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90 Percent of People Don't Know How to Use CTRL+F

posted by janrinok on Monday December 23 2019, @04:18PM   Printer-friendly
from the perhaps-they-can't-find-it dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/crazy-90-percent-of-people-dont-know-how-to-use-ctrl-f/243840/

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!'"

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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by barbara hudson on Monday December 23 2019, @06:31PM (4 children)

    by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Monday December 23 2019, @06:31PM (#935576) Journal
    Blame the gui. And hiding menus so that people don't use the alt key to select the highlighted item. Or see the keyboard shortcuts beside each submenu item. Or learn the keyboard shortcuts like in the old days of wordstar, that most non-gui programs adopted.

    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.

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    SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 23 2019, @07:34PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 23 2019, @07:34PM (#935595)

    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

      by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Tuesday December 24 2019, @01:30AM (#935725) Journal
      It's like a USB plug. Try to plug it in, turn it upside down and try again, turn it upside down again and try again ..: 3-4 tries should do it.
      --
      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)

    by PiMuNu (3823) on Tuesday December 24 2019, @09:35AM (#935845)

    what is a hamburger menu?