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

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

#271

Post by Majromax » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 6:50 PM UTC

3np wrote: post #266

dionidium wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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.

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

#272

Post by Majromax » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 6:51 PM UTC

xyzelement wrote: post #121

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.

> This learned helplessness scares me a bit... Not knowing is one thing, refusing to take in any new knowledge is another. As a matter of personal philosophy, I agree - but on the level of "empathy for users" this misses the mark pretty widely. The 'steering wheel' analogy is not applicable (but funny!) because unlike computers, everyone who drives has been licensed so there's a baseline level of education that isn't…

> Also, most people (at least in the US) grew up around cars, so you expect a 20 year old and a 70 year old to grasp what a steering wheel is.

For that matter, the steering wheel the 20 year old is using today is very similar to the steering wheel the 70 year old used 50 years ago. Nothing in computing has been so constant.

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

#273

Post by wrycoder » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 6:57 PM UTC

unethical_ban wrote: post #263

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…

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.

Yeah, but I want that horizontal space to the right of the nav field for other things, so I configure to combine nav and search.

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

#274

Post by denton-scratch » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 7:01 PM UTC

dylan604 wrote: post #229

denton-scratch wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

URLs are awful; I think they are a bodge. I think the same about domain names, and the whole DNS system. I mean, I think the DNS was a brilliant invention; it saved you having to memorise the IP address of every site you visited. But talking someone through entering a URL over the phone is a bit like fixing printer problems remotely; it feels like the early '80s. But I'd prefer real URL bars, rather than a field that…

If you're talking about telling someone over the phone how to enter example.com/specificpage.ext?key1=val1&key2=val2&key3=ABCDEFG0123456789, I'd agree that is painful and hopefully not necessary. Telling someone to enter example.com into the URL bar, click on the specificpage link, then select the correct information for the printer you have is much easier

That is what I was talking about; pretty good example, except the missing protocol and "://".

I'm remembering the difficulty of explaining what is a forward slash and what is a backward slash. After all, they both lean forward - one leads with its feet, the other with its head. It doesn't help if your contact is using a different keyboard from you. You have to keep asking them to read it back to you.

I still have to do this occasionally; it feels like swimming through treakle.

Edit: Oh, and then there's people who don't know what "colon" means. And "hash" and "pound" have different meanings depending where you are. At least in this country, punctuation is less and less emphasised. I had to teach my kids to punctutate myself, and I suspect I'm the only person they use punctuation for.

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

#275

Post by HWR_14 » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 7:03 PM UTC

solveit wrote: post #269

8ytecoder wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

DNS? Is that a high school level subject?

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

#276

Post by TeMPOraL » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 7:06 PM UTC

unsui wrote: post #261

TeMPOraL wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 bec…

> 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 computing is new, and there is no obvious preexisting mental model shared by non-specialists. Part of the job of UI is to enable the users to build correct mental models in the first place - and to the extent they introduce bad abstractions, they fail at this job, leaving users with bad mental models that don't correspond to reality, and don't let them make sensible predictions.

Note: I don't disagree with Norman. I disagree with how his work is used to justify current UX design trends.

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

#277

Post by HWR_14 » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 7:10 PM UTC

JoshTriplett wrote: post #200

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…

> 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.)

Autocompleting strings is something that allows you to take a shortcut (if it guesses correctly) but is completely ignorable if you never use it. Like, seriously, if you never looked at the bar while you are typing, it behaves the exact same way as if it had never been implemented.

Meanwhile, the omnibar changes old UX behavior to allow Google to MITM requests if people don't recognize it and update how they work. And most people didn't.

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

#278

Post by TeMPOraL » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 7:17 PM UTC

ryantgtg wrote: post #244

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…

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…

> “Efficiency” is not one of my programming goals, and so reasons like “vim is great - it’s super fast” have no appeal.

Then think in terms of friction - friction that prevents you from doing what you want.

The reason for pursuing this kind of efficiency in an editor is because the task of writing and editing text files is only means to an end as a programmer: your goal is to encode the program you have in your head in a form the computer could run. To persist a castle in the sand you're building. Your editor is usually the limiting factor on how fast can you do that. And this matter because the faster you go, the less friction you feel, the more time you have for the important part - thinking. If you can do this fast enough, cross a certain efficiency threshold, your mind will collapse the task, erase the perception of typing.

Think of what happens when you learn to drive, truly learn. Your car becomes an extension of your thoughts, not something you consciously give inputs to. Now imagine driving by having to type in commands like "accelerate" or "turn left". Now imagine the same, but through submitting paper forms.

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

#279

Post by abruzzi » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 7:30 PM UTC

asdff wrote: post #239

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 can't think of any advantage myself to having these things be discrete boxes, and I know what a search term and a URL is (as I'm sure most users do, give them some credit here). Corner cases rarely happen and if I think something might look like a url but is a search term, you can prepend the term with whitespace. Ultimately having them not be discrete boxes means I can see more of the url before…

Corner cases happen every day where I work. Specifically, we have an internal domain, and many users, rather than typing finance.pdq.xy.pg (made up domain) we like to type finance to go directly to the correct server. But we can't because 9 times out of 10 chrome/safari/edge interpret as a search. I either have to remember to put in a trailing slash, i.e. finance/ or type the FQDN. Thats the only reason I use firefox--I can separate search from urls.

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

#280

Post by lowlevel » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 7:36 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…

I think the more 'magic' they bake in to help non-technical users, the more it makes it harder to understand how the thing works for everyone else. As you allude to, cars have some fundamental rules that don't tend to get broken. The steering wheel, accelerator and brakes for example are generally all in the same place and operate the same between models, brands, updates.