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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: 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.