Slashdot Mirror
Most People Have Never Heard of CTRL+F
Hugh Pickens writes "Google search anthropologist Dan Russell says that 90 percent of people in his studies don't know how to use CTRL/Command + F to find a word in a document or web page. 'I do these field studies and I can't tell you how many hours I've sat in somebody's house as they've read through a long document trying to find the result they're looking for,' says Russell, who has studied thousands of people on how they search for stuff. 'At the end I'll say to them, "Let me show one little trick here," and very often people will say, "I can't believe I've been wasting my life!"' Just like we learn to skim tables of content or look through an index or just skim chapter titles to find what we're looking for, we need to teach people about this CTRL+F thing, says Alexis Madrigal. 'I probably use that trick 20 times per day and yet the vast majority of people don't use it at all,' writes Madrigal. 'We're talking about the future of almost all knowledge acquisition and yet schools don't spend nearly as much time on this skill as they do on other equally important areas.'"
Except the modern office suite software has made Ctrl-V useless and annoying, copying styles that have nothing to do with your paste target and often messing it up in the process. So instead you have to either click through menus or find a far more awkward key combo to "paste without formatting."
Fundamentally people need to be taught that mindless repetitive tasks are something that the computer can do for them. That the computers are the slaves.
Well that's an easy place to hide it. The Search box that's used to start web searches. Nice overload, Apple.
No, half the population is NOT necessarily below average; that's only true when there's a normal distribution.
Hint: Most people have an above-average number of legs.
Hell, most people can't tell the difference between a crookedly scanned all-image PDF and a Word document.
Then there are the clients who have shit fits when I tell them I can't make a 50 page fax that's obviously a print-out of an Excel or Word document go *bloop* into a database and that I need the actual file emailed to me otherwise I'll have to give them a data entry charge.
Yes, I've heard of OCR. I haven't heard of OCR that works well enough.
Join the Slashcott! Stay away entirely Feb 10 thru Feb 17! Close all tabs to prevent autorefresh!
Users who cannot grasp what "undo" does will be overwhelmed by the concepts of "batch processing" and "delayed email".
I guess this is one of the problems with the desktop metaphor in the post-paper era: people who haven't worked with paper have no reference point for the metaphors. For example, people who have never worked a desk job in the paper era don't know what an outbox is because they've never seen one.
We live around 90% slouches who would rather waste thousand of hours in the future than take 10 minutes now to learn to use a piece software correctly. The same applies to touch typing, but also eating junk, shopping with a 20% APY credit, etc. High time preference leads to social decay. Now stay out of my lawn.
\u262D = \u5350