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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: 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.
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(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.