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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: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 24 2019, @02:21PM (1 child)
Gui's are like an adventure game. They are packed with features that are non-obvious, but require the user to magically know how to use them.
One learns by word of mouth and just dumb luck.
Reading TFM is unheard of because it quickly saturates the user with things he doesn't immediately see he will need to know to get the next thing done.
Youtube and google are your friends, but searching can be problematic.
(How do you know to search for 'cut and paste' if you don't know those are the magic verbs to use?)
The discovery part of this seems an advance over find, grep, tar, and their ilk, but of course once you find them the command line stuff is much more functional.
So, given the state of things, how would one improve it?
Clippy get credit for both acknowledging the problem and then that really spectacular fail at fixing it.
Apple and followers seem to be packing in more functions but making the discovery process harder.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Friday December 27 2019, @06:32PM
GUIs can be featureful and helpful. There are a couple of things that help: clear, concise descriptions available as tootips; and, more importantly, an easily accessible 'Undo' function that works, so you are not afraid to try things as you can trust being able to reverse anything untoward/unexpected.
Some applications are dreadful in allowing you to do things that can't easily be undone, without giving clear and adequate warning.