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Every search bar looks like a URL bar to users

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

#311

Post by throwaway472927 »

conductr wrote: post #219
sseagull wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are also afraid of breaking things, which isn't entirely unreasonable. I think we've all had relatives do something and then be unable to "get it back". Task bars deleted, icons deleted, etc. So they don't try to venture too far out because past experiences make everything seem fragile.

It's true. What I don't get is the reluctance to seek out learning opportunities. They won't watch a video, attend a class, read a book, none of that. It's like picking up a hobby if you're computer illiterate. They spend all the money on the device and expect what exactly? Yet if they bought a DSLR they would know it's a hobby and they need to learn a thing or two. They'd invest in learning like people do with any h…

It's a cliché at this point but they don't want a hobby, they just don't want to be an outcast from society (especially in the last year and a half)

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

#312

Post by tshaddox »

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…

It's just as straightforward to interpret the browser bar as only being a search bar that accepts any textual representation of intent from the user and does its best to interpret that intent (that's what search engines do, after all). And if that intent looks like a URL [0], then it might interpret that as your intent and load that URL. It's just one of many cases that are expected from a search engine–other might include showing a map for a query that looks like a location, doing arithmetic calculations for queries that look like arithmetic expressions, etc.

[0] Or a domain...even the most tech-savvy among us probably types in domains without examining the difference between a domain and a URL or how software might detect whether a given string looks like a domain

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

#313

Post by tshaddox »

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…

> one of the other most frequently searched terms on google is "google",

Perhaps one of the most frequent, but surely nowhere near the majority. I'm guessing it's still an incredibly tiny portion of searches. The fact that Google Search also handles this case, for the likely tiny portion of cases where it occurs, seems totally reasonable to me, and hardly an indictment of any browser's UI paradigm.

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

#314

Post by rtsil »

Karellen wrote: post #258
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…

The value is that your fingers stay in the same place for typing, and for editing/commands. But also, once the commands aren't just in your actual memory, but are partially in your muscle memory, you don't even really have to think about what key sequence you're using; it just happens. Your fingers know. The advantage of both of these factors combined is that you don't have to think about editing, or the user interfa…

This is exactly what I'm aiming to do with my guitar playing. To internalize the instrument so much that I can only focus on the music and not have to think about where and how I should use my fingers. I practice hard to be able to achieve this.

The thing is, I see the value in my guitar playing. But when I code, much of my time is spent thinking about what I'm coding, and much less for the actual typing and editing, so I don't really see the value for vim. That's why I finished the tutorial, but then never used it in actual coding. Purely my own opinion, of course.

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

#315

Post by teemab »

II2II wrote: post #214
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…

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 should people have a basic knowledge of their tools? The world would be a better place?

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

#316

Post by tdeck »

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…

Perhaps this is a difference in incentives? Chrome was explicitly owned and developed by Google, a search engine. Google makes money when you search for things, rather than using the address bar, so they're incentivized to reward this behavior. (I've always suspected this is why Chrome's history search is 10 times worse than Firefox's, but that's another story).

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

#317

Post by RuggedPineapple »

tdeck wrote: post #316
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…

Perhaps this is a difference in incentives? Chrome was explicitly owned and developed by Google, a search engine. Google makes money when you search for things, rather than using the address bar, so they're incentivized to reward this behavior. (I've always suspected this is why Chrome's history search is 10 times worse than Firefox's, but that's another story).

But Firefox was derived from mozilla, where the URL bar would search if what you entered wasn't a URL.

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

#318

Post by piperswe »

Majromax wrote: post #271
3np wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Basic URL parts like (http/https)://(server)/(address) is not that much more complicated, is it really? Yes. http[s]://www.facebook.com/my/profile?token=goes_here&other_params and http[s]://evil.co/facebook.com/my/profile?token=goes_here&other_params are very different things , but naïvely presented the visual weight is not on the important parts.

+1 800 555-1234 and +1 900 555-1234 are also very different things, with one being toll-free and the other being pay-per-call, and people seem to be able to understand that

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

#319

Post by notatoad »

tshaddox wrote: post #313
notatoad wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> one of the other most frequently searched terms on google is "google", Perhaps one of the most frequent, but surely nowhere near the majority. I'm guessing it's still an incredibly tiny portion of searches. The fact that Google Search also handles this case, for the likely tiny portion of cases where it occurs, seems totally reasonable to me, and hardly an indictment of any browser's UI paradigm.

I don't mean to indict any browser's UI paradigm.

My point was just that you shouldn't draw too many conclusions from user behaviour because user behaviour is often dumb and a poor signal of what users actually want.

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

#320

Post by robocat »

jychang wrote: post #309
TeMPOraL wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 (...) Here I disagree, because the underlying assumption is that those "intuitive" interfaces are exploiting an existing mental model of the users, like door handles in the physical world. This is not true, because c…

> and there is no obvious preexisting mental model shared by non-specialists Strong disagree. Looking at the URL bar in Firefox vs Chrome is a great example of how Chrome nailed an "obvious preexisting mental model shared by non-specialists". We can look at things like the design of door handles, and clearly see how the shape of the human hand influences the design. If we had tentacles, door handles probably would lo…

> If we had tentacles, door handles probably would look more different.

I would love to see a virtual reality app that plays with different organism layouts, and solving the usability issues.

There is a lot of great sci-fi that tries to consider how a world would be designed for non-humanoids, or mixed aliens, or the reverse archaeological problem of calculating how aliens look from what they have left behind. I am struggling to think of any sci-fi that makes you deeply think about usability.

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