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Every search bar looks like a URL bar to users

shkspr.mobi

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Re: Every search bar looks like a URL bar to users

#141

Post by ronenlh »

3np wrote: post #44
rosseloh wrote: post #35

On phone support calls I usually can't even get people who know what a URL, URL bar, or even a search bar, is in the first place. "The box at the top where you type in websites you want to go to." "What are you talking about? I'm computer illiterate, I can't learn any of this fancy tech stuff. I just click my facebook icon and it comes up!" These people get all sorts of confused when something happens in their browse…

> I'm computer illiterate, I can't learn any of this fancy tech stuff. This learned helplessness scares me a bit. It's like the willingness to comprehend stops at "tap". "What are you talking about, 'steering wheel'?! I'm not a greasemonkey, are you talking about the thing I turn to make the car turn?" Not knowing is one thing, refusing to take in any new knowledge is another.

I had a computer illiterate boss once. He said “please understand it, I’m disabled”

Re: Every search bar looks like a URL bar to users

#142

Post by delecti »

lnx01 wrote: post #126
HelixEndeavor wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As self-driving cars come closer to reality, I fear your hypothetical will eventually become a real conversation someone will have to unironically have.

I have no idea how to shoe a horse.

But if someone told you that a horse needed to be shod before riding, you'd at least know what the sentence meant.

Re: Every search bar looks like a URL bar to users

#143

Post by kiryin »

rosseloh wrote: post #35

On phone support calls I usually can't even get people who know what a URL, URL bar, or even a search bar, is in the first place. "The box at the top where you type in websites you want to go to." "What are you talking about? I'm computer illiterate, I can't learn any of this fancy tech stuff. I just click my facebook icon and it comes up!" These people get all sorts of confused when something happens in their browse…

I think it's sad whenever I see people that are very proud of just how tech illiterate they are and just how little they understand computers. It's like teenagers who brag about how badly they scored on on their exam. In many aspects it's the same exact situation, change for the better wouldn't require much work, and this sort of behaviour only discourages others from even trying.

Re: Every search bar looks like a URL bar to users

#144

Post by lowlevel »

windowsrookie wrote: post #106
jabroni_salad wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I promise you it is younger people too. I train bank workers from freshly minted tellers to longtime officers, none of them can navigate to a URL unless it is a clickable hyperlink. The URL is one of the most foundational elements of internet usage, it is the way to get directly to where you want to go. Having a map is nice, but don't you need to know how to walk in order to get where you are going? Heck, there have…

I've actually been hearing and interesting theory that the younger generation is becoming even more computer illiterate than the generation before them. The younger generation was raised on iPads and iPhones where everything is easy to use and "just works". They've never had to do anything beyond tap the icon for the App they want. Edit: Was going to talk about that same article about File directories.

I have witnessed this with younger people joining the company I work at. Most of them don't seem to have much of an idea how a computer works, why putting the internet between them and their deadlines might be bad or just can't figure out where their files are. I have to do a lot of hand holding for the first few months anyway.

Re: Every search bar looks like a URL bar to users

#145

Post by cletus »

This is a good example of making the mistake of conflating implementation details and user interface design.

Firefox always had two boxes: URL bar and search. One of the big changes Chrome made when it was born was to have the Omnibar, being of course one bar that does both.

If you think about this as an engineer, Firefox's design decision makes sense. You don't want to accidentally leak things to a search engine. URLs and search bars are just different. There are also corner cases where you're not sure if something is a URL or a search term, mostly to do with intranets (eg "go/foo" can be a URL internally).

But users don't care about any of that. Users don't have the mental model to differentiate search terms and a URL. Chrome's decision was correct. It's surprising how long Firefox stuck with their bad (IMHO) design.

Here's another example of this: IIRC one of the most frequently searched terms on Google is "facebook". Tech-savvy people will just type "facebook.com" but users will just search for "facebook" and click on the (hopefully) first result. That happens a ton.

So the lesson is don't leak technical and implementation details into interface design. Your users don't care about any of that. Think like a user, not an engineer.

Re: Every search bar looks like a URL bar to users

#146

Post by TeMPOraL »

londons_explore wrote: post #29
phkahler wrote: post #12

This is because Google and Microsoft have confused the users by allowing them to type whatever into wherever and they just figure it out. Some would call that good UI - probably myself included - but it teaches bad behavior and makes people dumber by obscuring what things really are.

In the 1980's, taking away the 'choke' lever which assisted starting a car was seen by some as removing a critical control. Yet automatic chokes became standard, and today's drivers usually don't even know or care what a choke even is. Todays people have other things to spend their time learning. People of tomorrow may not need to know or care what the difference is between a search box and a URL bar. All they know i…

Bad example. Choke lever was a control device that became unnecessary as technology made the relevant part of the process fully automatic, and it was completely incidental to the overall purpose of a car - to move people places.

Messing with URL and search is like messing with the steering wheel, or - in case of self-driving cars - with navigation input.

Re: Every search bar looks like a URL bar to users

#148

Post by denton-scratch »

bmicraft wrote: post #104
londons_explore wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the 1980's, taking away the 'choke' lever which assisted starting a car was seen by some as removing a critical control. Yet automatic chokes became standard, and today's drivers usually don't even know or care what a choke even is. Todays people have other things to spend their time learning. People of tomorrow may not need to know or care what the difference is between a search box and a URL bar. All they know i…

Users not knowing what a url bar even is will be actively dangerous when they've somehow managed to land on a fishing site though. I don't think that can be engineered away in any reasonable way soon, so saying they shouldn't need to know seems irresponsible to me

> somehow managed to land on a fishing site though.

Hmmm. It took me a while to figure out that you weren't referring to sites for angling enthusiasts.

Re: Every search bar looks like a URL bar to users

#149

Post by danShumway »

3np wrote: post #44
rosseloh wrote: post #35

On phone support calls I usually can't even get people who know what a URL, URL bar, or even a search bar, is in the first place. "The box at the top where you type in websites you want to go to." "What are you talking about? I'm computer illiterate, I can't learn any of this fancy tech stuff. I just click my facebook icon and it comes up!" These people get all sorts of confused when something happens in their browse…

> I'm computer illiterate, I can't learn any of this fancy tech stuff. This learned helplessness scares me a bit. It's like the willingness to comprehend stops at "tap". "What are you talking about, 'steering wheel'?! I'm not a greasemonkey, are you talking about the thing I turn to make the car turn?" Not knowing is one thing, refusing to take in any new knowledge is another.

There are a lot of things that contribute to learned helplessness, but in my opinion one underrated cause (for computers) is lack of security.

Particularly with touchscreens, it's really easy to break settings or delete something if you're doing something fiddly. I think people underestimate how powerful concepts like the recycling bin are, history, etc... in making people feel a bit more confident about experimenting.

How to translate that stuff to completely computer-illiterate people is a big challenge. But my experience is that when people feel like it's really easy to revert mistakes, they tend to experiment more and they tend to be bolder about trying to solve their own problems. And in the opposite direction, as they learn more that computers are dangerous even in specific areas, that can bleed over into other contexts and make them scared of trying things in other programs and with other devices.

When I see people who aren't willing to try and figure out what a URL bar is or who are scared to move files around or organize a directory or bookmarks, I sometimes wonder what the rest of their computer looks like and if they're channeling anxieties with other programs.

Of course, that's only one aspect of the problem though, it's an issue with multiple causes.

Re: Every search bar looks like a URL bar to users

#150

Post by oAlbe »

rudian wrote: post #113
tobr wrote: post #50

A similar problem I’ve ran into both in tech support and user studies is momentary blindness for the scope of search. For example on your Mac, you have Spotlight, Finder search, Google search, help menu search, and various application-specific or website-specific search fields. In my experience if two of those are on screen at the same time, it’s very easy to get confused about which one to use to get which type of r…

Other than "momentary" blindness, it feels like some people don't look at their monitors three-dimensionally: It's just buttons and fields everywhere, there's no physical separation between them, there's no hierarchy. They just learn to operate some UIs mechanically and don't put any thought into it. That's why they whine when something moves; As far as they're concerned, that something disappeared into an alternate…

> three-dimensionally

I had actually never put it into words before now, but that makes a lot of sense, and it actually accurately describes how I see my screen.

To me, the OS taskbar is "higher" (as in, closer to me) than the application window title bar, which in turn is higher than whatever controls are in the application itself (think Firefox back and forward buttons, URL bar, setting menu etc), which is itself higher than whatever website it is currently loaded. And even more than this, my brain perceives the website to be "deeper" inside the screen than anything else.

Even right now typing this, the text area to me is "dug" inside the HN, making HN feel closer to my eyes than the texarea for the reply.

I wonder if that's experienced by others as well.

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