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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

#371

Post by alex_smart »

Stratoscope wrote: post #328
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…

Even engineers do this. A couple of years ago I watched a colleague - a very talented software engineer - do a Google search. 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 s…

This can only happen on a browser where you haven't visited Google before, right?

On any "real" use-case scenario, typing "google" into the omnibar and hitting enter, should take you directly to google.com.

I can just type g and hit enter on my browser, and it still takes me to google.com

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

#372

Post by jychang »

saurik wrote: post #344
jychang wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You didn't really make an argument for why "brains seem to have parts" leads to "Chrome's omnibar makes sense". The reason Chrome's design is "good"--which I put in quotes, as I absolutely agree that it is "destructive"--is because people are lazy: it is the same reason why co-mingled recycling is "good" and why a world in which trash and recycling were the same bin would be even better, and why a world in which tras…

Well, if that wasn't the worst slippery slope argument I've seen in a while.

That's like me saying "dogs and cats are both mammal pets" and you jump in and say "WELL JELLYFISH IS AN ANIMAL WITH DNA TOO SO OBVIOUSLY PEOPLE CAN'T DISTINGUISH BETWEEN JELLYFISH AND DOGS/CATS". Uhhh, no, that's a massive jump to an extreme conclusion. There's a BIG difference between someone typing "facebook" into a URL bar, and them putting their trash in their mailbox.

I'm not saying you should put literally everything including "change settings" or "access your bookmarks" in the omnibar, merely that combining the URL bar and the Search bar was clearly a common sense UI idea, and even Firefox bowed in after a while.

Your job as a developer isn't to force the user to learn more things. Your job as a developer is not to be arrogant and insist that the user must understand some technical model they don't care about. If they want to go to BankOfAmerica.com, and they typed in "BOA", your job is to make it easier for them to do their banking, even if they're massive idiots when it comes to tech. Human brains have a universal structure, which merely means you need to target the lowest common denominator when it comes to design.

As an aside, this is why Apple products historically are known for being very easy to use by the elderly. I certainly am grateful for the fact that my grandparents were able to learn to use Facetime and looked forward to using that software before they passed away. I'm not sure if Apple's ease-of-use is still true, for what it's worth- they've added a lot of complexity in recent years.

---

Addendum:

This is HN, full of very smart tech people who also happen to be terrible at empathy, so I'll give the usual spiel on empathy (which is usually disregarded by people with overly large egos): The person who typed "BOA" into the URL bar might be a tech idiot, but that tech idiot may just be a really good neurosurgeon, and that person may just prefer to spend their brain cells dealing with their own specialty. Humans are good at specialization, and I'd rather my brain surgeon not know or care or spend too much of their energy in understanding DNS, or the difference in how Chrome distinguishes URLs from search queries. For that matter, I'd rather not have to teach my grandparents the difference between a URL and a search query, either.

If you (the reader) is anything like the average tech guy, there's a good chance you're physically unhealthy in multiple ways, and in an alternate universe there's an internet forum of doctors lacking empathy who are shaking their heads and saying "why can't our patients simply spent a bit of their brain cells and time on eating correct amounts of the precise macronutrients, identifying each of the 13 major muscle groups and stretch and exercise them every day, actually doing the correct amount of cardio where they track if they hit 160bpm and sustain that amount (under age 45), sleep at the precise time each day for optional functioning of the central nervous system, etc". There's probably a mechanic forum that's complaining about tech guys who own cars and saying "why can't they just do a blackstone oil test to know what's the optimal amount of mileage for their car to do an oil change, why don't they routinely fill up their tires to the labeled air pressure to maximise fuel economy, etc". None of what these doctors or mechanics are suggesting something /unreasonable/ per se... but most of that stuff just aren't priorities for an average person to learn and deal with. In conclusion, you can be extremely smart in the tech industry (or any other field) and still be an absolute idiot in so many ways, and that's okay- but you need to keep in mind that the same thing applies to your users for their fields of non-specialty.

In summary: https://xkcd.com/2501/

Full disclosure, I started writing this after I took my sleeping pills for the night, so ignore any grammatical issues or bad structure

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

#373

Post by forgotpwd16 »

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…

In Firefox at least you can focus address bar for search with default engine with Ctrl-K or Ctrl-J.

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

#374

Post by duckmysick »

forgotpwd16 wrote: post #373
MauranKilom wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In Firefox at least you can focus address bar for search with default engine with Ctrl-K or Ctrl-J.

For anyone wondering why there's two shortcuts for the same action:

> If you have enabled Emacs-style text editing shortcuts in GNOME, they will also work in Firefox. When an Emacs text editing shortcut conflicts with the default shortcuts (as occurs with Ctrl+K), the Emacs shortcut will take precedence if focus is inside a text box (which would include the address bar and search bar). In such cases you should use the alternate keyboard shortcut if one is listed below.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/keyboard-shortcuts-perf...

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

#375

Post by southerntofu »

gmurphy wrote: post #357
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 designed[1] the Chrome Omnibox, and appreciate a lot of the conjecture in this thread and other places - I wish I was as devious as many people assume we were. The short version is that while many users can differentiate, it's more a problem of WHEN they differentiate - Chrome's entire design philosophy was around speed, and the omnibox was designed so that we had a simple destination that a user could focus on whe…

How do you feel that your invention was used to harm users and empower a quasi-global monopoly on search engines for the profit of tech billionnaire psychopaths and secret services? I don't think you had to have bad intentions (just like physicists and the atom bomb), but do you think the web is better for users without search boxes or search engine choices, and with Google forcing centralized AMP proxying down everyone's throat and therefore trying to actually completely remove URLs?

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

#376

Post by southerntofu »

micromacrofoot wrote: post #250
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…

They should have basic knowledge, but they won't. The majority of people in the world can barely use computers well at all, and we need to work with this reality. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/

They can barely use computers because:

- computers are uselessly complex even for simple tasks

- UI changes are pushed by vendors every other year or so, despite providing zero interesting features for users

- there's no IT education, and when there is it's focused on writing a CV on Microsoft Word and sending email, nothing more

All three points could be addressed. And having a proper UX that empowers users with ease can help. I don't think all web users need to know what "URL" means or even what's http://, but they could certainly understand the difference between "location" and "search criteria" if UI was good. Even a simple help box could help: "If you know the address you're going to, type it here. Otherwise, click the search button". The kind of UX that's similar enough to phonebooks and maps so users aren't confused.

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

#377

Post by saurik »

jychang wrote: post #372
saurik wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You didn't really make an argument for why "brains seem to have parts" leads to "Chrome's omnibar makes sense". The reason Chrome's design is "good"--which I put in quotes, as I absolutely agree that it is "destructive"--is because people are lazy: it is the same reason why co-mingled recycling is "good" and why a world in which trash and recycling were the same bin would be even better, and why a world in which tras…

Well, if that wasn't the worst slippery slope argument I've seen in a while. That's like me saying "dogs and cats are both mammal pets" and you jump in and say "WELL JELLYFISH IS AN ANIMAL WITH DNA TOO SO OBVIOUSLY PEOPLE CAN'T DISTINGUISH BETWEEN JELLYFISH AND DOGS/CATS". Uhhh, no, that's a massive jump to an extreme conclusion. There's a BIG difference between someone typing "facebook" into a URL bar, and them putt…

This isn't a slippery slope: this is an analogy. Your example of settings makes no sense as you have failed to draw a similar analogy and your example of bookmarks betrayal your own understanding of the system you like as bookmarks are in fact accessible via the omnibar :/. All of the things in my example were of a similar form, and frankly it would be convenient if anything you wanted to get rid of all went down the same hole: if you actually could solve that problem well, it arguably would be good UX.

The only reason the recycling examples seem absurd is because 1) it simply isn't that difficult to remember "trash goes in a black in and recycling goes in a blue bin and mail goes in... a different blue bin ;P" and 2) it is obvious how hard it is to separate the two results in the general case and the ramifications seem silly to tolerate given the low effort that the user has to take on to prevent it.

The exact same thing is true of the omnibar: there are a bunch of heuristics that often work well enough and people who are particularly lazy and don't want to learn the difference between the various bins don't have to because we figure it out for them... most of the time. I personally think that people shouldn't be so lazy, but it seems like the entire goal of "UX design" is to empower lazy people to "not have to think" (which is very different from "intuitive": after all, "the only intuitive design is the nipple; after that, everything is learned").

The reason then I think it is "destructive" goes further, though, than "people who are lazy do not deserve our sympathy": it is because, as someone else pointed out, there is a cost to leaking a user's intent to the search engine when they wanted to type in an address (in the same way that mailing someone's trash out randomly might be a privacy violation). Google doesn't give two shits about this: they want all of your information. That Google is training people to conflate the process of searching for something with then process of navigating to something is great for them and sucks for Firefox as Firefox kind of has to follow or be screwed and yet it seems a bit antithetical to their mission (though I don't think they even know what their mission is anymore).

(FWIW, the true original sin is the address bar itself: the address bar is a status display of where you are... making it editable is arguably sort of "intuitive"--using the typical kind of "just so" stories that allow people to claim random things are intuitive because the story was flowery enough--but frankly it just makes no sense and causes all kinds of problems. If you fix this, and return to the paradigm that some of the earliest browsers have, I think some of the other things the omnibar does are less awkward, and the "out" for true navigation wouldn't be affected as navigation would feel entirely unlike searching: it would become intuitive that these are separate concepts.)

(Also: the fact that I am unhealthy is not because I don't want to know how to be healthy or because I am not prioritizing understanding it... it is because most of the time I can't for the life of me figure it out even in consultation with doctors, and when I do know things--such as that I need to walk more every day--I don't prioritize doing it because I injured myself a couple years ago and I am now somewhat depressed over it. I point this out because it is very different from not knowing or not caring to know: a life un-analyzed and without curiosity at every level of scale and in every interaction would seem to me to be a life wasted. If you truly don't know anything about how a car works, I recommend spending some time to learn: it's fun! Tim isn't like the mechanic ever figured out what was wrong with my car until I finally pulled the error code of the ECU myself and rubbed it in his face. Learn to play at least one musical instrument of every class so that you can extrapolate the rest. Study linguistics as early and as often as you can in life so you can at least appreciate the beauty of other languages even if you don't choose to become fluent. Avoid hiring people to do things for you until you know how to judge if they did a good job, and decide how you wish things to be done before letting other people tell you what they like and then don't back down!)

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

#378

Post by everdrive »

joshuamorton wrote: post #352
Majromax wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 usefu…

You have an automatic transmission, so you don't have to know how to use the clutch (a thing people used to complain about the kids not learning)

But you don't confuse your automatic transmission for something which has another function -- perhaps your ignition.

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

#379

Post by [deleted] »

unsui wrote: post #230
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…

> 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…

[deleted]

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

#380

Post by micromacrofoot »

southerntofu wrote: post #376
micromacrofoot wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They should have basic knowledge, but they won't. The majority of people in the world can barely use computers well at all, and we need to work with this reality. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/

They can barely use computers because: - computers are uselessly complex even for simple tasks - UI changes are pushed by vendors every other year or so, despite providing zero interesting features for users - there's no IT education, and when there is it's focused on writing a CV on Microsoft Word and sending email, nothing more All three points could be addressed. And having a proper UX that empowers users with eas…

It's not remotely as simple as you make it out to be. People have spent decades trying to make this stuff easier.
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