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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, @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.