SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 23 2019, @11:55PM (2 children)
What I always do when something is tedious, I say myself "Surely there's a feature that makes the computer do this for me", and go looking.
(Score: 2) by dry on Tuesday December 24 2019, @02:38AM (1 child)
First IBM compatible I owned, a 386SX with Windows 3.0, didn't have a mouse, so I learned the keyboard shortcuts first.
(Score: 2) by Booga1 on Tuesday December 24 2019, @07:56AM
Heh, tell me about it. I was a poor college student once when my mouse broke and I couldn't afford another one until the next paycheck. Nothing makes you learn keyboard shortcuts faster than necessity.