321–330 of 417 posts
I think it is discord that supports this. One app that doesn't is Zoom which makes you extract the meeting ID and password from the URL manually.
But in the OPs case I think the issue is users have alternative search engines and somehow URLs occasionally are 'prefetched' using incorrect search providers.
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> and makes people dumber by obscuring what things really are. "What things really are" is microscopic invisible electrical patterns thrumming through specially-shaped chemically-doped sand to shove some crystals back and forth to change some reflected and emitted light frequencies that hit a human eye to be interpreted by a human brain. Literally everything about UX is obscuring what things really are, because what…
I think a good point to bring up despite it being absurd. It's not that current trends in UX hide "what things really are" because we all decide what the metaphors are so much as current UX trends don't teach users the vocabulary we use to talk about the parts of a UI. You literally just have to know what a "search bar" is -- nothing is ever going to tell you. There's no text on the screen that says "Search Bar." The…
I am literally looking at a bar labeled "Search" at the top of my browser window right now.
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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…
Having seen the kind of situations (untrained) drivers get themselves into while looking at a complete loss of how to proceed, I would like to vehemently disagree.
That's why most western countries have something that passes for "training" as an requirement to be allowed to drive.
No such thing with computers.
With this analogy I suppose an omnibar would be like a self-driving car? Or maybe just an automatic transmission?
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DNS? Is that a high school level subject?
I was going to say something about how you needed to know what DNS is to know how URLs work and how all this is easily teachable at the high school level, but I realized I'm just out of touch. Amend my comment to say that the previous poster's classmates can't tell apart a search bar and a URL bar either.
And URLs, canonically, don't require DNS to function.
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> 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…
I’d wager most Americans don’t know what our country code is or what country codes are. Just say’n.
The rot goes deeper. I/O sucks. My beautiful code ends up being sullied by some shitty in code that is smaller, buggier, and takes longer to write.
The best programs should not need to do any I/O.
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Search and keywords are part of Google's DNA. Of course they want to utilize the thing that they do anywhere they can. Eliminating the URL means that everything is a keyword search to visit places. We've already seen how that doesn't work well with AOL. Maybe you're not old enough to remember it, so it sounds like a promising idea. The thing G has over AOL is that G has a complete profile on you that AOL never had. S…
> Eliminating the URL means that everything is a keyword search to visit places. I don't think you can jump to that conclusion. For example I can come up with an idea that removes URLs without going through google. Imagine a new protocol where the user types in something like "john's pizza cafe; order a pizza". My local pizza joint is registered in a DNS-like system and handles the query directly with some commodity…
and to prevent spamming the hell out of this system, each user's local KNS client will prefer those sites for a given keyword which are "bookmarked" by the user's peers (more on the closer peers, less on the more distant ones).
this involves some kind of social-netowrking into this system, but don't panic: it is not meant to be a FB, more like a GPG-like web of trust. if your direct "friends" or "peers" or whatever identity which participates in the system (a blog, a yellow pages provider, a local newspaper publisher) visits a site as a result to a keyword and he mark the site appropriative to the keyword (ie. it is not a spam but a legit content for the given keyword according to his opinion), then your KNS client/search engine ranks the site higher. if a friend's friend marks a site this way then your search results still get ranked upper but not that much. and so on: every level more distant the ranking is weighted less.
"bookmarked" is not the best term here, because the users don't save the site to bookmarks or into "Favorites", just marks it appropriative. they might not have incentive to do so, but it can be automated by assuming the user judges a site appropriative for a given keyword by interacting with it, or not going back too soon, etc.
though it is not perfect because one can just stay on a site out of an interest other than the entered keyword. and it raises privacy questions as well: users generally don't want EVERY of their visits to be signaled on the net, however they are often happy to share a fair amount of their keywords/visits with their friend circles. for the remaining set of activities on the web, they may use an other KNS identity (profile/persona) which nobody, or an other set of people follows.
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…
He typed "google" into the search/URL bar and hit Enter.
This took him to a search results page, with Google as the first entry.
He clicked on Google.
This took him to the Google home page.
He entered his search query into the search box on the Google home page, and hit Enter.
Now he had the search results he wanted!
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> Eliminating the URL means that everything is a keyword search to visit places. I don't think you can jump to that conclusion. For example I can come up with an idea that removes URLs without going through google. Imagine a new protocol where the user types in something like "john's pizza cafe; order a pizza". My local pizza joint is registered in a DNS-like system and handles the query directly with some commodity…
actually i had a similar idea for a keyword-based addressing/search on the web. let's call is keyword naming system, KNS. anyone can define any number of keywords for his website (not neccessarily bound to a dns domain) and these keyword–site-address pairs propagate on the net (like routing protocols, or DHT). and to prevent spamming the hell out of this system, each user's local KNS client will prefer those sites fo…
your also now tying search into a social platform by using "friends" or "peers". i want to find something regardless of what anybody else is doing or has done. if i wanted what my friends were doing, i would already know about it from talking with my friends.
i'm so sick of everything trying to be relevant to what others are doing i could vomit.
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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?