Just yesterday I witnessed my friend type a url into the google search bar (on the results page). She found what she was looking for, so I guess that's alright.
This is probably why Google truly pays to be the default on search. They end up a data collection middleman for people they provide no actual beneficial service[0] to: Folks who already know where they are going.
[0] One could argue that Google will correct spelling and URL errors for you. But on the other hand, it's likely to inject ads above the real destination, which are very likely fraud, so I'd say it's a wash at best there.
This has always perplexed me. The fact that so many people use a search engine for new windows/tabs combined with browsers shrinking the URL bar to near non-existence makes this an obvious thing people will do though. Reminds me of the old AOL keywords. It's all about getting those precious analytics. If the users go to a website directly from typing a URL, 3rd parties loose those metrics.
Google is actively trying to kill the URL[1]. I'm not sure whether it's good or bad, but it is a goal of theirs to fundamentally change or eliminate the URL entry bar, yes.
I tend to agree, but at the same time I find anecdotes like this comment elsewhere in this thread[1] compelling. It may be we're just wrong and there really is a better way to do it, I've certainly been wrong about plenty of other things. Dunno.
My counter to that is that if you think you are submitting a URL to go to a website but instead that data is sent to 3rd party which allows them to continue their tracking of everything you do, then this is bad.
Be upfront and clear with your users. If you are sending data to a 3rd party in a way that is not 100% obvious, then it's bad UI leaning towards dark patterns. If you are a UI dev and it never occurred to you a user would do something like this, then that's typical. If after you learn that users are doing something you as the dev finds not normal, then maybe the UI needs to be tweaked. If you design the UI to confuse/trick people, then you are just an asshole.
I think you will find you are in a tiny minority. Most people don't care about that, and you have a long uphill battle to convince them they should, especially if they find this new experience more useful. Legislation may be a way to solve that problem, but we've long left discussing the URL bar at that point.
Edit: Also I genuinely don't think collecting end-user data is the primary goal of the Chrome team with this change, although I agree it's a likely side-effect. I think they are trying to create a better end-user experience, even if you and I don't feel that it is better for us (nerds) in particular :)
So how is typing into the text field a full URL like 'example.com' and getting a search result better for the user than going to the damn url that was entered?
If I was actually wanting to search for information about the URL provided, then the result is expected. However, if I just want to go to the damn url, it is not useful at all. Now, in this unified input that you seem complacent with, how do I avoid the step of search results when I just want to view a specific website?
I've said several times I agree with your discomfort with the idea, so please chill out a bit :)
Also, I didn't say google wants to kill the URL bar. I said google wants to kill the URL. So you wouldn't type in "example.com", you would do something else to get to whatever content you wanted from what used to be called "example.com".
I don't know what the replacement for URLs will be, and it seems neither does Google (yet), but I'm at least open to the idea that there may be a better idea.
> at the same time I find anecdotes like this comment elsewhere in this thread[1] compelling
I don't. As I replied to that post directly, the URL bar is not like the choke lever on a car, but more like the steering wheel or navigation input. It's the UI element that is used to communicate user's goals to the machine - not some incidental control of a subsystem that gets automated away.
Google is suggesting replacing the URL entirely. URLs have real problems, which are genuinely really hard to solve. They're also designed for a subset of web content, and a lot of modern web content does not fit into the URL scheme very well. I don't know if Google's replacement will be better, but I am at least willing to hear them out once they have a proposal.
I'd be happy to hear them out too. Much less happy with them just slowly, piece by piece, making their vision happen without "public consultation", just by the virtue of being the dominant browser vendor.
I don't think they're trying to "make their vision happen," I think they're trying to solve real issues people have with URLs. Some of their solutions don't work, as stated in the article I linked original, but I don't think they're doing anything nefarious. They're trying to serve their users, the vast majority of whom have no idea what a URL is.
Well I just learned how to stop Chrome from hiding the https:// at the start of URLs from that link, so thank you.
I really hate what Google is doing in this area with their immense power over the web. It may be more friendly for those who just don't care how computers work and just want their Facebook button, but it's very hostile for those who do know how they work.
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 doesn't know whether you're entering a URL or search-terms.
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.
for the lulz? it's almost like one of those old skool prank caller kind of bits. you could drive someone batty if you could hold it together long enough
Search and keywords are part of Google's DNA. Of course they want to utilize the thing that they do anywhere they can. Eliminating the URL means that everything is a keyword search to visit places. We've already seen how that doesn't work well with AOL. Maybe you're not old enough to remember it, so it sounds like a promising idea. The thing G has over AOL is that G has a complete profile on you that AOL never had. So yes, this sounds like a good idea to Google.
Not allowing a user to go directly to where they want to go is just bad. It's like ordering a Lyft to take you somewhere, but the driver takes you to 4 different places that pays Lyft money to artificially increase traffic to their place before ultimately taking you to where you wanted to go. It's just a waste of everyone's time.
> Eliminating the URL means that everything is a keyword search to visit places.
I don't think you can jump to that conclusion.
For example I can come up with an idea that removes URLs without going through google. Imagine a new protocol where the user types in something like "john's pizza cafe; order a pizza". My local pizza joint is registered in a DNS-like system and handles the query directly with some commodity search-like system, never going through google; or the pizza joint offloads the query to some 3rd party which crawls their site and handles the resolution.
(This is just some dumb idea I came up with off the top of my head; please don't nit-pick it to pieces. Wait for Google's proposal to come out and nit-pick that.)
Every internet query going through google would be bad, sure. But google isn't proposing that... yet :)
that's not how this works. if you don't wont opinions, don't post an idea to the internet.
you've just replaced a working DNS system with a DNS system based on best guess or worse requiring a small biz to register with multiple DNS like systems. What happens when competitor beats you to those multiple registration points?
>But google isn't proposing that... yet :)
Why in the world would you think that google would do anything that did not use their system? That's just not based in reality one bit.
> you've just replaced a working DNS system with a DNS system based on best guess or worse requiring a small biz to register with multiple DNS like systems
Yes, I said it's a really dumb idea. Stop wasting your time nit-picking it :) It was an example of how you could create an open, keywords-based system without requiring Google as an intermediary.
> Why in the world would you think that google would do anything that did not use their system? That's just not based in reality one bit.
I don't think their new URL scheme would catch on without buy-in from non-Google stakeholders, so there's plenty of incentive for them to come up with something in cooperation with those stakeholders, who would surely reject a strong dependency on Google's services.
I'm glad that you put so much faith in Google, but they get no trust from me. Video and Image codecs are nowhere near the samething as web traffic where they can gather data. Of course G wants a faster JS engine. Everything they do is hidden/obfuscated with in that code. Making an engine that is fast enough so they can track mouse movements to generate heat maps and what ever other nefarious JS tracking they are doing/wanting to do in a way that doesn't enfuriate the user is just self centered. The fact that you can use it to do other things is just collateral damage.
> It was an example of how you could create an open, keywords-based system without requiring Google as an intermediary.
Yeah, you replaced Google with another intermediary or a bunch of other intermediaries. That just shows you're refusing to see that the problem is one of why there should be any intermediary at all.
actually i had a similar idea for a keyword-based addressing/search on the web. let's call is keyword naming system, KNS. anyone can define any number of keywords for his website (not neccessarily bound to a dns domain) and these keyword–site-address pairs propagate on the net (like routing protocols, or DHT).
and to prevent spamming the hell out of this system, each user's local KNS client will prefer those sites for a given keyword which are "bookmarked" by the user's peers (more on the closer peers, less on the more distant ones).
this involves some kind of social-netowrking into this system, but don't panic: it is not meant to be a FB, more like a GPG-like web of trust. if your direct "friends" or "peers" or whatever identity which participates in the system (a blog, a yellow pages provider, a local newspaper publisher) visits a site as a result to a keyword and he mark the site appropriative to the keyword (ie. it is not a spam but a legit content for the given keyword according to his opinion), then your KNS client/search engine ranks the site higher. if a friend's friend marks a site this way then your search results still get ranked upper but not that much. and so on: every level more distant the ranking is weighted less.
"bookmarked" is not the best term here, because the users don't save the site to bookmarks or into "Favorites", just marks it appropriative. they might not have incentive to do so, but it can be automated by assuming the user judges a site appropriative for a given keyword by interacting with it, or not going back too soon, etc.
though it is not perfect because one can just stay on a site out of an interest other than the entered keyword. and it raises privacy questions as well: users generally don't want EVERY of their visits to be signaled on the net, however they are often happy to share a fair amount of their keywords/visits with their friend circles. for the remaining set of activities on the web, they may use an other KNS identity (profile/persona) which nobody, or an other set of people follows.
and what happens when you and I both register the same keyword pairs? or some large corp registers every single keyword pair they can imagine?
your also now tying search into a social platform by using "friends" or "peers". i want to find something regardless of what anybody else is doing or has done. if i wanted what my friends were doing, i would already know about it from talking with my friends.
i'm so sick of everything trying to be relevant to what others are doing i could vomit.
it's less like "registering" keyword–site pairs, more like broadcasting keywords about your site. normally only the site owner can broadcast keywords about the site (it's cryptographically signed).
if multiple site owners have the "cats" keyword on their sites, then you simply get more hits on searching for "cats".
the "social" aspect is there to help in search result ranking. individually for each clients.
it's really a bad naming to call it "social" and call the participans "friends", i've just named them so to make an analogy to the well-known social networks.
but you are right, i don't want to mimic today's "push what is trendy" idea.
i wanted to design this system to be as analogous to real life as possible.
this "rank higher what others like/suggest/approve" logic is analogous IMO to this IRL: you are searching for a car repair shop, but there is 50 car repair shop advertisements in the newspapers. you ask some people which one to go to. (this may interpreted as "which one is the best" or "you like the most" - but only that should be taken into account in my ranking algorithm that the entity claiming it's a repair shop is really one, not fake, ie. not something which people generally flag as spam). in this way the ones which are likely really repair shops get more relevancy points, and the spammy ones get less. but you don't neccessarily ask ordinary people about it, you may ask the government what are the accredited ones. in the algorithm, it translates to follow/subscribe to the government ('s KNS handle) and sort the search results according to their ranking (the may give each accredited car shop 1 point, and 0 for the rest).
this idea is based on the observation that IRL without central directory of "things" you often evade spam advertisement by looking around what is its reputation at others. it does not prevent you to discover lower ranked search results, of course.
this ranking algorithm is there exacly to prevent any company registering all keywords and effectively gaining benefit from it. it may increase the load in the keyword propagation network traffic, but that's an other layer to worry about.
On the rare occasions when I’m manually typing out a url, that’s what I do also, just in case I ever mistype it. It’s better than being directed to the wrong site.
Normally I don’t even need a url though, I’ll just google “chase bank” or wherever it is I’m trying to go.
Yes, this or the site seems to be obscure and the URL is dated and who knoews wether they have changed the scheme without implementing redirects or something like that.
> Normally I don’t even need a url though, I’ll just google “chase bank” or wherever it is I’m trying to go.
I know Google is generally supposed to be above maliciously modifying search results, but people definitely aren't above maliciously poisoning Google search results. I definitely wouldn't want to get to my bank's website by any source other than my bank telling me where it is. (I do rely on my history and/or my bookmarks to remember that once the bank tells me, but hopefully those are proof against external malice, or else I've got bigger problems.)
To be honest, this is a way to avoid phishing too. Type facebook into a search engine and click the first result. Otherwise, on a sleepy morning, one might go to faecbok.com, and happily give away their credentials.
I've had a bunch of bots doing oddly specific nonsense searches in my search engine, stuff like casinos, online pharmacies, warez. The bermuda triangle of dodgy internet sites. They are very strange because they are both generic and specific at the same time.
Here is an example:
> skyrim english voice files (and subtitles) latest version
You get no results with my search engine, but interestingly, if you feed that into google, you get some pretty dodgy top results.
It looks like the type of SEO spam nonsense you find on websites, hacked wordpress deployments are often rife with these types of keywords. I think they are trying to manipulate a would-be suggestion algorithm somehow. Problem is I don't do anything with the user input.
Could be, but usually bots that post spam include some form of link, not just keywords. The link is the entire point of posting spam.
There also seems to be a few distinct bots doing this, with distinct user agents (but bots with the same UA spam-search on the same topic out of epharma, casino, warez).
I also have another, identical search box in another part of the site and it has never seen any sort of spam bots.
I wonder if these are attempts to drive up the “interest” metric, with the hypothesis that the more search for a specific string, the result that is exact match gets higher ranking?
Could definitely be something along those lines. Discovering all this black hat SEO stuff and what they are doing to manipulate search engines has been one of the great joys of this project.
Nobody seems to write much about it, maybe because they don't want to give people ideas, but it's an endlessly fascinating subject.
depends on the mistake. if your widget designed for a certain task returns an obvious response when provided bad data allows for an easy understanding that this widget does not do what you think it does, then yes, allowing them to make the mistake is acceptable. they will learn not to do this. allowing things that teach bad behavior is something to avoid. in your quest to never have to tell the user "oops", you enable this bad behavior. little snow flakes are not going to melt because you told them "the princess is in the other castle". provide a proper/meaningful response (no, ID10T/PEBKAC does not count) so they know why what they did is not the correct method.
I suspect that's why Apple moved the URL bar to the bottom of the screen in iOS Safari. For better or for worse, it now stands out a lot more from the search boxed within websites.
I personally think the reason was to further reduce the need to move your thumb from the bottom of the screen. The current iteration of safari is the only mobile browser I have ever used where I feel comfortable browsing and switching tabs with only one finger.
It's surprisingly well implemented, though some actions (such as accessing history or site settings) take a couple extra taps.
I've yet to try firefox mobile on my phone, I've had no reason to switch from safari (most of my browsing is on Brave on my laptop anyway), but I'll give it a shot.
Safari in iOS 15 also has extension support, and apps like Hyperweb[0] make the experience very pleasant.
Probably doesn't have Firefox's infuriating tab manager that throws an idiotic "well golly you closed a tab!" popup over the next tab you intend to open.
They've fixed that on Nightly, for what it's worth. There is now padding at the bottom of the tab list. Also, undo-ing a closed tab puts it back where it was, not at the top of the list.
The big challenge I have with this is that while the Safari bar is at the bottom, search within sites (say, Wikipedia) is still at the top. This ends up making it harder for me to redevelop muscle memory for searches/urls at the bottom
I think the purpose is (at least in part) precisely to "split up your muscle memory", so you don't use the same pattern for different kinds of searches. With browser search at the bottom of the UI, it's better differentiated from the Web site's search input at the top of the page.
They did this because Firefox (and other mobile browsers) has been allowing the option for years. It works better for one-handed usage. It's the kind of change that it takes a few days to get used to and then you never want to go back, that's the place where Apple really shines since they can force their users to adjust (most other products have to worry about users dropping off if configuration changes too much).
This is because Google and Microsoft have confused the users by allowing them to type whatever into wherever and they just figure it out. Some would call that good UI - probably myself included - but it teaches bad behavior and makes people dumber by obscuring what things really are.
If you paste a link into the google search box, a good fraction of the time it doesn't lead you on a path to arriving at that link. For example, try the URL of this page.
The URL of this page probably hasn't been indexed yet as it was created today. It also doesn't include any identifiable strings of text, just a page ID number.
In the 1980's, taking away the 'choke' lever which assisted starting a car was seen by some as removing a critical control.
Yet automatic chokes became standard, and today's drivers usually don't even know or care what a choke even is. Todays people have other things to spend their time learning.
People of tomorrow may not need to know or care what the difference is between a search box and a URL bar. All they know is they can type what they're looking for into any box, and they'll find it. And like the choke, it might turn out that most people might prefer not to know.
This is a good analogy. Quite frequently I think "if only more companies did a better job at educating users instead of dumbing things down." But then I remember a lot of users don't want to be educated about things they're not interested in. They just want things to work so they can move on to whatever else they have going on in their lives.
Yeah, I only know about it from using other carbureted things (lawnmower, generator, motorcycle, etc.) If I'd only ever started up a modern car, I probably wouldn't know about it either.
This is the only issue I see with the new bar. The system would work fine if it wasn't for malicious actors trying to pose as other sites. Some official documents give specific instructions to type the whole url and not to use google.
A choke on an engine does not do anything other than control the flow of air to the engine. That's it. That's all it does.
Allowing the URL bar to also act as search or vice versa, the simple act of trying to do the one thing now does something else that you might or might not have intended or been aware of being possible is not the same as a single purpose choke. When that possible thing is sending your data to a 3rd party, then that is just bad.
Bad example. Choke lever was a control device that became unnecessary as technology made the relevant part of the process fully automatic, and it was completely incidental to the overall purpose of a car - to move people places.
Messing with URL and search is like messing with the steering wheel, or - in case of self-driving cars - with navigation input.
This is only true if you assume that differentiating between a url and a search query. In a sense, a url (or uri) is just a specific type of query.
We could equivalently ask why ftp and http and https and such don't have different types of entry uis, since they're different protocols. If we consider the "resource location via plain language" protocol (which we could even formalize!) that defers to http(s), ftp, Tor, and Bing based on aspects of the request, it's just one higher level protocol.
That is true about the choke, but I bet we could [and this is not an invitation, go away keyboard warriors] start a raging inferno in the comments right now about manual vs automatic transmissions.
IIRC, chokes are only necessary with carburetors to control the fuel/air mixture. I think today's cars are all fuel injection and thus don't need to have a choke. Cheaper gas powered garden equipment still has chokes, I think.
So now its all computerized. You don't get a knob on the dash to personalize exactly how much fuel to air you want. The OEM sets that and you go on about your day without ever caring.
No, not quite. The choke was basically just a kludge to enrich the fuel-air mixture beyond the limits of what a carburator would otherwise be mechanically able to achieve. If it had had this ability -- something like "below-idle", where idle is the lower limit of where the carburator can keep the engine running -- then there would never have been a choke. Fuel injection can do that because of the different physical / mechanical way it mixes air and fuel. It has nothing to do with the computerization per se.
> and makes people dumber by obscuring what things really are.
"What things really are" is microscopic invisible electrical patterns thrumming through specially-shaped chemically-doped sand to shove some crystals back and forth to change some reflected and emitted light frequencies that hit a human eye to be interpreted by a human brain.
Literally everything about UX is obscuring what things really are, because what things really are is "utterly incompatible with human cognition." There's an entire field of disciplined study to build a compatibility layer regular people can use; without it, all these fancy computers are just dumb matter in weird shapes.
I think a good point to bring up despite it being absurd. It's not that current trends in UX hide "what things really are" because we all decide what the metaphors are so much as current UX trends don't teach users the vocabulary we use to talk about the parts of a UI. You literally just have to know what a "search bar" is -- nothing is ever going to tell you. There's no text on the screen that says "Search Bar."
The fact that people who work in tech have to jump from precise terminology like "open your browser, and navigate to $URL" to stuff like "click the E and then find the bar at the top where you search thing and type..." is 100% our failing. We are the ones responsible for creating a population of people who are tech "illiterate" because we've spend all our time and effort keeping the words from users.
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 different from a URL bar, there's a lot of meat on the bones of the idea of just making them the same thing. They look like the same thing. They act like the same thing. Maybe they are the same thing?
100% agreed, I have no problem smushing the two concepts together but also we then have to tell users in the UI and make it visually discoverable that the bar thing is called the "navigation bar" or whatever so we can refer to it.
I would absolutely kill for a shortcut that when held creates an overlay that puts labels on all the UI elements so I can say, "hold Ctrl+H and look for navigation bar."
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 with these buttons and Internet at all?
Moreover, user are watching video to satisfy their hunger for new, to feel good. Why not just to produce a chemical which make the same when consumed? Or just plant electrodes into brain, which is much safer. Then, without burden of these users, we will able to use a browser with separate URL and search bars, which is good for work performance.
> 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).
> I can tell you're being facetious, but you actually just described "television,"
My mom has 64" 4k TV with excellent image quality, but very often (right now, for example) she watches YouTube on her old CoreDuo PC with 24" screen, in small window. I don't know why.
My search bar shows me my past searches, instead of random suggestions, while my URL bar shows my past URL's, which saves tons of time for me when I need to find a past site or a past search. Also, I can quickly select another specialized search engine for a search.
I general, general people needs something simple, while a professional needs something powerful.
> Also, I can quickly select another specialized search engine for a search.
Chrome's unified bar currently supports that. Type a fragment of a site name and hit tab... If the site published a standard search mapping in its metadata, the bar changes modes to direct a search query to the specified website. Super useful for GitHub.
I think the post was really talking about the limits of human agency. If we could easily and manually move those electrons ourselves, we probably would be vastly more intuitive and able to tailor the best answer for our query. I think having a relatively intelligible URL bar allows people more freedom from whatever the larger agenda those who would have such an advanced search bar that you type in "object" and it automatically directs you to "big co's" sale of that object with no real thought, why encourage people to use less of their capacity to navigate? Overall I think we should be elevating society not abstracting away any effort to the detriment of the human mind.
"As we approach the limit of efficiency, movement because becomes so little that it is practically inert, nothing has to move because it's already there, where it is supposed to be" - me
> why encourage people to use less of their capacity to navigate
Because automating tedium is the purpose of the machine. Most of what we do is in pursuit of allowing the user to do more with less of their capacity.
The URL itself is a naming abstraction to let users identify things. And it's not even a great one; it has some sharp edges from the end-user's point of view (why does the end user care about protocol? They just want the thing. Why do they care about domain? They just want the thing. Why is the path nine slashes long? The thing they saw yesterday was just "history of mesopotamia;" if they type that in, they should just get the thing). Allowing the bar to accept and intelligently identify multiple different ways to identify things is an increase in capability, not a decrease.
Sure, I don't disagree that automating tedium (I'd say self discovery isn't tedium, but not quibble) is the purpose of the machine.
However, what I take issue is with "intelligently identify multiple ways to identify "the thing"" sure, in you're example if someone wants to get to the top search result for "the history of mesopotamia" it might be doing alright...but, who is the one who decided what that search result is, if I type in "history of mesopotamia" and I get shunted directly to the wikipedia entry, maybe that's all ever get, I won't see the thing I really might have wanted which was a specific book about stone tablets of mesopotamia.
The point is, offloading our intelligence to "the machine" only makes as smart or as agenda driven as the machine and its maker, this overall must have some limiting effect. even if doing more with less capacity is good, if the capacity itself is limited to the machine, then it's like saying, I can eat more pie, but the pie is also shrinking.
> > why encourage people to use less of their capacity to navigate
> Because automating tedium is the purpose of the machine.
Getting people to think of knowing where they are and what they're doing as "tedium" is exactly what The Man wants. Congratulations on your succesful assimilation.
I guess we live several abstraction layer away from "reality" anyways. So saying people should learn one abstraction and not the other isn't justified in and off itself. So if typing in random box leads to the same result as typing in some specific box, fine and well?
Except that combining them causes the side effect of sending everything to a third party, rather than just what they are willing to give them. Does the search provider really need to know what url you wanted to go to? Especially given that most of them are greedily saving that information in order to better convince you to buy something you don't want or need at the behest of someone else.
Maybe instead of "which box should they type into" we should be asking why the url interface is a simple text box to begin with.
Looking at those old screenshots shows me how much the current autocomplete has regressed. The suggestions used to be so much better since it was a literal text search across titles and URLs. I remember you could configure how many results were displayed, I always set it to the max.
The 2-line rich display was awesome for scanning URLs too. The "URL after the title" we have now makes it impossible to do that.
If these people read a bad news story about google, they will not know how to stop using google for any and all web access. A discerning consumer often opts to alter their product use under similar circumstances. They are dependent on a middleman because their understanding of the boxes they type things into does not reflect reality. This is what it means for a mental model to be "wrong".
The realized model of having two separate boxes could only ever be "wrong" in a moral or aesthetic sense. This is not the case for mental models, which are incorrect when they do not correspond to reality.
I think if we imagine that a user, having read some bad news about Google, will respond with "I'm never typing anything into that little search box next to my URL bar again" and isn't simultaneously a user savvy enough to respond to such news by reconfiguring their network stack to blackhole all traffic to Google servers, we're thinking of users that exist in such a small quantity that we could address their concerns by finding them, one by one, and teaching them how to edit a network stack.
The vast bulk of users would respond either by changing nothing about their behavior because all this stuff is inside-baseball to them, or changing their behavior by resetting their browser's search bar to some other target (for example, I can go into Chrome right now and remove Google from the list of search engines).
At this point, one really has to reach to conclude that awesomebars are bad for end-users without an ideology that doesn't reflect the average user very well at all.
It's not bad behavior, its more unrealistic expectations. Google provides a magic box that does everything and works it out while every other bit of software presents constrained UIs which push the requirement of understanding on the user rather than the system.
The end game system for google is one where you just talk to it like a person and it does what you want without having to have any kind of training on the system.
I disagree. My grandfather was happily typing websites into search bars long before the two bars were combined into one. Users weren't taught to do this any more than babies were taught to cry.
Not only allow, but forcefully redirect their search input up into the address bar. In my opinion this has been a deliberate and concerted effort by google to get everyone to 'search' instead of go directly to sites and this ux behaviour has been bothering me for a very long time now. I am not at all surprised people are searching for https after all this time.
That being said, there is likely a large number of urls pasted into the search box vs the address bar. (Hardly anyone can tell the difference anymore.)
You're conflating correlation and causation. Unified URL and search was initially introduced by Firefox (via the awesomebar) in 2008, because they'd observed in user testing that users couldn't tell the difference between search text box and URL text box and were disinclined to learn; rather than continue to retrain users (which they'd attempted with multiple iterations of resizing, new icons, etc.), they unified the features and relied upon the two inputs having wildly different shapes of text to disambiguate.
Chrome followed suit later that year, because by the time Chrome hit the market, awesomebar had demonstrated its utility for end users.
Note that, sometime this year or 2020, Google stopped redirecting the search bar on the new tab page to the top url bar in Chrome. The omnibox search still does both web addressing and searching, but the new tab page has considerably less-confusing UX now.
Or "Every URL bar is made to look like a search bar". It's been 30+ years and it doesn't seem like we've been able to rethink or enhance the URL bar in any meaningful sense other than throwing search into it.
Every change to URL bars lately seems to make them less useful.
Let's hide the protocol, users don't need to know whether they are connected through http, https or ftp, right?
Let's make the URL bar jump about fifty pixels when you select it, so that your mouse cursor is no longer in the right place when you go to select a URL fragment.
The path and the query parameters are obviously useful and informative. The problem is that those URL components have more-and-more been turned into opaque hashes, that provide zero information.
And it's annoying that web-devs don't respect the principle that URLs shouldn't ever change.
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.
The 'myths' it discusses are all absolutes along the lines of "it's impossible for old people to learn anything" or "old people hate computers and will never use them". The myths are constructed so that there is no possibility they are correct, and yet in the conclusion they still say there is some truth to them!
Anyway, "old people tend to be confused by websites significantly more than other groups" and "it's impossible to train an old person to know what search boxes are" are not remotely similar statements.
>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".
You'd be surprised. Research has found that the "digital native" generations (younger people born into/after the internet age) are no better at these things than the "older people" - the whole "digital native" thing is a myth in this regard.
It's mostly about being interested in tech/a nerd vs not. Kids that don't, might know 100 ways to use Instagram or specific tools they need, but can't tell a URL bar from a search bar (and other basic distinctions/skills) either.
I don't think that's true. Tech illiteracy was built in to the 'minimal' design of iOS, which influenced every mobile interface that followed. Design today is 'mobile first', meaning the starting point is to hide functionality, then add the barest minimum possible for the user to complete a task. I remember needing to switch from my tablet to a real computer when I had an issue with an Airbnb booking and couldn't find the support option.
It's why there's no such thing as an iOS/Android power user.
The vast majority of users simply accepted the defaults provided, and their ability to understand computing principles suffered due to:
- No accessible file system
- No way to sideload applications
- For ages, no support for mouse/keyboard input
- No USB mass storage
- No support for audio/video codecs other than Apple-approved ones
10-15 years ago a lot of people were saying, that the "digital native" generation will be tech savvy and will surpass everyone with their IT knowledge.
Yeah, right. A few months back in 2021 I was asked how to "make an app on the phone". Not FOR a phone, ON a phone, the complete development only using a phone. WTF?
And no, it wasn't a 12 year old kid, it was a 21 year old guy with a Bachelor of science degree.
> Yeah, right. A few months back in 2021 I was asked how to "make an app on the phone". Not FOR a phone, ON a phone, the complete development only using a phone. WTF?
You jest, but it's possible. There is an Android IDE that includes a compiler that runs on Android.
Yes, and there are also coding environment apps that go all the way from coding to the app store in iOS.
But in this case it's 99% more likely that the person asking didn't have these in mind, but just misunderstood what it takes to make a regular mobile app and though it obvious that regular mobile app development happens on the phones themselves.
So they were correct by accident, and only because there are some niche environments very few actual apps - and no major one - were ever made on. So it's like being correct that there are aligators in Australia, but not because normally there would be as local fauna (which is what you had in mind, confusing them with crocodiles), but because it happened that some actual aligators escaped from some zoo and procreated in the wild outback.
I see this a lot working with grad students and professors.
Older than a certain age = much more likely to have less experience with computers as they didn't grow up learning how to use them/only learned specific tasks and applications as needed for work and online communication/shopping/etc.
Younger than a certain age = much more likely to only have experience with mobile, "apps", and turnkey solutions. Knows the details of popular platforms but little in terms of troubleshooting, workarounds, or generally anything that can't be solved by clicking a link or pointing to a picture on a screen.
Granted, there are loads of exceptions because, as you say, there's nothing stopping you from learning about something if you have an interest. It's more a matter of who has run across a need to look into something in the course of their life. If you grew up in the period between personal computers becoming common and the explosion of web apps/mobile devices, chances are you had to figure out how to do something at some point. That's not necessarily the case before or after.
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.
Search bar is superclass of url bar? Just bigger parsing space?
Now we just need to superclass the bar into the whole screen. Rightclick wherever to bring up optionally-context-sensitive addressing/searching. Free ourselves from the tyranny of the browser frame.
Which we have already done to a degree. And it's great.
And that is why inheritance and object oriented programming are bad. /s
Just because I made an error while copy pasting some internal address doesn't mean I want that address shared with every search provider that pays my browser for information on me. I managed to disable that in Firefox, which somehow also broke the search bar on its startup page.
The world is so poorly understood by everyone but in the end things are fine. Users don't fully understand UI but it doesn't matter because they make do. The majority manage to buy their product on Amazon just fine.
I'm pretty sure that this is deliberate. The URL bar isn't really under the site's control (although Web sites have more access to it, these days, than they used to).
If you can get users to interact with the elements directly under the site's control, then the site has ... more control.
Also, it's actually not a bad idea to have a "Swiss Army Knife" text entry. It's sort of what users expect. Couple that with advanced language parsing, and you can actually give users what they want.
My wife says I have "Google-Fu," because I'm so good at entering search queries that return relevant results.
Really, all I do, is enter a natural language phrase into the URL bar, and I get good results.
I used to be able to turn stuff up deep into the web with Google back around 2000–2001 through careful choice of keywords. Google's NLP stuff has effectively destroyed that ability and some of the deep search techniques I used to be able to employ no longer work and while the information is definitely still on the web, it's harder to surface (while web spam rises to the top of Google results).
Certain types of searches, Google is great still. No problem with them for programming issues, finding libraries, etc... But try and find an actual review of a product? Fat chance.
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 recently been articles about STEM students that do not know how to work with a basic file directory.
I've actually been hearing and interesting theory that the younger generation is becoming even more computer illiterate than the generation before them.
The younger generation was raised on iPads and iPhones where everything is easy to use and "just works". They've never had to do anything beyond tap the icon for the App they want.
Edit: Was going to talk about that same article about File directories.
I have seen this hiring, 10 years ago in general everybody fresh out of college had a good grasp of a linux box inner workings as they had fought through the install process of a Gentoo or LFS machine.
Today is fairly common for me to have to explain in detail what is needed or how things work.
This is true, the ease of use and proliferation of simplified and straightforward user interface conventions has had the adverse effect of making everyone born after 1998 practically unable to use a computer outside of the 4 major websites and apps.
I have witnessed this with younger people joining the company I work at. Most of them don't seem to have much of an idea how a computer works, why putting the internet between them and their deadlines might be bad or just can't figure out where their files are. I have to do a lot of hand holding for the first few months anyway.
And that's unironically a good thing. To poorly paraphrase Alan Kay, you know a certain piece of technology works when it gets out of the way and becomes second nature.
However we're now encountering one of those pesky questions that we never hear about in sci-fi because it's hard to solve and it's not fun for authors to write about: are we setting up future generations for failure by making technology too easy? And it's most likely "yes". I wonder out loud: are children not getting courses on how to use a desktop computer anymore like they used to in the 90s/2000s? It seems like it. Even if they never encounter having to browse a file system again until they graduate, the fact that it's at least introduced to them while their brains are still terrific sponges would be beneficial.
I've never had to do long division after ~6th grade, but given a few minutes of recall, I can get right back into it because of the rote learning I had.
I think that the fact newer versions of popular OSes (Windows, Android) try hard and harder to hide the filesystem from the users - probably because "they won't understand". But in the long run, hiding it makes the problem even worse.
> 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 had the "a-ha" moment we did about it, so far back we've almost forgotten we needed an "a-ha" moment for something so "simple and obvious".
We get that this over here and that over there "are" the same thing, but that neither "is" the thing it's representing, which may also be represented entirely differently over in this other place. When we search in a file explorer window and it "becomes" something totally different, we get what's happened and that nothing's "gone anywhere". Normal people don't.
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 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?
The transition to mobile computing devalued typing and greatly increased the attraction of icon grids.
There was some series of essays recently that I read (linked from HN maybe) that went into some details about the economic differences between search-based desktop computing and "juicy springboard of icons" mobile computing.
It isn't surprising, really. Computers are wonderful and complicated devices but a lot of knowledge about them is handed down more as an oral history, and it is dense and has had over fifty years of tumultuous growth.
Have you ever thought about even just the jargon you need to know to be fluent today? Not even just the important computer systems terms, but the names of tools, all the acronyms, the context of why things are the way they are.. its huge, and its endless. The stuff we think about as basic really never was, and now it gets hidden behind a slick user interface, and you might reasonably get to your third year in a CS program before getting a handle on how everything sort of fits together.
I see this all the time, with people not understanding where files are or that there is some kind of hierarchical filesystem lurking behind the covers. Thanks for the link.
As self-driving cars come closer to reality, I fear your hypothetical will eventually become a real conversation someone will have to unironically have.
It feels to me like they're scared to try, because they still might not get it, and then what does that say about them? But dammit, if my relatives just tried, even a little bit, things would be so much better.
It's true. What I don't get is the reluctance to seek out learning opportunities. They won't watch a video, attend a class, read a book, none of that. It's like picking up a hobby if you're computer illiterate. They spend all the money on the device and expect what exactly? Yet if they bought a DSLR they would know it's a hobby and they need to learn a thing or two. They'd invest in learning like people do with any hobby.
I guess hobby isn’t the best word. I suppose it could be a chore too. I have to learn all kinds of stuff to DIY pool maintenance. Either way, it’s an endeavor.
> 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 there for computing. 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. But likely the people you are making fun of here did not grow up with computing. They are older folks to whom the computer was presented as a way to solve some specific problem (eg: a series of clicks so I can zoom with the grandkids) rather than a general platform that you perceive it as.
You can still say "well, there's a computer now in your life so you should learn about that" and again personally I agree, but - you gotta admit there are things in your life that you could go deeper on but you simply aren't comfortable or interested in doing so. For example, do you know the anatomy of every muscle in your body? Are you perfectly comfortable with public speaking? Are you able to articulate the nuances of policy difference between two local politicians running for office in your area? These are examples of things that you come in contact with on daily basis, and (if you are like most people) you probably did not go as deep in on as you could (and arguably should). Even if you happen to be good at these specific things you can get the larger point that people don't and can't go "deep" on everything they encounter. It may seem weird to you that to someone that thing is their computer, but those people may know things that you don't, also.
> 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.
> 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.
That's exactly right, the car industry has done a remarkable job maintaining interface compatibility for over a century despite massive implementation changes.
Someone who knew how to "hit the brakes" on a 1908 Model-T will be able to do it in my 2021 Toyota. Despite the fact that my car has regenerative breaking (and ABS and other things) which means that how the pedal does its thing is totally different.
Even the new additions over the basic interface feel pretty optional. EG, my car has radar cruise control but someone can drive the car for 10 years and not notice that button. If you want to drive my car the same way you drove the Model-T, you pretty much can.
Not to be pedantic, but the Model T has a very different control system than modern cars.
There are three pedals and a throttle pusher on the wheel. The brake is on the right, the middle pedal is reverse. To accelerate, you work a combination of left pedal to select gear, handbrake/clutch, and a pusher for throttle on the steering wheel.
You would need retraining to go from this to a modern car or vice versa.
You got me! I actually knew this but wanted to make my point. Technically my post is correct because I focused on the operation of the brake pedal specifically but it definitely doesn't stand to this level of scrutiny :)
There are a lot of things that contribute to learned helplessness, but in my opinion one underrated cause (for computers) is lack of security.
Particularly with touchscreens, it's really easy to break settings or delete something if you're doing something fiddly. I think people underestimate how powerful concepts like the recycling bin are, history, etc... in making people feel a bit more confident about experimenting.
How to translate that stuff to completely computer-illiterate people is a big challenge. But my experience is that when people feel like it's really easy to revert mistakes, they tend to experiment more and they tend to be bolder about trying to solve their own problems. And in the opposite direction, as they learn more that computers are dangerous even in specific areas, that can bleed over into other contexts and make them scared of trying things in other programs and with other devices.
When I see people who aren't willing to try and figure out what a URL bar is or who are scared to move files around or organize a directory or bookmarks, I sometimes wonder what the rest of their computer looks like and if they're channeling anxieties with other programs.
Of course, that's only one aspect of the problem though, it's an issue with multiple causes.
> 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 is turn the wheels.
The "learned helplessness" here is on us, not the users.
> 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 the trend here in making it feel more difficult for users. Things like “unified bar” and hiding the address are just two concrete examples in two decades of “making it easier”.
> 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.
+1 800 555-1234 and +1 900 555-1234 are also very different things, with one being toll-free and the other being pay-per-call, and people seem to be able to understand that
A lot of people don’t, I didn’t even know that 900 means that. But ignoring that, you’re able to verify that the person on the other line almost certainly isn’t who you intended by just having them say anything, whereas evil.co might look literally identical to Facebook. There are security and performance issues that are totally invisible to you when you use http vs https, and the errors you get aren’t just a “that number you dialed is unavailable” but instead some arcane issue about SSL certificates or something, which you didn’t know even existed, whose error page is designed to make you feel literally unsafe. The length of a phone number in a given locality is generally constrained, whereas URIs can be extremely long and complicated, and the effects of a different URI or query parameter are unbounded and differ from website to website based on no consistent pattern, and on top of that as you’re navigating a site you don’t explicitly interact with the URL at all whatsoever, whereas with phone numbers the input pretty much ends the moment you connect your call.
> Turning the steering wheel never randomly creates a bunch of new problems for the user that they don't understand.
Having seen the kind of situations (untrained) drivers get themselves into while looking at a complete loss of how to proceed, I would like to vehemently disagree.
That's why most western countries have something that passes for "training" as an requirement to be allowed to drive.
No such thing with computers.
With this analogy I suppose an omnibar would be like a self-driving car? Or maybe just an automatic transmission?
I do think consistency is also an important part of interface design, so I don't think GP is wrong to bring it up as something that modern software often fails at, but the type of consistency they're talking about isn't what I'm talking about with safety to experiment.
For me, a better car analogy would be something like the fact that your radio controls can't mess with your brakes. You don't have to worry that if you change your radio station that your car suddenly won't start. This means that you probably don't feel nearly as worried about messing with those controls in an unfamiliar rental car. The entertainment system is never going to brick your car and make it impossible to drive (well, in most cars it can't).
----
That's still a kind of tortured analogy though, so I'll dispense with the analogies entirely and just talk technology. When I teach people how to use Git, some of the most important early commands I teach them after the basic data model are:
`git reflog`
`git reset <ref>`
`git rebase -i <ref>` (and importantly, I wire this up to something other than Vim)
I have observed anecdotally that people who have a good grasp of `git reflog` are much more likely to experiment with branching strategies, rebases, and merges, and are much more likely to come up with creative ways to solve their problems. Why? Because they're no longer scared of blowing up their entire repo.
I used to leave those more "complicated" commands out of early conversations with people because I felt like I would be dropping too many concepts on them too quickly, but without that kind of confidence that says "I can undo any Git operation, swap my head to any reference, and reorder, merge and customize any set of commits from any branch", people treated Git more like a set of arcane symbols and they were scared to ever experiment or try to extrapolate to solve their problems, even when their problems could be solved using commands they already knew.
Git could be a lot better about this stuff; the lesson I take is that I want to have very clear designations between dangerous and safe operations, and I want my interfaces to teach people where the undo key is first.
----
You can probably think of other Linux tools that demonstrate this issue as well. It took us a long time to get safety locks around `rm -rf /`. In some ways, the point of those safety locks isn't just to help protect the reckless people who do irresponsible things without thinking. It's also to give more confidence to people who are learning basic terminal commands/Bash that they're not going to accidentally mess up a pipe or regex expression and delete their entire hard drive if they try to experiment a little bit.
We can take that even a step further, one of the best things you can do if you're learning Linux is get a good, reliable hard drive clone pushing regularly to a backup. You'll be in a better position to learn how the low-level system works if you know in the back of your head that you can always just blow the entire thing a way and rewind back a few days whenever you want.
It's really because most adults don't have time to tinker like we did, being children and adolescents with computers. When I grew up in the windows xp era, I became the family tech support, and not because I was smart or anything. Just because I had time on my hands, being a child with little responsibilities compared to my parents, to go through the control panel and click every single button and option just to see what it did, so when something did go wrong I had some idea to guess where the fix was to be found. Honestly, I'm surprised I didn't mess things up more often. Fast forward to today, and there is a lot of common software that I struggle with like my parents did 20 years ago because I don't have the time to fiddle like I did 20 years ago. I can't do much of anything on windows anymore, after years of using macos and unix, that knowledge has left my brain and I don't have the time to get it all back.
Tech has gone to great lengths to convince people to be illiterate. "There's an app for that" was the worse form of handicap and users were heavily incentivized to seek premade solutions rather than trying to solve their own problems
This is my mom. Trying to walk her through steps on the phone like logins and lost passwords is a nightmare.
I imagine it would be like a car mechanic trying to walk me through changing the oil over the phone. Since it's not in my interests, I just want it to work, I don't have any desire to learn it.
At the same time, oil changes are more of a hassle that you only need to deal with every year or two. You can get away with not bothering to sort it out (and even if you know how, it might be worth the extra cost to just pay someone to do it faster on those rare occasions).
But if you use a computer to access resources and services on the web, you probably do so much more frequently than you change your oil. I'd liken it more to knowing how the turn signals, headlight controls, and wipers work on a car.
You don't need to know how to repair those items or how exactly they operate. But since that familiarity is something inherent to the operation of a car, you should at least know the basics of usage if you plan to do much driving.
> (and even if you know how, it might be worth the extra cost to just pay someone to do it faster on those rare occasions)
Going off on a tangent:
I thought that this would be the case when I switched to changing my own oil -- if I was feeling lazy, I could always have the shop do it. But I found out right away that when the local quick-change place does it, they tighten the drain plug and oil filter to roughly a zillion ft-lbs. So if I pay them to do it, I am making the job way more of a pain in the butt for myself next time I want to do it, because I'll spend half an hour just struggling to remove those.
I just stopped bothering when it got harder to access the filter/drain and I moved to the city where I park on the street. I'm much less interested in farting around under the car, getting messy, and spending a half hour or more to drain the oil, replace the filter, and refill.
At some point I just decided it was worth the extra cost to be in and out quickly. And honestly, when you add up the cost of replacement filter and oil, the premium isn't terrible when you add in time saved. I like knowing how to do it, but it's been several years since I bothered.
Top-side filters and oil extraction pumps make oil changes almost effortless. The biggest problem for me is disposing of the oil. There are several vehicles in my family, and the old oil just collects in jugs by the garage door. The nearest hazardous waste centre at the landfill will only accept two jugs at a time, and they won't take 5 gallon buckets at all. They will not accept 10 jugs (<2 years' worth), let alone 30. It's like they want me to pour it down the drain or something!
This. I had a similar situation to the GP poster-- years of used oil piled up in jugs in the garage. One trip to a local parts store and the issue was resolved. It was shockingly easy.
Same with my mum. It's really insightful to try to see things through her eyes. For example not understanding context like which app she's currently in blew my mind at first, but totally makes sense.
> I imagine it would be like a car mechanic trying to walk me through changing the oil over the phone. Since it's not in my interests, I just want it to work, I don't have any desire to learn it.
Really?
I don't believe there exists a task I theoretically could perform if I knew the steps, that I would be unable to do if those steps were being explained to me by an expert. Even if it was gardening or cooking (two areas I have extremely little interest in). In my mind, this very concept doesn't parse.
On the other hand, I do know people like this, and I hate helping others with computers over the phone.
I believe this has nothing to do with one's intelligence or familiarity. More like some kind of general intellectual or emotional "closedness" - an instinctive refusal to do things out of one's comfort zone, even if one is guided step-by-step, and refusing to take those steps causes a huge loss. I have no idea how this comes about, as it's totally alien to me, except that I see it in most people.
There are some tasks that require finesse, like hovering a helicopter, riding a bicycle or even balancing a clutch.
Most people can't do those initially no matter how much an expert explains it - until they build up the muscle memory. Cooking and gardening are like that but to a much lesser extent.
Of course typing into a URL bar is nothing like that.
Yup, I've explicitly excluded such tasks from consideration (perhaps not clearly enough). My claim was only about tasks that don't require tacit knowledge or experience in addition to detailed enough step-by-step instructions.
With references to gardening, I meant stuff like e.g. how to correctly replant a flower. I have no first clue how to do it, but I'm confident I could do it successfully if I had a gardener guiding me through the process step by step.
Family members for me, but they don't understand the difference between the windows search box in the task bar (next to the "start" button), and google. The difference between Chrome and google.com is lost on them as well.
It's a good exercise in patience for me while we go through the steps of describing the differences between searching for things on your computer vs searching for things on the internet, what google is, etc.
They've been using the internet since I was a kid in the 90's.
I'm sure most of us have examples of this in our lives, being the de-facto "computer person" in the family. It is what it is at this point. For whatever reason, if you didn't grow up with computers, it's incredibly difficult to understand them as an adult. Which still applies to huge swaths of the worlds population.
Anecdotally, my grandfather ~78, works very hard to understand how to navigate and use the computer they have, not sure to the extant you would call "technoliterate", but certainly he puts in the effort to learn how to navigate and use the device without asking for much help.
Interestingly, I think we're seeing less people grow up with general purpose computers, and instead just have an iPad or an android tablet, or a chromebook.
At least chromebooks have the capacity to become general purpose computers by installing Linux. But yeah, anyone who doesn't grow up with a Raspberry Pi or the like is gonna have a hard time.
The browser has a search bar at the top of the page; Amazon has a search bar at the top of the page.
Ergo it’s actually bad UX design. Thinking desktop UX if that was an “Amazon app” there would be ONE singular search bar.
To make matters worse, Windows has a search bar in start (usually at the bottom); browser has a search bar (at the top); some websites have their own search bar; file explorer has its own search bar.
You get the point: bad UX design enforced by assumptions made at each layer of the OS/browser/website. Many out of the control of users and developers alike. Nonetheless, it’s overcrowding the UX with redundancy.
Historically speaking, users had an ability to “find stuff” on their system but it was never by an implicit “search bar”; users had to explicitly do something like: file -> find prior to entering search query.
The web browser was the one with the search bar (having one job: entering URLs not search terms) and when websites had a search feature it was typically placed in the middle of site or somewhere else (typically reserved for search terms).
Modern UX can be ridiculous in ways devs put too much emphasis on these “automatic” components. Like the annoying page header that suddenly scrolls with content and takes up 1/3 of the page. Ack! Don’t even get me started.
> The browser has a search bar at the top of the page; Amazon has a search bar at the top of the page.
I assume this is deliberate. Amazon doesn't want you clicking on URLs that don't point to Amazon. A search bar that doesn't do an internet search, but looks like a browser search bar, would seem to fit the bill.
I believe Amazon will fade away, once that bald guy reaches the orbit of Saturn. It's basically just an online shop with low prices - I can't see any USP.
Incidentally, the combined URL-and-search bar (is that still called the "awesomebar"? It's not awesome) in my version of Firefox (93.0, running on Windows 10) doesn't actually let me search, unless I select a search engine. If I search for "red shoes", it tries to take me to "redshoes.com". If I search for "red doctor martens", it says it can't find a site with that name. I have to choose a search engine, even if I only have one search engine configured. I suppose I must have broken something.
I think it's sad whenever I see people that are very proud of just how tech illiterate they are and just how little they understand computers. It's like teenagers who brag about how badly they scored on on their exam. In many aspects it's the same exact situation, change for the better wouldn't require much work, and this sort of behaviour only discourages others from even trying.
I painstakingly developed a personal script for how to teach people how to split a screen between two chrome tabs.
This is amazingly and surprisingly difficult thing to explain over the phone to “normal” (born before computers were prevalent) people.
Basically I got it divided in two groups: those who have used internet for the first time after 18 years old (hardest group. Have to explain in terms of geometrical figures, like lines and rectangles on top of the screen, where in this rectangle is a good place to click and how to drag, and what a successful drag looks like), and the others (those I can explain how to “drag a tab”, because they already know what a tab is).
The address bar is more easy, I refer to it as the place where you type the site where you want to go (but very often people never type addresses, they open google and start from there, always).
This got me into thinking about getting old, more than once. How can I prevent this to myself (being totally confused and out of touch with current technology when I get older).
I think I’m still doing pretty well with knowing about and even understanding new technology. The thing is, I have a harder time finding it worthwhile. Like social media that seems to have a 5 year cycle just because the younger kids don’t want to be seen using what the older kids use. Do we really need a new IM system and different way of posting short videos to friends every 5 years? So much “technology” change is now just fashion.
A similar problem I’ve ran into both in tech support and user studies is momentary blindness for the scope of search. For example on your Mac, you have Spotlight, Finder search, Google search, help menu search, and various application-specific or website-specific search fields. In my experience if two of those are on screen at the same time, it’s very easy to get confused about which one to use to get which type of result.
You don’t need to be a naive user to make this mistake. The problem is that your brain is thinking “search”, your eyes are looking for something that looks like a search input, and when you find one you click it and start typing.
I feel like that’s what’s going wrong in this example too; it’s not that people expect Amazon to bring them to any random webpage, it’s just that there are two similar looking text inputs very close together on the screen.
Also, there sometimes isn't a good separation between the browser and the page itself. For example, I use a dark theme on my browser and was on a site that had a dark nav bar above their logo. They also had another navigation area, so I didn't even notice the top nav bar. I couldn't figure out how to log out of the site due to that.
Other than "momentary" blindness, it feels like some people don't look at their monitors three-dimensionally: It's just buttons and fields everywhere, there's no physical separation between them, there's no hierarchy. They just learn to operate some UIs mechanically and don't put any thought into it. That's why they whine when something moves; As far as they're concerned, that something disappeared into an alternate universe.
I had actually never put it into words before now, but that makes a lot of sense, and it actually accurately describes how I see my screen.
To me, the OS taskbar is "higher" (as in, closer to me) than the application window title bar, which in turn is higher than whatever controls are in the application itself (think Firefox back and forward buttons, URL bar, setting menu etc), which is itself higher than whatever website it is currently loaded. And even more than this, my brain perceives the website to be "deeper" inside the screen than anything else.
Even right now typing this, the text area to me is "dug" inside the HN, making HN feel closer to my eyes than the texarea for the reply.
Huh. I have that experience, but in reverse. More "specific" or application/context-specific UI elements feel "closer" to me, while browser chrome is farther in the background, and OS all the way in the back. I believe that's the visual paradigm most graphical OS's going back to the '90s used.
Yup, the desktop metaphor. Basically the computer screen is like a desk, and each application is a paper/document on the desk that can lay on top of one another. Mouse cursor is more or less your finger/hand to interact with the “documents”.
Everything had bevels (XP) and/or shading (Vista) that evoked a 3D appearance. Buttons are extruded (and appear to physically move down when pushed), menus overlay each other, text boxes are "inset".
Nowadays though... it is apparently a cardinal sin to even make clickable things appear clickable. Looking at you, Windows/Office!
Today I used an exercise machine at the gym for the first time and noticed the buttons: their design was Web 2.0! Flat buttons but with stickers, and the stickers have these glossy cartoon buttons printed on them. The machines were fairly recent and I wondered if the design was intentional (more buttonlike than flat labels) or if they just hadn't bothered to update them in a while.
As a side note I found it comical that they're using computer UI-styled buttons printed onto actual paper on a physical machine instead of "real" push buttons, but I guess it's a cost-saving thing.
I think it's really easy for programmers to overestimate how much screen parsing everyone else is doing.
I've often joked that one of the core skills of a programmer is to be able to look at a terminal scrolling a full screen of text every quarter of a second or so, and extract useful information from it. I've lost track of the times I've seen something "different" and had to scroll up dozens of screens to find what I happened to see.
This is a job-specific skill like a mechanic diagnosing a complicated machine's problem from the particular way a single knocking sound sounded, or a doctor glancing at you and telling you you have some obscure disease that you've never heard of because you have some particular droop in your eyelids. This is not the way the non-programming public perceives a computer screen.
Parsing GCC/Clang (or god forbid MSVC) compiler error messages listing a mixture of header paths, usage paths, and unrelated system headers, with no clear distinction between the start of one error and the start of another, is a skill in of itself.
once was trying to help someone get setup on email and realized that the concept of scrolling was new to them. my mental jaw hit the floor at the difficulty she was having in grasping that concept and making it happen predictably. kids get it immediately, but she was in her 20's, so harder to learn. She was so frustrated and I totally got it.
The author's thesis may be true: maybe people make this mistake all the time.
But, remember on the Tonight Show, where Jay Leno would go out on the street and ask a lot of people questions, then they'd edit together a segment that made it look like all of the interview subjects were idiots? It's not fair to characterize the entire sample from a curated selection.
In this case, Amazon probably gets hundreds of millions of searches a day, and it probably doesn't take many URLs being pasted in the search box to show up as automatic suggestions. One of the examples that pops up is "amzn.to/3tmosfj": how many people do we think searched for that url? A million people? Closer to a hundred people? Or was it one person, one time, out of a billion possible users?
I don't know the answer, but that's the point: nobody does. So, we can't draw conclusions from this example about how people use (or misuse) the search bar.
Everyone reaches for the interesting explanation, but usually the actual explanation is much more mundane. Sure a small percentage won't understand the difference between the two search bars, but even power users who are working on a computer all day enter text in the wrong field. It just happens, and it's not that interesting.
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.
I don't know anyone in real life who has a problem with it. Half of the reason Chrome beat Firefox is that Firefox had search in a separate bar and it was unergonomic to use.
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.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 320 ms ] thread[0] One could argue that Google will correct spelling and URL errors for you. But on the other hand, it's likely to inject ads above the real destination, which are very likely fraud, so I'd say it's a wash at best there.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/06/google-chrome-ends-i...
It's bad, very very bad
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28864722
Be upfront and clear with your users. If you are sending data to a 3rd party in a way that is not 100% obvious, then it's bad UI leaning towards dark patterns. If you are a UI dev and it never occurred to you a user would do something like this, then that's typical. If after you learn that users are doing something you as the dev finds not normal, then maybe the UI needs to be tweaked. If you design the UI to confuse/trick people, then you are just an asshole.
Edit: Also I genuinely don't think collecting end-user data is the primary goal of the Chrome team with this change, although I agree it's a likely side-effect. I think they are trying to create a better end-user experience, even if you and I don't feel that it is better for us (nerds) in particular :)
If I was actually wanting to search for information about the URL provided, then the result is expected. However, if I just want to go to the damn url, it is not useful at all. Now, in this unified input that you seem complacent with, how do I avoid the step of search results when I just want to view a specific website?
Also, I didn't say google wants to kill the URL bar. I said google wants to kill the URL. So you wouldn't type in "example.com", you would do something else to get to whatever content you wanted from what used to be called "example.com".
I don't know what the replacement for URLs will be, and it seems neither does Google (yet), but I'm at least open to the idea that there may be a better idea.
Some further reading:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/09/google-wants-to-get-...
https://www.wired.com/story/google-wants-to-kill-the-url/
I don't. As I replied to that post directly, the URL bar is not like the choke lever on a car, but more like the steering wheel or navigation input. It's the UI element that is used to communicate user's goals to the machine - not some incidental control of a subsystem that gets automated away.
I think you're sadly misguided and, frankly, scaringly naïve.
I really hate what Google is doing in this area with their immense power over the web. It may be more friendly for those who just don't care how computers work and just want their Facebook button, but it's very hostile for those who do know how they work.
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 doesn't know whether you're entering a URL or search-terms.
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.
Leading with one's feet is commonly known as leaning backward.
Not allowing a user to go directly to where they want to go is just bad. It's like ordering a Lyft to take you somewhere, but the driver takes you to 4 different places that pays Lyft money to artificially increase traffic to their place before ultimately taking you to where you wanted to go. It's just a waste of everyone's time.
I don't think you can jump to that conclusion.
For example I can come up with an idea that removes URLs without going through google. Imagine a new protocol where the user types in something like "john's pizza cafe; order a pizza". My local pizza joint is registered in a DNS-like system and handles the query directly with some commodity search-like system, never going through google; or the pizza joint offloads the query to some 3rd party which crawls their site and handles the resolution.
(This is just some dumb idea I came up with off the top of my head; please don't nit-pick it to pieces. Wait for Google's proposal to come out and nit-pick that.)
Every internet query going through google would be bad, sure. But google isn't proposing that... yet :)
that's not how this works. if you don't wont opinions, don't post an idea to the internet.
you've just replaced a working DNS system with a DNS system based on best guess or worse requiring a small biz to register with multiple DNS like systems. What happens when competitor beats you to those multiple registration points?
>But google isn't proposing that... yet :)
Why in the world would you think that google would do anything that did not use their system? That's just not based in reality one bit.
Yes, I said it's a really dumb idea. Stop wasting your time nit-picking it :) It was an example of how you could create an open, keywords-based system without requiring Google as an intermediary.
> Why in the world would you think that google would do anything that did not use their system? That's just not based in reality one bit.
Google creates open standards all the time.
https://http2.github.io/faq/#whats-the-relationship-with-spd...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebP
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VP9
I don't think their new URL scheme would catch on without buy-in from non-Google stakeholders, so there's plenty of incentive for them to come up with something in cooperation with those stakeholders, who would surely reject a strong dependency on Google's services.
Yeah, you replaced Google with another intermediary or a bunch of other intermediaries. That just shows you're refusing to see that the problem is one of why there should be any intermediary at all.
and to prevent spamming the hell out of this system, each user's local KNS client will prefer those sites for a given keyword which are "bookmarked" by the user's peers (more on the closer peers, less on the more distant ones).
this involves some kind of social-netowrking into this system, but don't panic: it is not meant to be a FB, more like a GPG-like web of trust. if your direct "friends" or "peers" or whatever identity which participates in the system (a blog, a yellow pages provider, a local newspaper publisher) visits a site as a result to a keyword and he mark the site appropriative to the keyword (ie. it is not a spam but a legit content for the given keyword according to his opinion), then your KNS client/search engine ranks the site higher. if a friend's friend marks a site this way then your search results still get ranked upper but not that much. and so on: every level more distant the ranking is weighted less.
"bookmarked" is not the best term here, because the users don't save the site to bookmarks or into "Favorites", just marks it appropriative. they might not have incentive to do so, but it can be automated by assuming the user judges a site appropriative for a given keyword by interacting with it, or not going back too soon, etc.
though it is not perfect because one can just stay on a site out of an interest other than the entered keyword. and it raises privacy questions as well: users generally don't want EVERY of their visits to be signaled on the net, however they are often happy to share a fair amount of their keywords/visits with their friend circles. for the remaining set of activities on the web, they may use an other KNS identity (profile/persona) which nobody, or an other set of people follows.
your also now tying search into a social platform by using "friends" or "peers". i want to find something regardless of what anybody else is doing or has done. if i wanted what my friends were doing, i would already know about it from talking with my friends.
i'm so sick of everything trying to be relevant to what others are doing i could vomit.
it's less like "registering" keyword–site pairs, more like broadcasting keywords about your site. normally only the site owner can broadcast keywords about the site (it's cryptographically signed).
if multiple site owners have the "cats" keyword on their sites, then you simply get more hits on searching for "cats".
the "social" aspect is there to help in search result ranking. individually for each clients. it's really a bad naming to call it "social" and call the participans "friends", i've just named them so to make an analogy to the well-known social networks. but you are right, i don't want to mimic today's "push what is trendy" idea.
i wanted to design this system to be as analogous to real life as possible.
this "rank higher what others like/suggest/approve" logic is analogous IMO to this IRL: you are searching for a car repair shop, but there is 50 car repair shop advertisements in the newspapers. you ask some people which one to go to. (this may interpreted as "which one is the best" or "you like the most" - but only that should be taken into account in my ranking algorithm that the entity claiming it's a repair shop is really one, not fake, ie. not something which people generally flag as spam). in this way the ones which are likely really repair shops get more relevancy points, and the spammy ones get less. but you don't neccessarily ask ordinary people about it, you may ask the government what are the accredited ones. in the algorithm, it translates to follow/subscribe to the government ('s KNS handle) and sort the search results according to their ranking (the may give each accredited car shop 1 point, and 0 for the rest).
this idea is based on the observation that IRL without central directory of "things" you often evade spam advertisement by looking around what is its reputation at others. it does not prevent you to discover lower ranked search results, of course.
this ranking algorithm is there exacly to prevent any company registering all keywords and effectively gaining benefit from it. it may increase the load in the keyword propagation network traffic, but that's an other layer to worry about.
Normally I don’t even need a url though, I’ll just google “chase bank” or wherever it is I’m trying to go.
I know Google is generally supposed to be above maliciously modifying search results, but people definitely aren't above maliciously poisoning Google search results. I definitely wouldn't want to get to my bank's website by any source other than my bank telling me where it is. (I do rely on my history and/or my bookmarks to remember that once the bank tells me, but hopefully those are proof against external malice, or else I've got bigger problems.)
But also, interesting.
Here is an example:
> skyrim english voice files (and subtitles) latest version
You get no results with my search engine, but interestingly, if you feed that into google, you get some pretty dodgy top results.
It looks like the type of SEO spam nonsense you find on websites, hacked wordpress deployments are often rife with these types of keywords. I think they are trying to manipulate a would-be suggestion algorithm somehow. Problem is I don't do anything with the user input.
There also seems to be a few distinct bots doing this, with distinct user agents (but bots with the same UA spam-search on the same topic out of epharma, casino, warez).
I also have another, identical search box in another part of the site and it has never seen any sort of spam bots.
Nobody seems to write much about it, maybe because they don't want to give people ideas, but it's an endlessly fascinating subject.
It's surprisingly well implemented, though some actions (such as accessing history or site settings) take a couple extra taps.
Safari in iOS 15 also has extension support, and apps like Hyperweb[0] make the experience very pleasant.
I also love the icon :P
0. https://hyperweb.app
It's a much better design choice imo when you get used to it.
For me, zero results.
Yet automatic chokes became standard, and today's drivers usually don't even know or care what a choke even is. Todays people have other things to spend their time learning.
People of tomorrow may not need to know or care what the difference is between a search box and a URL bar. All they know is they can type what they're looking for into any box, and they'll find it. And like the choke, it might turn out that most people might prefer not to know.
I don't think that can be engineered away in any reasonable way soon, so saying they shouldn't need to know seems irresponsible to me
Hmmm. It took me a while to figure out that you weren't referring to sites for angling enthusiasts.
Allowing the URL bar to also act as search or vice versa, the simple act of trying to do the one thing now does something else that you might or might not have intended or been aware of being possible is not the same as a single purpose choke. When that possible thing is sending your data to a 3rd party, then that is just bad.
Edit: finished an incomplete thought
Messing with URL and search is like messing with the steering wheel, or - in case of self-driving cars - with navigation input.
We could equivalently ask why ftp and http and https and such don't have different types of entry uis, since they're different protocols. If we consider the "resource location via plain language" protocol (which we could even formalize!) that defers to http(s), ftp, Tor, and Bing based on aspects of the request, it's just one higher level protocol.
"What things really are" is microscopic invisible electrical patterns thrumming through specially-shaped chemically-doped sand to shove some crystals back and forth to change some reflected and emitted light frequencies that hit a human eye to be interpreted by a human brain.
Literally everything about UX is obscuring what things really are, because what things really are is "utterly incompatible with human cognition." There's an entire field of disciplined study to build a compatibility layer regular people can use; without it, all these fancy computers are just dumb matter in weird shapes.
The fact that people who work in tech have to jump from precise terminology like "open your browser, and navigate to $URL" to stuff like "click the E and then find the bar at the top where you search thing and type..." is 100% our failing. We are the ones responsible for creating a population of people who are tech "illiterate" because we've spend all our time and effort keeping the words from users.
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 different from a URL bar, there's a lot of meat on the bones of the idea of just making them the same thing. They look like the same thing. They act like the same thing. Maybe they are the same thing?
I would absolutely kill for a shortcut that when held creates an overlay that puts labels on all the UI elements so I can say, "hold Ctrl+H and look for navigation bar."
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?
Moreover, user are watching video to satisfy their hunger for new, to feel good. Why not just to produce a chemical which make the same when consumed? Or just plant electrodes into brain, which is much safer. Then, without burden of these users, we will able to use a browser with separate URL and search bars, which is good for work performance.
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).
My mom has 64" 4k TV with excellent image quality, but very often (right now, for example) she watches YouTube on her old CoreDuo PC with 24" screen, in small window. I don't know why.
My search bar shows me my past searches, instead of random suggestions, while my URL bar shows my past URL's, which saves tons of time for me when I need to find a past site or a past search. Also, I can quickly select another specialized search engine for a search.
I general, general people needs something simple, while a professional needs something powerful.
Chrome's unified bar currently supports that. Type a fragment of a site name and hit tab... If the site published a standard search mapping in its metadata, the bar changes modes to direct a search query to the specified website. Super useful for GitHub.
I am literally looking at a bar labeled "Search" at the top of my browser window right now.
"As we approach the limit of efficiency, movement because becomes so little that it is practically inert, nothing has to move because it's already there, where it is supposed to be" - me
Because automating tedium is the purpose of the machine. Most of what we do is in pursuit of allowing the user to do more with less of their capacity.
The URL itself is a naming abstraction to let users identify things. And it's not even a great one; it has some sharp edges from the end-user's point of view (why does the end user care about protocol? They just want the thing. Why do they care about domain? They just want the thing. Why is the path nine slashes long? The thing they saw yesterday was just "history of mesopotamia;" if they type that in, they should just get the thing). Allowing the bar to accept and intelligently identify multiple different ways to identify things is an increase in capability, not a decrease.
However, what I take issue is with "intelligently identify multiple ways to identify "the thing"" sure, in you're example if someone wants to get to the top search result for "the history of mesopotamia" it might be doing alright...but, who is the one who decided what that search result is, if I type in "history of mesopotamia" and I get shunted directly to the wikipedia entry, maybe that's all ever get, I won't see the thing I really might have wanted which was a specific book about stone tablets of mesopotamia.
The point is, offloading our intelligence to "the machine" only makes as smart or as agenda driven as the machine and its maker, this overall must have some limiting effect. even if doing more with less capacity is good, if the capacity itself is limited to the machine, then it's like saying, I can eat more pie, but the pie is also shrinking.
> Because automating tedium is the purpose of the machine.
Getting people to think of knowing where they are and what they're doing as "tedium" is exactly what The Man wants. Congratulations on your succesful assimilation.
Maybe instead of "which box should they type into" we should be asking why the url interface is a simple text box to begin with.
Looking at those old screenshots shows me how much the current autocomplete has regressed. The suggestions used to be so much better since it was a literal text search across titles and URLs. I remember you could configure how many results were displayed, I always set it to the max.
The 2-line rich display was awesome for scanning URLs too. The "URL after the title" we have now makes it impossible to do that.
Edit: Fixed most of these annoyances with this: https://www.userchrome.org/megabar-styling-firefox-address-b...
I wouldn't call it bad behaviour. Why are the users behaving bad and not the interfaces? Computers are meant to serve users.
The realized model of having two separate boxes could only ever be "wrong" in a moral or aesthetic sense. This is not the case for mental models, which are incorrect when they do not correspond to reality.
The vast bulk of users would respond either by changing nothing about their behavior because all this stuff is inside-baseball to them, or changing their behavior by resetting their browser's search bar to some other target (for example, I can go into Chrome right now and remove Google from the list of search engines).
At this point, one really has to reach to conclude that awesomebars are bad for end-users without an ideology that doesn't reflect the average user very well at all.
All models are wrong, some are useful. We are debating how useful this model is.
The end game system for google is one where you just talk to it like a person and it does what you want without having to have any kind of training on the system.
Chrome followed suit later that year, because by the time Chrome hit the market, awesomebar had demonstrated its utility for end users.
Not me! Confusing the users was deliberate.
Let's hide the protocol, users don't need to know whether they are connected through http, https or ftp, right?
Let's make the URL bar jump about fifty pixels when you select it, so that your mouse cursor is no longer in the right place when you go to select a URL fragment.
And it's annoying that web-devs don't respect the principle that URLs shouldn't ever change.
Generalizing that "users don't understand" from some autocomplete suggestions does not logically follow.
The 'myths' it discusses are all absolutes along the lines of "it's impossible for old people to learn anything" or "old people hate computers and will never use them". The myths are constructed so that there is no possibility they are correct, and yet in the conclusion they still say there is some truth to them!
Anyway, "old people tend to be confused by websites significantly more than other groups" and "it's impossible to train an old person to know what search boxes are" are not remotely similar statements.
You'd be surprised. Research has found that the "digital native" generations (younger people born into/after the internet age) are no better at these things than the "older people" - the whole "digital native" thing is a myth in this regard.
It's mostly about being interested in tech/a nerd vs not. Kids that don't, might know 100 ways to use Instagram or specific tools they need, but can't tell a URL bar from a search bar (and other basic distinctions/skills) either.
It's why there's no such thing as an iOS/Android power user.
The vast majority of users simply accepted the defaults provided, and their ability to understand computing principles suffered due to:
- No accessible file system
- No way to sideload applications
- For ages, no support for mouse/keyboard input
- No USB mass storage
- No support for audio/video codecs other than Apple-approved ones
From what you've written here though, it seems that you do agree with me...
Yeah, right. A few months back in 2021 I was asked how to "make an app on the phone". Not FOR a phone, ON a phone, the complete development only using a phone. WTF?
And no, it wasn't a 12 year old kid, it was a 21 year old guy with a Bachelor of science degree.
You jest, but it's possible. There is an Android IDE that includes a compiler that runs on Android.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.aide.ui&hl...
But in this case it's 99% more likely that the person asking didn't have these in mind, but just misunderstood what it takes to make a regular mobile app and though it obvious that regular mobile app development happens on the phones themselves.
So they were correct by accident, and only because there are some niche environments very few actual apps - and no major one - were ever made on. So it's like being correct that there are aligators in Australia, but not because normally there would be as local fauna (which is what you had in mind, confusing them with crocodiles), but because it happened that some actual aligators escaped from some zoo and procreated in the wild outback.
Older than a certain age = much more likely to have less experience with computers as they didn't grow up learning how to use them/only learned specific tasks and applications as needed for work and online communication/shopping/etc.
Younger than a certain age = much more likely to only have experience with mobile, "apps", and turnkey solutions. Knows the details of popular platforms but little in terms of troubleshooting, workarounds, or generally anything that can't be solved by clicking a link or pointing to a picture on a screen.
Granted, there are loads of exceptions because, as you say, there's nothing stopping you from learning about something if you have an interest. It's more a matter of who has run across a need to look into something in the course of their life. If you grew up in the period between personal computers becoming common and the explosion of web apps/mobile devices, chances are you had to figure out how to do something at some point. That's not necessarily the case before or after.
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.
Now we just need to superclass the bar into the whole screen. Rightclick wherever to bring up optionally-context-sensitive addressing/searching. Free ourselves from the tyranny of the browser frame.
Which we have already done to a degree. And it's great.
And that is why inheritance and object oriented programming are bad. /s
Just because I made an error while copy pasting some internal address doesn't mean I want that address shared with every search provider that pays my browser for information on me. I managed to disable that in Firefox, which somehow also broke the search bar on its startup page.
It is like the most meta description of how things are that I believe anyone has ever come up with!
If you can get users to interact with the elements directly under the site's control, then the site has ... more control.
Also, it's actually not a bad idea to have a "Swiss Army Knife" text entry. It's sort of what users expect. Couple that with advanced language parsing, and you can actually give users what they want.
My wife says I have "Google-Fu," because I'm so good at entering search queries that return relevant results.
Really, all I do, is enter a natural language phrase into the URL bar, and I get good results.
I'd be willing to wager that a scan of their search logs for how often "http://" shows up in them is a non-negligible amount.
"The box at the top where you type in websites you want to go to."
"What are you talking about? I'm computer illiterate, I can't learn any of this fancy tech stuff. I just click my facebook icon and it comes up!"
These people get all sorts of confused when something happens in their browser and the new tab page's recently visited list gets cleared out...
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.
Heck, there have recently been articles about STEM students that do not know how to work with a basic file directory.
https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-direc...
The younger generation was raised on iPads and iPhones where everything is easy to use and "just works". They've never had to do anything beyond tap the icon for the App they want.
Edit: Was going to talk about that same article about File directories.
Today is fairly common for me to have to explain in detail what is needed or how things work.
And that's unironically a good thing. To poorly paraphrase Alan Kay, you know a certain piece of technology works when it gets out of the way and becomes second nature.
However we're now encountering one of those pesky questions that we never hear about in sci-fi because it's hard to solve and it's not fun for authors to write about: are we setting up future generations for failure by making technology too easy? And it's most likely "yes". I wonder out loud: are children not getting courses on how to use a desktop computer anymore like they used to in the 90s/2000s? It seems like it. Even if they never encounter having to browse a file system again until they graduate, the fact that it's at least introduced to them while their brains are still terrific sponges would be beneficial.
I've never had to do long division after ~6th grade, but given a few minutes of recall, I can get right back into it because of the rote learning I had.
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 had the "a-ha" moment we did about it, so far back we've almost forgotten we needed an "a-ha" moment for something so "simple and obvious".
We get that this over here and that over there "are" the same thing, but that neither "is" the thing it's representing, which may also be represented entirely differently over in this other place. When we search in a file explorer window and it "becomes" something totally different, we get what's happened and that nothing's "gone anywhere". Normal people don't.
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/
There was some series of essays recently that I read (linked from HN maybe) that went into some details about the economic differences between search-based desktop computing and "juicy springboard of icons" mobile computing.
Have you ever thought about even just the jargon you need to know to be fluent today? Not even just the important computer systems terms, but the names of tools, all the acronyms, the context of why things are the way they are.. its huge, and its endless. The stuff we think about as basic really never was, and now it gets hidden behind a slick user interface, and you might reasonably get to your third year in a CS program before getting a handle on how everything sort of fits together.
Computers also used to be only for those willing to geek out and geniuses. Now they are used without thinking too much about them.
I just hope nobody would mishear it as "shot". That could be unpleasant.
I think we've all had relatives do something and then be unable to "get it back". Task bars deleted, icons deleted, etc.
So they don't try to venture too far out because past experiences make everything seem fragile.
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 there for computing. 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. But likely the people you are making fun of here did not grow up with computing. They are older folks to whom the computer was presented as a way to solve some specific problem (eg: a series of clicks so I can zoom with the grandkids) rather than a general platform that you perceive it as.
You can still say "well, there's a computer now in your life so you should learn about that" and again personally I agree, but - you gotta admit there are things in your life that you could go deeper on but you simply aren't comfortable or interested in doing so. For example, do you know the anatomy of every muscle in your body? Are you perfectly comfortable with public speaking? Are you able to articulate the nuances of policy difference between two local politicians running for office in your area? These are examples of things that you come in contact with on daily basis, and (if you are like most people) you probably did not go as deep in on as you could (and arguably should). Even if you happen to be good at these specific things you can get the larger point that people don't and can't go "deep" on everything they encounter. It may seem weird to you that to someone that thing is their computer, but those people may know things that you don't, also.
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.
That's exactly right, the car industry has done a remarkable job maintaining interface compatibility for over a century despite massive implementation changes.
Someone who knew how to "hit the brakes" on a 1908 Model-T will be able to do it in my 2021 Toyota. Despite the fact that my car has regenerative breaking (and ABS and other things) which means that how the pedal does its thing is totally different.
Even the new additions over the basic interface feel pretty optional. EG, my car has radar cruise control but someone can drive the car for 10 years and not notice that button. If you want to drive my car the same way you drove the Model-T, you pretty much can.
There are three pedals and a throttle pusher on the wheel. The brake is on the right, the middle pedal is reverse. To accelerate, you work a combination of left pedal to select gear, handbrake/clutch, and a pusher for throttle on the steering wheel.
You would need retraining to go from this to a modern car or vice versa.
You got me! I actually knew this but wanted to make my point. Technically my post is correct because I focused on the operation of the brake pedal specifically but it definitely doesn't stand to this level of scrutiny :)
Particularly with touchscreens, it's really easy to break settings or delete something if you're doing something fiddly. I think people underestimate how powerful concepts like the recycling bin are, history, etc... in making people feel a bit more confident about experimenting.
How to translate that stuff to completely computer-illiterate people is a big challenge. But my experience is that when people feel like it's really easy to revert mistakes, they tend to experiment more and they tend to be bolder about trying to solve their own problems. And in the opposite direction, as they learn more that computers are dangerous even in specific areas, that can bleed over into other contexts and make them scared of trying things in other programs and with other devices.
When I see people who aren't willing to try and figure out what a URL bar is or who are scared to move files around or organize a directory or bookmarks, I sometimes wonder what the rest of their computer looks like and if they're channeling anxieties with other programs.
Of course, that's only one aspect of the problem though, it's an issue with multiple causes.
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 is turn the wheels.
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 the trend here in making it feel more difficult for users. Things like “unified bar” and hiding the address are just two concrete examples in two decades of “making it easier”.
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.
So yes, URLs are way more complex.
I’d wager most Americans don’t know what our country code is or what country codes are. Just say’n.
Having seen the kind of situations (untrained) drivers get themselves into while looking at a complete loss of how to proceed, I would like to vehemently disagree.
That's why most western countries have something that passes for "training" as an requirement to be allowed to drive.
No such thing with computers.
With this analogy I suppose an omnibar would be like a self-driving car? Or maybe just an automatic transmission?
For me, a better car analogy would be something like the fact that your radio controls can't mess with your brakes. You don't have to worry that if you change your radio station that your car suddenly won't start. This means that you probably don't feel nearly as worried about messing with those controls in an unfamiliar rental car. The entertainment system is never going to brick your car and make it impossible to drive (well, in most cars it can't).
----
That's still a kind of tortured analogy though, so I'll dispense with the analogies entirely and just talk technology. When I teach people how to use Git, some of the most important early commands I teach them after the basic data model are:
`git reflog`
`git reset <ref>`
`git rebase -i <ref>` (and importantly, I wire this up to something other than Vim)
I have observed anecdotally that people who have a good grasp of `git reflog` are much more likely to experiment with branching strategies, rebases, and merges, and are much more likely to come up with creative ways to solve their problems. Why? Because they're no longer scared of blowing up their entire repo.
I used to leave those more "complicated" commands out of early conversations with people because I felt like I would be dropping too many concepts on them too quickly, but without that kind of confidence that says "I can undo any Git operation, swap my head to any reference, and reorder, merge and customize any set of commits from any branch", people treated Git more like a set of arcane symbols and they were scared to ever experiment or try to extrapolate to solve their problems, even when their problems could be solved using commands they already knew.
Git could be a lot better about this stuff; the lesson I take is that I want to have very clear designations between dangerous and safe operations, and I want my interfaces to teach people where the undo key is first.
----
You can probably think of other Linux tools that demonstrate this issue as well. It took us a long time to get safety locks around `rm -rf /`. In some ways, the point of those safety locks isn't just to help protect the reckless people who do irresponsible things without thinking. It's also to give more confidence to people who are learning basic terminal commands/Bash that they're not going to accidentally mess up a pipe or regex expression and delete their entire hard drive if they try to experiment a little bit.
We can take that even a step further, one of the best things you can do if you're learning Linux is get a good, reliable hard drive clone pushing regularly to a backup. You'll be in a better position to learn how the low-level system works if you know in the back of your head that you can always just blow the entire thing a way and rewind back a few days whenever you want.
I imagine it would be like a car mechanic trying to walk me through changing the oil over the phone. Since it's not in my interests, I just want it to work, I don't have any desire to learn it.
But if you use a computer to access resources and services on the web, you probably do so much more frequently than you change your oil. I'd liken it more to knowing how the turn signals, headlight controls, and wipers work on a car.
You don't need to know how to repair those items or how exactly they operate. But since that familiarity is something inherent to the operation of a car, you should at least know the basics of usage if you plan to do much driving.
Going off on a tangent:
I thought that this would be the case when I switched to changing my own oil -- if I was feeling lazy, I could always have the shop do it. But I found out right away that when the local quick-change place does it, they tighten the drain plug and oil filter to roughly a zillion ft-lbs. So if I pay them to do it, I am making the job way more of a pain in the butt for myself next time I want to do it, because I'll spend half an hour just struggling to remove those.
We moved to a bigger property, have 5 cars. It's easier now to change 2 or 3 at a time.
At some point I just decided it was worth the extra cost to be in and out quickly. And honestly, when you add up the cost of replacement filter and oil, the premium isn't terrible when you add in time saved. I like knowing how to do it, but it's been several years since I bothered.
Really?
I don't believe there exists a task I theoretically could perform if I knew the steps, that I would be unable to do if those steps were being explained to me by an expert. Even if it was gardening or cooking (two areas I have extremely little interest in). In my mind, this very concept doesn't parse.
On the other hand, I do know people like this, and I hate helping others with computers over the phone.
I believe this has nothing to do with one's intelligence or familiarity. More like some kind of general intellectual or emotional "closedness" - an instinctive refusal to do things out of one's comfort zone, even if one is guided step-by-step, and refusing to take those steps causes a huge loss. I have no idea how this comes about, as it's totally alien to me, except that I see it in most people.
Most people can't do those initially no matter how much an expert explains it - until they build up the muscle memory. Cooking and gardening are like that but to a much lesser extent.
Of course typing into a URL bar is nothing like that.
With references to gardening, I meant stuff like e.g. how to correctly replant a flower. I have no first clue how to do it, but I'm confident I could do it successfully if I had a gardener guiding me through the process step by step.
It's a good exercise in patience for me while we go through the steps of describing the differences between searching for things on your computer vs searching for things on the internet, what google is, etc.
They've been using the internet since I was a kid in the 90's.
I'm sure most of us have examples of this in our lives, being the de-facto "computer person" in the family. It is what it is at this point. For whatever reason, if you didn't grow up with computers, it's incredibly difficult to understand them as an adult. Which still applies to huge swaths of the worlds population.
I wonder what things will look in 20 years.
https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-direc...
As things get more and more offloaded to the cloud, local computing is something only developers, engineers, and geeks will properly understand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profession_(novella)
Ergo it’s actually bad UX design. Thinking desktop UX if that was an “Amazon app” there would be ONE singular search bar.
To make matters worse, Windows has a search bar in start (usually at the bottom); browser has a search bar (at the top); some websites have their own search bar; file explorer has its own search bar.
You get the point: bad UX design enforced by assumptions made at each layer of the OS/browser/website. Many out of the control of users and developers alike. Nonetheless, it’s overcrowding the UX with redundancy.
Historically speaking, users had an ability to “find stuff” on their system but it was never by an implicit “search bar”; users had to explicitly do something like: file -> find prior to entering search query.
The web browser was the one with the search bar (having one job: entering URLs not search terms) and when websites had a search feature it was typically placed in the middle of site or somewhere else (typically reserved for search terms).
Modern UX can be ridiculous in ways devs put too much emphasis on these “automatic” components. Like the annoying page header that suddenly scrolls with content and takes up 1/3 of the page. Ack! Don’t even get me started.
I assume this is deliberate. Amazon doesn't want you clicking on URLs that don't point to Amazon. A search bar that doesn't do an internet search, but looks like a browser search bar, would seem to fit the bill.
I believe Amazon will fade away, once that bald guy reaches the orbit of Saturn. It's basically just an online shop with low prices - I can't see any USP.
Incidentally, the combined URL-and-search bar (is that still called the "awesomebar"? It's not awesome) in my version of Firefox (93.0, running on Windows 10) doesn't actually let me search, unless I select a search engine. If I search for "red shoes", it tries to take me to "redshoes.com". If I search for "red doctor martens", it says it can't find a site with that name. I have to choose a search engine, even if I only have one search engine configured. I suppose I must have broken something.
This is amazingly and surprisingly difficult thing to explain over the phone to “normal” (born before computers were prevalent) people.
Basically I got it divided in two groups: those who have used internet for the first time after 18 years old (hardest group. Have to explain in terms of geometrical figures, like lines and rectangles on top of the screen, where in this rectangle is a good place to click and how to drag, and what a successful drag looks like), and the others (those I can explain how to “drag a tab”, because they already know what a tab is).
The address bar is more easy, I refer to it as the place where you type the site where you want to go (but very often people never type addresses, they open google and start from there, always).
This got me into thinking about getting old, more than once. How can I prevent this to myself (being totally confused and out of touch with current technology when I get older).
There, FTFY. Now geroffmylawn.
You don’t need to be a naive user to make this mistake. The problem is that your brain is thinking “search”, your eyes are looking for something that looks like a search input, and when you find one you click it and start typing.
I feel like that’s what’s going wrong in this example too; it’s not that people expect Amazon to bring them to any random webpage, it’s just that there are two similar looking text inputs very close together on the screen.
I had actually never put it into words before now, but that makes a lot of sense, and it actually accurately describes how I see my screen.
To me, the OS taskbar is "higher" (as in, closer to me) than the application window title bar, which in turn is higher than whatever controls are in the application itself (think Firefox back and forward buttons, URL bar, setting menu etc), which is itself higher than whatever website it is currently loaded. And even more than this, my brain perceives the website to be "deeper" inside the screen than anything else.
Even right now typing this, the text area to me is "dug" inside the HN, making HN feel closer to my eyes than the texarea for the reply.
I wonder if that's experienced by others as well.
https://pics.computerbase.de/5/7/4/1/0/1-1080.130195173.jpg
https://i1.wp.com/www.thespinningdonut.com/wp-content/upload...
Everything had bevels (XP) and/or shading (Vista) that evoked a 3D appearance. Buttons are extruded (and appear to physically move down when pushed), menus overlay each other, text boxes are "inset".
Nowadays though... it is apparently a cardinal sin to even make clickable things appear clickable. Looking at you, Windows/Office!
As a side note I found it comical that they're using computer UI-styled buttons printed onto actual paper on a physical machine instead of "real" push buttons, but I guess it's a cost-saving thing.
I've often joked that one of the core skills of a programmer is to be able to look at a terminal scrolling a full screen of text every quarter of a second or so, and extract useful information from it. I've lost track of the times I've seen something "different" and had to scroll up dozens of screens to find what I happened to see.
This is a job-specific skill like a mechanic diagnosing a complicated machine's problem from the particular way a single knocking sound sounded, or a doctor glancing at you and telling you you have some obscure disease that you've never heard of because you have some particular droop in your eyelids. This is not the way the non-programming public perceives a computer screen.
I remember when google made the URL bar as a search bar. It had the convenience factor, and google had the "search for everything" philosophy.
But we call that a "dark pattern" now.
ref: https://i.postimg.cc/GmKmd2GH/amazonsearch.jpg
edit: then there's this clue https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R28STJLEYYUTF
But, remember on the Tonight Show, where Jay Leno would go out on the street and ask a lot of people questions, then they'd edit together a segment that made it look like all of the interview subjects were idiots? It's not fair to characterize the entire sample from a curated selection.
In this case, Amazon probably gets hundreds of millions of searches a day, and it probably doesn't take many URLs being pasted in the search box to show up as automatic suggestions. One of the examples that pops up is "amzn.to/3tmosfj": how many people do we think searched for that url? A million people? Closer to a hundred people? Or was it one person, one time, out of a billion possible users?
I don't know the answer, but that's the point: nobody does. So, we can't draw conclusions from this example about how people use (or misuse) the search bar.