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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

#201

Post by denton-scratch »

ltbarcly3 wrote: post #17

People who don't know anything get confused, but this is going to be older people who are struggling to use computers, the people that call the Microsoft Edge icon "the internet". Generalizing that "users don't understand" from some autocomplete suggestions does not logically follow.

> People who don't know anything get confused

Correct. They also crash cars into trees, shoot themselves in the foot, and vote for orange people.

Computers and the internet are intrinsically complex. I regret efforts to make them seem simple.

In fact, tablets and smartphones are a serious effort to put a simplified skin on computers and the internet; but I don't want that simplification when I'm using a real general-purpose computer, with a proper keyboard. I wish smartphones and tablets would get off the freeway, and leave it free for real drivers.

The people who "don't know anything" need their own road network.

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

#202

Post by Adrig »

bantunes wrote: post #158
Mikeb85 wrote: post #127

Am I the only one who likes the search/URL bar combined? It makes it easy to search, it searches through your bookmarks as well (giving bookmarks some priority), and auto-fills frequent website URLs quickly.

You're not in the percentage of users that has a problem with it (that I'd put in the high 70s or 80s).

Why would his experience be anecdotal and the ones who have a problem with it be the majority? In the linked article and the comments here, almost no one gave real insights or data to define a trend.

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

#203

Post by Sophira »

handrous wrote: post #125
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…

> Heck, there have recently been articles about STEM students that do not know how to work with a basic file directory. File directories, and the filesystem generally, confuse the hell out of the vast majority of computer users. We nerds forget this stuff because at age 12 we really gave a shit about it and took the time to internalize what it all means, and it's been second nature ever since, but most people haven't…

I feel like a big part of the problem is that back when computers were newly introduced to the world at large, there were actually good tutorials on how to use them.

Consider the Windows 3.1 interactive mouse tutorial/Windows tutorial. [0] This was designed for an age where both mice and Windows were relatively new and people didn't know how to use them, and it's one of the better designed tutorials out there, I think, allowing the user to interact with the tutorial and instantly see the results of their actions.

However, nowadays if you try to look up a tutorial on how to use a mouse, you're probably not going to find very much. The best I could find was hosted at gcfglobal.org [1], and explained the concepts and how to do things with a mouse, and has relevant interactive parts, but requires knowledge of how to scroll the page (which it does tell you how to do at the top, but there's only so much room there). There was also a set of pages called hosted at pbclibrary.org [2] which goes over the mouse basics and doesn't require scrolling before the concept is introduced, but it's somewhat outdated.

But those two were about it. The rest were mostly non-interactive videos. And in all these cases, discovery is a major problem - most of the time, the only way you're going to be able to get to those in the first place is through someone who already knows how to use a mouse.

We're all assuming that schools are teaching these basics. But what if they're not?

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmFzIllvHzU

[1] https://edu.gcfglobal.org/en/mousetutorial/mouse-tutorial/1/

[2] http://www.pbclibrary.org/mousing/

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

#204

Post by nyanpasu64 »

Nalta wrote: post #196
everdrive wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Users don't have the mental model to differentiate search terms and a URL. I don't think good software always aims for the lowest common denominator. It's not an unequivocal good that users' lack of education is catered to. Infantilizing users makes them more dependent on services, and less able to navigate the internet.

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

Except conflating the address and search bar, then adding search suggestions, has objective problems. It's a bad thing that typing URLs in your address bar leaks them to Google/etc.'s search completion service, allowing search engines to track which URLs people begin visiting (not just searches they make).

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

#205

Post by shadowgovt »

goohle wrote: post #128
shadowgovt wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. And decades of research have strongly suggested there's an upper limit to how much you can teach the average user. Remember: XEROX PARC's GUI breakthrough was "What if we make working on a computer feel like pushing stuff around on an office desk." "Educating the user" required walking three-quarters of the way to what they were already familiar with. Instead of trying to teach users how a search bar is diff…

Yeah, but keyboard has so many keys, which looks too similar and act in similar way. Why not to free user from typing? Just make one big button, called «Home», which will navigate user to Start of Internet, where he can select the site instead of searching it. Moreover, most of the time users are just watching video, so why not to launch a video stream right after powering of the device? Why we need to confuse user w…

> Moreover, most of the time users are just watching video, so why not to launch a video stream right after powering of the device? Why we need to confuse user with these buttons and Internet at all?

I can tell you're being facetious, but you actually just described "television," and you should see the numbers on how many people buy cable instead of cutting the cord and subscribing to a handful of streaming services for half the price specifically because (and they do surveys on this stuff) "I just want it to work; I don't want to search for something to watch, I want to turn it on, it's already playing something, and I just put it in the background."

> we will able to use a browser with separate URL and search bars, which is good for work performance

Maybe I just don't do the kind of work where it's mattered, but the fact that my URL bar also accepts keywords and auto-directs them to a search engine has never impacted my work performance (perhaps because I use bookmarks for anything I need to get to frequently, bypassing the URL bar entirely).

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

#206

Post by benbristow »

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…

> It's surprising how long Firefox stuck with their bad (IMHO) design

You can still enable the separate search bar in the settings if you want.

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

#207

Post by MarkLowenstein »

How many of us have had the inverse of this problem? We go to a browser's URL & search bar, and we paste in what we think is a URL...but then we failed to copy the "h" at the beginning so it regards the whole thing as a Google search for the remainder of our URL?

I'm sure tons of internal, proprietary URLs have been exposed this way.

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

#208

Post by datavirtue »

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…

Google wanted all user input leaking to them. They got it. When I first saw this feature it felt like a natural progression...a real innovative feature. I didn't need it though. In the end, browsers probably should not have knowledge of search engines, for various reasons.

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

#209

Post by handrous »

jkfdrsak wrote: post #199
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it's limited to the systems we're exposed to. I grew up with DOS and then windows so I know file structure there no problem, but I'm still not comfortable with how Linux organizes things, and I haven't the faintest clue about Mac.

I used a friend's mac once and I (a competent windows/linux user) could not find the top most file directory. Scary times.

"ls /" ?

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

#210

Post by [deleted] »

thrashh wrote: post #131
3np wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Pretty much everyone is like this somewhere though. Not many people eagerly learn in every domain.

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