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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.'"
While you are at it, teach them CTRL+C (Command+C) and CTRL+V and CTRL+A. At least 25% of users have never seen any of these amazing combos in action either.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
Usually (even in firefox) just typing / to find something just works...
European Linux user, living in Antwerp
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.
Look, I don't want to get off on a rant here, but most people don't know their ass from... hey, what's that in the ground over there? When they go to perform a new task their first question isn't "how easy is this?" but "why are you trying to hard to read that word? are you a fag?" Most people are not aware of too many things, but they know what they know, and aren't remotely interested in learning anything outside of their world view.
Some people are different. They want to learn for the sake of learning. We call them geeks, or nerds. Or, when they are coming on all superior to some non-nerd, they are called an asshole.
Maybe applications need to find a less obtrusive way of popping up hints, because most users need them; they won't go looking. Shit, it took me months to get my lady, who is quite intelligent, to take the windows tour. Once she did, much was revealed that was formerly opaque.
Finally, have you ever noticed how many people don't even have the basic computer skills in their job description? I've found this to be especially egregious in academia. Explaining basic Office functions to a counselor for the 23523312th time is tiring, to say the least. Isn't this a school? Aren't there classes for this crap that you could take for free? Whoever is pretending to manage these assholes needs to fuck off immediately.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You're right! Science and mathematics should be self explanatory. Skilled skim reading a document is self explanatory. (Note, if it is, you're doing it wrong) In fact, life should just be self explanatory. Everything should be so user friendly that everyone gets it.
I think the point made by the article is that schools as allegedly here to teach the non self explanatory things such as reading, writing and arithmetic, and yet the most basic computing skills are not being looked at. Some schools are doing this in an ad hoc fashion, but it is arguable today that for quite a significant portion, if not majority of people, they spend more time on the keyboard than they do with a pen in their hand. Hence, we should be teaching these basic skills.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Well that's an easy place to hide it. The Search box that's used to start web searches. Nice overload, Apple.
In other words, some interactions with external systems are irreversible. But this can be worked around whenever the interactions can run as a batch as opposed to interactively. For example, an e-mail client can implement undo send by holding the message in the outbox for several minutes before actually sending it.
Users who cannot grasp what "undo" does will be overwhelmed by the concepts of "batch processing" and "delayed email". Many already have enough trouble with "the trash is just another folder".
When trying to see things from the average user's perspective just have someone kick you in the balls while you're sniffing glue. That should result in a relatively accurate POV.
In other crude terms, there is a lot of idiots out there.
Achille Talon
Hop!
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.
A better skill to teach is menu exploration. Find, Select All, Undo, Replace, and a zillion application-specific gems are in the menus, together with their shortcuts. An even better meta-skill is generic program exploration, with an emphasis on not screwing things up. When I encounter a new program for the first time, I always find the Settings/Preferences/Options and at least glance through them. If it's a type of program I'm not familiar with I definitely look through the menus. I right click places that might be right-clickable and explore the ensuing context menus, I try double clicking, I sometimes try control-clicking, and I generally see what the program does in response to standard inputs. Some people seem to think I have magical abilities when they watch me run a program I've never encountered before, but they just miss the conventions and tests that I don't. Most people are capable of picking up on these skills pretty quickly if they're given some examples and told what's going on.
Me: Hey, Slashdot says 90% of people don't know what Ctrl-F does. That sounds pretty low to me.
My wife (who's in IT): Ctrl-what?
Me: Ctrl-F. You know, for searching on a page.
WIfe: Oh, yeah. Well, why would you ever use Ctrl-F when you can just hit F3?
Me: F3?
(hits F3)
Me: Oh.
I worked at a newspaper and would see journalists and editors doing things like searching for words completely manually. I would say, "hey I have a very quick tip for you that will save you hours every single day for the rest of your career. In fact, it'll save much, much more time TODAY than it takes to teach it to you." and they would say "I don't have time!!! I have too much work to do!!!." Often I would just jump in and show someone how to do it, doing search and replaces in less than 10 seconds that would take them well over 30 minutes. That impressed a few people enough for them to start using it. But I found that many of them would persist in doing it manually anyway because it was just "easier." So what I discovered is that there are a lot of people who will work their fingers to the bone, unnecessarily spend hours working instead of enjoying life (these people were all salaried), even injure themselves with repetitive stress disorder, osteoarthritis, and so forth, to save the slightest mental effort involved in learning something very slightly new.
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.
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