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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: 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.