Every search bar looks like a URL bar to users • Hacker News Board

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

#261

Post by unsui » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 6:21 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #236

unsui wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> believe that people should have a basic knowledge of the tools they are using The whole point of intuitive design is to realize that you shouldn't make your users "think", insofar as making effortful cognition (i.e., Kahneman's "Type 2" thinking). Good design should leverage built-in assumptions of how the world, per users' intuitive mental models, to create affordances that guide users to the desired interaction a…

> The whole point of intuitive design is to realize that you shouldn't make your users "think", insofar as making effortful cognition (i.e., Kahneman's "Type 2" thinking). Defined like this, this makes "intuitive design" a very destructive trend. There's only so far you can go trying to "leverage built-in assumptions of how the world, per users' intuitive mental models". Computing world is not like everyday experienc…

You're thinking like a HN reader, rather than the intended audience for the chrome omnibar (i.e., non-specialists)

They don't want the abstraction punctured to see the inner workings...

Anything less than that creates a Norman Door conflict, whereby their inner mental models conflict with the intended interaction, where they want to pull the door, when the door only works by pushing (yet the door handle basically beckons to be pulled)...

Whether it's a good thing or not is besides the point. It's how people work, if you want to reach them at scale.

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

#262

Post by ryantgtg » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 6:22 PM UTC

burnished wrote: post #254

ryantgtg wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re vim: As a hobby developer (a perpetual newbie) the learning curve is an issue for me simply because I don’t yet understand the value in overcoming the curve. “Efficiency” is not one of my programming goals, and so reasons like “vim is great - it’s super fast” have no appeal. So, remembering 80 unintuitive shortcuts just so I can do what I do in Kate, but a little faster? Eh…

Have you ever seen an experienced user demonstrate some use cases? I'm in the same boat as you but that convinced me because some of it was like magic. I don't think the value is in uniqueness of function, right, but the sort of swiftness of expression you can get. More like having you workbench set up just perfectly, less like having irreplaceable tools. But the start up cost is what keeps me out - learning it, tryi…

Only brief glimpses. And I have no doubt it’s amazing in capable hands. My interest in learning vim is likely solely rooted in some vague jealousy of these skills. I keep having to remind myself to be happy with what I have and stop spending what little time I have gazing at greener pastures.

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

#263

Post by unethical_ban » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 6:22 PM UTC

MauranKilom wrote: post #160

cletus wrote: post #145

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. UR…

On the other hand, I despise this exact change in Firefox. When I want to search, I use the search bar. When I want to enter an address, I use the address bar. I have a clear picture of what I want to do, and it is annoying to no end if the browser confuses one for the other. For example, by auto-completing a search term to a URL instead (see: computers don't know what users want). That's why I personally prefer the…

FYI in Firefox you can revert to the correct, two-box implementation by checking "Settings > Search" . You can get two boxes back, and you can turn off search suggestions in the address bar.

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

#264

Post by causi » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 6:24 PM UTC

frosted-flakes wrote: post #176

causi wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably doesn't have Firefox's infuriating tab manager that throws an idiotic "well golly you closed a tab!" popup over the next tab you intend to open.

They've fixed that on Nightly, for what it's worth. There is now padding at the bottom of the tab list. Also, undo-ing a closed tab puts it back where it was, not at the top of the list.

I bet they still have the New Tab button floating off by itself instead of in the navigation menu where it belongs.

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

#265

Post by burnished » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 6:25 PM UTC

jabroni_salad wrote: post #89

JohnWhigham wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People get old and obstinate. It's sad but at the end of the day, they choose to be like this.

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…

It isn't surprising, really. Computers are wonderful and complicated devices but a lot of knowledge about them is handed down more as an oral history, and it is dense and has had over fifty years of tumultuous growth.

Have you ever thought about even just the jargon you need to know to be fluent today? Not even just the important computer systems terms, but the names of tools, all the acronyms, the context of why things are the way they are.. its huge, and its endless. The stuff we think about as basic really never was, and now it gets hidden behind a slick user interface, and you might reasonably get to your third year in a CS program before getting a handle on how everything sort of fits together.

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

#266

Post by 3np » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 6:27 PM UTC

dionidium wrote: post #221

danShumway wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 experimentin…

> Particularly with touchscreens, it's really easy to break settings or delete something if you're doing something fiddly. I think this is correct. Turning the steering wheel never randomly creates a bunch of new problems for the user that they don't understand. It works the same way every time over the course of the user's entire life. I've probably made millions of turns of a steering wheel and all it's ever done i…

> The "learned helplessness" here is on us, not the users.

I think the big problem here is everyone of the big players “giving up” and trying to obscure and abstract as much as possible rather than make things clear.

Most people understand a phone number +[country] (area) (number).

Basic URL parts like (http/https)://(server)/(address) is not that much more complicated, is it really?

Google and Apple have really set the trend here in making it feel more difficult for users. Things like “unified bar” and hiding the address are just two concrete examples in two decades of “making it easier”.

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

#267

Post by rnotaro » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 6:44 PM UTC

notatoad wrote: post #237

cletus wrote: post #145

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. UR…

>Here's another example of this: IIRC one of the most frequently searched terms on Google is "facebook". one of the other most frequently searched terms on google is "google", because people don't understand that the chrome omnibox performs a google search, and they want to go to google to perform a search from a dedicated "search" box rather than a URL input - essentially, they want what the firefox UI gave them. if…

>they want to go to google to perform a search from a dedicated "search" box rather than a URL input - essentially, they want what the firefox UI gave them.

I would not even be surprised if that kind of user would search "Google" on the dedicated "Search box" because they are more confortable performing the search on the actual Google website than on a UI element inside the browser toolbar.

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

#268

Post by Majromax » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 6:46 PM UTC

iforgotpassword wrote: post #213

Nalta wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like this is the same argument as "kids these days don't know anyone's phone number!" If it works it works

Phone numbers are stored in your phone's contacts app, a tool that does the remembering for you. Making an input box do two different things and then adding a heuristic to guess what the user wants might be handy, but can go wrong. And then, as the linked post demonstrates, users get used to that and treat every input box as if it can do both of these things. It's a race to the bottom. Now your users "got stupider" a…

> Nobody ever questioned that you have to learn driving a car.

At the same time, nobody ever questions what you don't learn to drive a car. You have one acceleration pedal; you don't have separate controls for the fuel/air mixture and ignition timings. You don't manually control the differential. You have one brake pedal, not separate ones for the front and rear brakes, and automatic anti-lock braking is even a useful safety feature.

Modern cars even have warnings for tire pressure, so the driver has less need to manually check.

Modern cars are so smart that a 16 year old can buy one and drive it without having to know how to rebuild the engine, unlike cars of a hundred years ago.

The trick is that we have a long cultural history of deciding just what aspects of car driving are non-trivial and need to be learned and what aspects can be automated successfully (or even beneficially). Consumer computing is still in its relative infancy, and it's a moving target.

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

#269

Post by solveit » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 6:47 PM UTC

8ytecoder wrote: post #246

II2II wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am going to disagree since I believe that people should have a basic knowledge of the tools they are using. I am not saying that the bar should be particularly high, but being able to differentiate where something is and searching for something is a realistic expectation. That being said, I think developers have made some things more difficult to understand than they should be. While people understand what an addre…

Why can't we teach this in schools? My high school curriculum covered the basics of the UI elements - window, menu bar, URL and such - in addition to OpenOffice and the basics about internet (this was 1998)

To a first approximation, school can't teach anything. Most of your high school class don't remember what DNS is.

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

#270

Post by bee_rider » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 6:47 PM UTC

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #223

JoshTriplett wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tech-savvy people will just type "facebook.com" Tech-savvy people will type f, see that their browser completes "acebook.com", and press enter. That's a form of search, it's just more directly provided by the browser and unambiguously serving the user. (Ideally, tech-savvy people will type f and see no signs of facebook whatsoever, but that's an orthogonal issue.)

> (Ideally, tech-savvy people will type f and see no signs of facebook whatsoever, but that's an orthogonal issue.) I'm tech-savvy and I use Facebook all the time. :-P Going off-topic here, but outside of Facebook's issues with privacy, I think Facebook is a fine platform. Most of the issues people have with Facebook (again, ignoring the privacy issues) are self-inflicted. You have a racist uncle and don't want to se…

That works for issues like "annoying uncle" in the US, I don't think, for example, Rohingya in Myanmar could just un-friend the ethnic cleansing that Facebook contributed to.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/technology/myanmar-facebo...