
I don't really know why he is surprised about it or for that matter why he is so interested or upset about ctrl+f. I guess it's cause he is at Google and is a search guy and search is apparently the most important aspect of his work.
Speaking of Googling, I see people type things into the Google search box and then go and click on the search button to start the search with the mouse and I'm like why don't you just hit enter/return? They get this blank stare like some deer in headlights ... Lets not even get started on the whole obscure Google syntax for searching or boolean searching for that matter. I'm fairly certain 90% (or more) of the people don't know about that either, or use it, or even know what Boolean is. Perhaps they could google that while they are at it. Why have they not made a GUI for that? They might have and I just have not been paying attention. Don't they want people to get the most out of their googling?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by barbara hudson on Monday December 23 2019, @06:31PM (4 children)
I want my main menu at back. And my status line. No hamburger menus, no stupid pie menus, no mouse gestures. Everything should be easily discoverable. And get rid of sliders for on/off.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 23 2019, @07:34PM (1 child)
I think on/off sliders are my favorite. The only way to know what state they are in is to click on them. Brilliant.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Tuesday December 24 2019, @01:30AM
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Tuesday December 24 2019, @09:35AM (1 child)
what is a hamburger menu?
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Tuesday December 24 2019, @10:21AM
Enjoy [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by MostCynical on Monday December 23 2019, @09:34PM (1 child)
No, they want people to trigger some paid key words and then click on the first (sponsored) link.
they don't care you find anything you wanted - they want you to find the paid stuff, and be happy with that.
So many people even type the url into google search, then click on a different site that appears in the search results - so people seem to be happy voluntarily creating MITM/re-routing/re-directs.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by Booga1 on Monday December 23 2019, @10:07PM
Once again, you live up to your name! Also, I think you're right on target. :P
(Score: 2) by Dr Spin on Tuesday December 24 2019, @01:46PM
I am beginning to suspect 100% of GUI designers are illiterate/stupid.
See your nearest GUI for a demonstration.
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 23 2019, @05:45PM (7 children)
Support for Ctrl-F for "Find" is just a vestige of the past when keyboard shortcuts were fully supported.
Try to copy text from any random part of a web page, for example. It usually works, but sometimes it doesn't because it is disabled on purpose.
You can't even use keyboard shortcuts on phones or tablets, and this is the interface people are using and learning these days. Hence even less reason for programmers to properly support it always. And how is this for not respecting this ancient standard? If you hit Ctrl-F now in Outlook, it will FORWARD your email, unlike in the rest of the MS Office programs or prior Outlook versions.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 23 2019, @05:50PM (1 child)
The savages living in ignorance of how to disable Javascript, do not deserve the blessing of copy and paste.
(Score: 4, Informative) by canopic jug on Monday December 23 2019, @05:59PM
Disabling javascript is not enough any more. There are some CSS-based bariers as well. For now, they can be circumvented in several ways, but with Tim Berners-Lee throwing in with Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) techologies and allowing them inside the official web standards, those work-arounds will soon go away. The fight carry our rights from meat space to the digital realm has suffered several setbacks and this is one of them.
If you want a taste of DRM, not being able copy text from any random part of a web page is just that, a taste of things to come. More of the same is already in the pipeline and will arrive in the next few years unless there is enough pushback. John Perry Barlow is gone. It is up to the rest of us now.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by nobu_the_bard on Monday December 23 2019, @06:01PM (4 children)
"Find" is an option supported on the browser of every phone I have seen without need of a keyboard shortcut, though. Even the designers of phone browsers expect you to want it.
I saw a kid the other day, presented with a long document on a computer, deliberately reopen the page on his phone to use the Find tool because he didn't know you could do that on the computer as well. He was more "smartphone literate" than "computer literate" I suppose.
Maybe the splash page for a new browser's first open ought to have some actual useful information instead of being an overblown advertisement for sponsors or the browser's brand.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by drussell on Monday December 23 2019, @06:41PM (1 child)
So true. I hadn't even really considered the implications of this until now.
There is going to be a precipitous drop on the number of people with any real understanding in the entire range from actual useful, productive computer skills through vague computer usability knowledge as the vast majority of "regular, average" people move to content-consumption based/optimized devices like a smartphone or "pad" device.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by nitehawk214 on Monday December 23 2019, @06:52PM
I don't know, was there ever a time when there were a lot of people actually literate in computer usage? The kid in this case would have been one of those people that simply never used a computing device in the 70's or 80's, and by the 90's would be hunt-and-peck typing their once-a-week use of a computer at their job to fill in a time sheet. In the 90's and 00's user interfaces were evolving (devolving?) so fast I don't blame anyone for being confused.
I have been using computers since the mid-80s, and there was no time when I did not see people befuddled over user interfaces. Whether they were intuitive or not. Heck, every time i have to use a word processor I have to pick through the menus because it happens so rarely that I don't bother learning any shortcuts. Microsoft will randomly rearrange the menus, toolbars, and options ever release anyhow.
Today's smartphone-literate kid is yesterday's "computers are only for nerds" kid.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 2) by progo on Monday December 23 2019, @07:12PM
You're never going to successfully teach "there is a Find command, bound to Ctrl-F" using the new-profile welcome screen. Users have to meet you half-way.
In Waterfox (Firefox fork), the main menu has a clearly labeled 'Find in This Page' command with an icon and a shortcut hint. If you don't see that… I honestly don't know how to help you.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 23 2019, @08:37PM
Followed immediately by the same 90% that this article references immediately forgetting any of the useful information presented there. Esp. if it is only presented once.
Now, if the useful info appears every time the browser is started, or a new window is open, then maybe, after months of usage, one or two tidbits will sneak past the lack of curiosity that resulted in the "transfer web page to phone to perform search" action of this kid.
(Score: 2) by progo on Monday December 23 2019, @07:05PM (3 children)
In MS Outlook, Ctrl-F is NOT "search this form / document"! AFAICT there's no default key shortcut for this comment in Outlook.
The fact that Microsoft hasn't noticed the people complaining about this misfeature says something about how many people might actually care and complain about it.
(Score: 2) by progo on Monday December 23 2019, @07:08PM
Oh. I just found it. It's [F4]. Microsoft needs to join us here in the 21st century.
Also I didn't notice the previous story comment making the same complaint.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 23 2019, @08:39PM (1 child)
You can blame that miss-feature squarely on Bill Gates:
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20140715-00/?p=503 [microsoft.com]
Why does Outlook map Ctrl+F to Forward instead of Find, like all right-thinking programs?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 24 2019, @07:25AM
Is it because MS is a dam'd leftie pinko crypto-communist corporation which dreams of replacing Trump with that Indian guy?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by legont on Monday December 23 2019, @07:27PM (1 child)
Google intentionally removes searchables from their pages to force people to eyeball their advertisement.
For example, "Ctrl-F print" on gmail page does not find print.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by dry on Tuesday December 24 2019, @02:36AM
Does here, using SeaMonkey, well actually Print as it is case insensitive.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by pTamok on Monday December 23 2019, @08:36PM
And thus we see why discoverable interfaces are useful.
It's fine to have arcane interfaces that require you to read and learn a manual ( or man pages, or info pages), but most people won't read them.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 23 2019, @11:55PM (2 children)
What I always do when something is tedious, I say myself "Surely there's a feature that makes the computer do this for me", and go looking.
(Score: 2) by dry on Tuesday December 24 2019, @02:38AM (1 child)
First IBM compatible I owned, a 386SX with Windows 3.0, didn't have a mouse, so I learned the keyboard shortcuts first.
(Score: 2) by Booga1 on Tuesday December 24 2019, @07:56AM
Heh, tell me about it. I was a poor college student once when my mouse broke and I couldn't afford another one until the next paycheck. Nothing makes you learn keyboard shortcuts faster than necessity.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Ron on Tuesday December 24 2019, @03:17AM
The real shocker is that anyone is surprised by this at all. We all learn to read and write in grade school, but how many people *really* know how to read and write? I didn't learn how to read properly until I tried to write a novel and joined a critique group, then realized I'd been reading all wrong and missing a whole lot of content I didn't even know was there.
In that group I met a woman who was making a seven figure income selling "chroma-therapy" treatments. No joke. Apparently color can change your physiology. Who knew?
Meanwhile, how many people know how to use punctuation like semicolons, commas and apostrophes correctly? Spell their, there and they're; its and it's; your and you're?
(Did I do that right? Are you sure? American or British rules? Modern or archaic? According to which style authority?)
We are all blithering idiots in someone else's area of expertise. It's one against seven billion. A ten percent hit rate seems pretty good to me.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 24 2019, @04:12AM
If 90% of the people don't use something, remove it. This has been late coming. Remove http from the address bar, remove www from domain names. Remove the ability to fix or repair software or hardware on computers. Remove the ability to program. This has been the current trend of things.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 24 2019, @09:28AM
I remember when every site could be bookmarked. A typical page had a single, identifiable URL which could be written down, copied, bookmarked, e-mailed etc. Now thanks to "applications" you have to screenshot, copy or analyze what creators tried to achieve with obfuscated code.
Now not every site can be even searched - content is dynamically loaded and "infinite scrolling" forces users to use non-efficient and buggy on-page search boxes. These boxes are less and less functional, while a few years ago it was possible in virtually every of them to exclude something some way, now it's just not implemented.
So it's not only normal that users are not computer literate, but it is also normal that the marketing-oriented Web makes them less computer literate as this results in increase of sales.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 24 2019, @02:21PM (1 child)
Gui's are like an adventure game. They are packed with features that are non-obvious, but require the user to magically know how to use them.
One learns by word of mouth and just dumb luck.
Reading TFM is unheard of because it quickly saturates the user with things he doesn't immediately see he will need to know to get the next thing done.
Youtube and google are your friends, but searching can be problematic.
(How do you know to search for 'cut and paste' if you don't know those are the magic verbs to use?)
The discovery part of this seems an advance over find, grep, tar, and their ilk, but of course once you find them the command line stuff is much more functional.
So, given the state of things, how would one improve it?
Clippy get credit for both acknowledging the problem and then that really spectacular fail at fixing it.
Apple and followers seem to be packing in more functions but making the discovery process harder.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Friday December 27 2019, @06:32PM
GUIs can be featureful and helpful. There are a couple of things that help: clear, concise descriptions available as tootips; and, more importantly, an easily accessible 'Undo' function that works, so you are not afraid to try things as you can trust being able to reverse anything untoward/unexpected.
Some applications are dreadful in allowing you to do things that can't easily be undone, without giving clear and adequate warning.