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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) 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.