SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(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).