There really isn't a way to learn hotkeys other than searching for them and practicing, and people expect computers to be intuitive so much that they never do that. I wonder how many people aren't consciously aware of how much faster they could get at using their computer if they spent an hour learning.
Middle-aged to elderly women LOVE hotkeys. Show them how to cut/copy and paste text with Ctrl-C|X|V and they are hooked. Ctrl-A to select everything is another such gem.
Or holding Shift or Ctrl to select multiple items (eg files to delete).
They always(!) lighten up and smile when I show them (no hyperbole!).
One of the reasons that elderly people like keyboard shortcuts is because learning how to use a mouse can be quite difficult, as it requires precise hand-eye coordination (which is also why it's slow, causing techies to rely on the keyboard as much as possible). At that age, not only is it difficult to learn how to operate new devices, but their afferent & efferent neurons may not be up to the task to begin with.
Yup. When my mom tries to double click a mouse button, I hear anything from two to five clicks, and the mouse shudders under her hand as she attempts this. The result is predictably unpredictable. She seems to do OK with single clicks.
I wonder if it would be better if we would make software actually less intuitive to use, and by doing so, forcing people to spend that hour to learn at least some basics.
That doesn't really mesh with the quote, which was, "I do these field studies and I can't tell you how many hours I've sat in somebody's house as they've read through a long document trying to find the result they're looking for."
hum, there is a menu option for find in all browsers I know of. Sure, under chrome it's in the wrench menu but if it's a menu it might as well be lost for a large group of users.
Chrome's Find menu has "Search the Web", "Find", "Find Next", "Find Previous", "Use Selection for Find" and "Jump to Selection". I'm willing to bet non-techies would be utterly confused by all those possibilities.
This is a valid point. I'm in Germany and half of my software is localized, so search is Strg-S, the other half is not, so search is Ctrl-F or F3, or /, or whatever.
We tech-savvy people think ctrl-f is so basic we can barely conceive how could anyone not know it. How could they not?
Somewhere there is a discussion group where people can't believe people don't know you can wear something other than geeky looking clothes. They can't believe someone would wear baggy jeans, a baggy t-shirt they got free at a conference, and white sneakers.
To say other people don't care is accurate, but doesn't do justice to the diversity of interests out there.
They have other priorities.
Yes, some are lazy or daft, but while you figured out how to use ctrl-f other people were learning to ski, climbing a mountain, jumping out of a plane, learning to dress fashionably, picking up girls, picking up guys, teaching their kids piano, etc. Even the lazy ones probably enjoyed being lazy and don't care about streamlining their searches. And the daft ones, well, if they have a learning disability or something like that, that's their story.
Viewing people having other interests as something to learn from and celebrate makes the world a different place. The humility that comes with it leads to much more learning about the world.
You're comparing basic computer use to hobbies. That may have been somewhat accurate 20 years ago; it isn't anymore.
They don't care, but the lack of caring is getting to the point where it's more like they don't care how to use a shower (wow I can't believe I've been taking ice-cold showers all this time!) or drive a car, etc.
Half my friends don't know or care how to drive a car. I'm 32, don't have a licenses, and can probably count on my fingers the number of times I've genuinely wished I had one. Just because something is vital to you and your social circle doesn't make it universally true.
It isn't vital to me either and I don't own one, living as I do in an area with great mass transit and where parking the thing would cost more than housing in a lot of places. But to be an adult and not know how to drive, regardless of whether you actually have a car, is a pretty shitty situation. I went on vacation recently and it was great to be able to drive, because the area we were in demanded it.
None of this addresses my point, which is that computing is an essential skill. Are you disputing that as well?
"None of this addresses my point, which is that computing is an essential skill."
My first example of something people do that some make a priority and learn to do well was wearing clothing and being stylish. Members of this community have ready access to dress stylishly but I'd wager few do. Somewhere some stylish people can't believe they do that in the same way many people here are suprised people don't know ctrl-f.
This is a case where the MS Visual Studio forced on me at work poisons my mind. Ctrl+F brings up some big ugly search modal, while Ctrl+D pops straight to the quick search text box. Whenever I switch from VisStudio to a web browser (or pretty much anything sane), I always catch myself trying to bookmark a page instead of search. (Of course my prefered search key is / but that's not really an option here....)
That 90% of people don't know about 'Find' functions (^F/⌘F)? Boggles.
It might be worth trying incremental search in Visual Studio (it's like "find as you type"). I use it with Emacs keybindings (CTRL-S for forward search, CTRL-R for backward search), but I'd imagine you can bind it to whatever keystroke you want. There is no dialog, you simply hit CTRL-S (or whatever it is bound to), then start typing and it immediately goes to the next occurrence of what you have typed; you hit CTRL-S again to go to the next occurrence.
Incremental search changes the way you navigate text beyond using it for searches. Want to move to particular place in the text file quickly without using the mouse? Pick the most unique string near it and incremental search to move near it, then use regular keyboard movement commands to get to it (if the unique string itself wasn't where you wanted to be).
I wonder if this is going to become even more of a problem as OS's become more gesture-based like iOS and Lion. All of the three- and four-finger swiping actions in Lion are amazing and useful, but only if you know about them and can remember them. Apple stores do a pretty good job of educating people when you go in to buy a new Mac, but "pinch with 5 fingers to open launchpad" might be harder to learn than "cmd + f"
Yeah, too many developers don't seem to have a good understanding of the average user (and don't do any usability testing), and end up spending a lot of time on arcane features that most people don't use or don't want to use (but are forced to). Like so many keyboard shortcuts and hidden menu options. In general, if it is out of site (like in a menu), it is out of mind. Or software is designed for text input since it is easier to code than visual interfaces.
Of those of us making up the 10% who do use Ctrl/Cmd + F (or '/', or some keyboard shortcut for find); how many find themselves saying "Ctrl F" out loud when looking for something on a piece of paper (or somewhere in local space)?
I constantly catch myself chanting, "Ctrl F, Ctrl F, Ctrl F" in frustration as I search for a lost item or try to find a keyboard shortcut on a quick reference sheet that's printed.
WAY more than 98%. 98% or more don't even know what a regexp is, let alone how to construct one to match what they want to find, and then use the search-forward-regexp tools to actually find the matches.
I can definitely vouch for this. I have a lot of exposure to medical back office staff, and I do a lot of trainings with them for my company's medical software. I'll no longer be shocked when I recommend that they just search the page for a name, and their first attempt is to start reading the whole page.
This highlights a few important facts. First, you can't write good software without being out in the "field" and really observing how your users use your product. It's very easy to get in the pattern of writing software for other techies. Second, something very simple as learning how to use Cntrl-F can drastically improve someone's quality of life. You don't need to build a fancy new algorithm, but you definitely do need to design a great intuitive user experience.
It's really eye opening in a good way. Teaching my Mom how to use her first computer (which had Windows 98 on it) was all I needed to fully understand why Mac mice only have one button.
I've just acquired a new mac with Lion and a Mighty Mouse, and the number of functions built into that apparently-buttonless mouse is slightly overwhelming. I don't think I've discovered them all yet.
It's okay for me, but I can easily imagine your mother accidentally doing a two-finger horizontal swipe, winding up on another workspace, and being entirely confused about how to get back.
A couple of my friends have had their installs of Vista Basic replaced with Ubuntu* and the first thing I’ve always done is disable the multiple workspace switcher. It’s useful to some but exceedingly confusing to the other 90%.
* This was at the point that they were going to give up and buy a new computer anyway due to OEM bloatware, so no harm in trying a new OS.
Multiple desktops is definately one thing few have gotten used to, though Lion may make them much more mainstream. I think Mission Control, especially on a touchpad with a 3-finger push shortcut, seems as natural as it could be.
It is interesting how many comments on this page are focused on the short-cut rather than the underlying functionality. Ctrl-F itself has nothing to do with it and is purely incidental. The real rub here is that people don't understand that they can search for a sequence. This is equivalent to losing your keys and then locating them only by sense of smell.
Unfortunately, many applications and operating systems have decided to hide keyboard shortcuts and underlined accelerator keys, in the interest of "user friendliness."
Windows, for example, won't show the underlines for keyboard accelerators until you hold down the Alt or Ctrl key (I can't recall which, because I always disable the option). Unfortunately I can't recall which application(s) I was using that didn't show keyboard shortcuts next to menu items.
It kills me when I watch my non-technical colleague editing a document by repeatedly selecting words, right-clicking, slowly scrolling down to either Copy or Cut, then click somewhere else, right-click, slowly scroll down to Paste...
He also regularly "checks" spreadsheets with a handheld calculator... Sometimes going as far as not using formulas at all.
I learned this when I was mentioning to people how happy I was that they had finally added webpage search to MobileSafari in iOS. Nobody had any clue what I was talking about. I tried relating it to Command/Control-F in their browser and nobody had ever seen the feature before.
I find this amazing, as the Find feature in a browser is my most common fallback. Too lazy to keep looking for something on a long page? Just use Find. Hell, they should teach it to you at school. It makes internet research much easier.
I think the whole reason is that it isn't always showing on the page; it's hidden behind a shortcut. If the find bar was always visible like the address bar, I'm sure more users would use the find feature.
So many complain that sometimes it is this or that shortcut. That shortcut seems to only change in IDEs and common dev tools. Usually changing because the C-f is used for some other more common coding task.
In programs used by the general public I have a hard time finding when C-f(cmd-f for mac users) is not the standard for search.
Schools should have a class on finding data. When I was in school we had to have at least one electronic source in our papers. This was supposed to help kids learn how to look up data electronically. They should take one day every year to teach kids how to mine that data with google, and things like c-f. This would allow the kids to find the data they need much faster, and may actually make them enjoy finding and learning more.
I actually strongly disagree with the idea of an Electronic Literacy class, at least I disagree with it as a class which basically teaches people tricks like control-f that can save them time. Let me relay a story:
In college I worked as a T.A. for in intro programming class for non majors. For some the course started out teaching the students to use Nano as a text editor and assumed that they would choose a more full featured editor whenever they saw fit. Now Nano is a really bare bones editor, it doesn't even have line numbers. And not having line numbers is a serious problem when you're trying to debug c++ compiler errors that reference lines by number. I kid you not I saw kids counting down 100s of lines from the top of the file to get to the listing of the errors.
Now the thing about this situation is: these were perfectly electronically literate people. They all knew about Ctrl-F. And could easily be taught more tricks. The problem is they'd never grasped the philosophy of computers. Specifically that when a task that's so simply stated is taking too long there's normally a better way to do it. Or if there isn't it's an opportunity for you to make a better way to do it.
All of the students simply assumed that if there was a trick they'd have been told about it already so no one inquired further.
Yes, that they got poor instruction is my point. Furthermore more my point elaborates on why it was poor. Because they were taught many individual tricks and never how and when to search for new tricks.
Hey, don't diss nano like that. Try alt+c, or ctrl+g. Looks like you didn't try looking for a solution either (=
First thing you should teach in a class like that is to teach them to fish for tricks in the manpages/docs rather handing them individual tricks throughout.
Alright, I guess I'm not fully aware of all of Nano's features. And yes, my entire point is that it's much better to teach them to fish for tricks in various places rather than teaching them individual tricks. Also I was only a T.A. in this class (and actually only did grading) so I never got a chance to teach.
No, read the comment you just responded to. I only did grading. It wasn't until I asked a friend of mine who was in the class what he thought of it and he responded: "Line numbers are a bitch" that I discovered what was going on. At which point I mentioned to the professor that she might want to bring up man pages.
This is one of those things I'm constantly explaining to friends, clients, and others. It seems so trivial to me, the ctrl+f brings up the search dialog, but at least if someone doesn't know the shortcut surely they would know of the search dialog itself? I've found over the years this is definitely not the case, anything that's not blatantly obviously with buttons on the browser is never known by the majority of the people that I interact with.
In terms of this particular feature, I love CTRL+F and I use it on a daily basis.
It makes me think that we need a new type of class in schools across the land immediately. Electronic literacy.
Negatory. We need to improve our UI metaphors. In the case of finding something, holding down one key while pressing another has no parallel to real life searching.
Let me tell you a story about my mum trying to view a slideshow on a mac. She double clicked on one of the photos (double clicking didn't come natural for her, but that's another story). Then she tried using the left and right arrows. Nothing. I noticed that Preview was only loading up the photo she clicked on, so there was only one photo in the slideshow. I helped her by selecting all the photos and dragging them onto the preview application.
But select-all and drag onto an icon had no real life metaphor for my mum and I didn't even bother trying to explain why it worked. (Maybe if there was some image of a slide projector and she could drag each image into a slot...but then again, I've got a terrible UI brain...)
tl;dr: if the UI is broken, fix the UI, not the end user.
>In the case of finding something, holding down one key while pressing another has no parallel to real life searching.
Ok, so you would recommend what? A single key? But remember, it needs to work in a text editor where you're actually typing stuff.
Of course, searching is such a fundamental verb that there probably should be a dedicated key on keyboards for it. In fact, on android phones, one of the four standard hardware buttons is for search. But the designers of most software have to work in the absence of such sensible input devices.
Ok, so you would recommend what? A single key? But remember, it needs to work in a text editor where you're actually typing stuff.
I hate to be the guy, but the "/" key definitely works to find something on firefox (and lots of programs), and definitely works in at least one text editor I know of...
There are fewer people in all of Sweeden than the city in which I currently live. I don't think theirs is the keyboard the world should be optimising for.
There's a lot to be said in terms of better UI design. But at some point you really can't eliminate any more: there has to be a baseline of new interactions that someone must learn.
Pushing peddles, turning a wheel, and shifting a stick into different positions didn't have many parallels to real-life actions before the automobile was invented, but people learned that UI regardless.
Because the law requires it, and it requires it because people who can't drive can kill or harm themselves and people around them. If there was absolutely no risk of harming or killing, the law would probably not require training before you can drive. If not being able to use a computer meant killing or harming people, the law would probably require training but because there is no such danger, no one cares and everyone can buy a computer and start using it with no training.
Sure, same for me learning to shift a manual trans four wheeler. But for a huge portion of the population, that's not how their brains work.
I described in detail to my wife how manual transmissions work, she couldn't care less to remember it because she had no direct immediate use for that info so she still doesn't know how to drive one. She's a very smart person but the UI of it doesn't fit her existing knowledge.
Without direct application of provided knowledge, the best way to get someone to remember is to make doing the thing intuitive.
You only have to be trained to learn the execution. Anyone sitting in a car and watching someone drive can figure out what the controls do, it's just that driving a car requires timing.
...of course, perhaps the problem with the above is the assumption that they've had a chance to watch someone drive!
The thing is I think end users are evolving. I find that the generations that grew up before pervasive computers were pervasive are the ones having the most issue with these things. When I watch my 7 year old nephew use a computer 10 times better than his parents, it makes me thing that maybe designing UI to match "real life" concepts might not work so well for future users. Desktops, folders, ... those concepts that are supposed to match real things are now becoming a hindrance and limitation on the older computer users today. Just the idea of having the same file be part of multiple folders is complicated for some users.
I think Google's label/tag metaphor for email classification is rather natural. Of course, it could get confusing when your labels are implemented using folders, such as via links.
But there's also a lot of shallow knowledge among the digital natives -- kids who've grown up in a world where there have always been computers, GUIs, Google, YouTube, or now, even Facebook and other social networks.
They know the basics, they're not afraid of them, but unless they've either been taught or are self-motivated to explore, discover, and learn, they are rote users, not informed users.
> holding down one key while pressing another has no parallel to real life searching.
Yeah, but having a device instantly find something for you among a stack of 100 pages also has no parallel to real-life searching. The parallel to real life searching is paging through pages one by one, or browsing an index - precisely the things we're trying to get away from.
If you stretch your search for metaphors too far you end up with outdated ones nobody knows about - like for searching it'd be the old library card catalog. Heck even today, I bet a majority of computer uses have never used a filing cabinet with documents in folders.
At some point we have to create new metaphors, when the digital realm create opportunities that never existed in the real world
I disagree. If we want our society to take full advantage of the technology, we need to remove the training wheels and ditch the tired old half-assed and extremely limited metaphors.
It's time we started using technology like adults, instead of children. The UI may be far from perfect, but the end user is the bottleneck here.
The ctrl-F issue is a perfect example: the problem is not that people don't know the key combination or that the UI is bad, the problem is the they can not imagine such blatantly obvious functionality would be there in the first place. If they did, they would have found the damn keys/icons/gestures, no matter how obscure.
I agree completely with what you said, but think about why it is blatantly obvious to you. It's obvious because you know the web page is a document with images overlaid with text.
Imagine instead that you are viewing an image in a photo viewer that has some text. Would you think to ctrl+f that? I wouldn't. The end-user you're referring to doesn't know the difference between the two scenarios.
What does a wrench have to do with searching? It's no better than Ctrl+F and filing cabinets. I usually associate wrenches with configuration screens, so that would confuse me. I would assume the find menu under the wrench is to look for configuration options, like the configuration search in Chrome.
Chrome is actually an interesting example, because the UI for find-on-page is identical to the one in iPad Pages - click on a spanner/wrench then on "Find...". It makes even less sense in other applications - "Find" is normally in the "Edit" menu, but finding is quite specifically about reading, not writing. So why in the Edit menu? It makes sense that 90% of people wouldn't be able to find it...
My point is that software offers possibilities that go way beyond our real-life experience; there might not always exist a good real-world metaphor for all useful operations, at which point education becomes crucial.
We don't need a metaphor. We simply need a "menu" that shows up when you're holding Ctrl that lists the possible continuations of the shortcut along with brief descriptions.
I think being "intuitive" and being easily discoverable are not the same thing for UI, and designers pay too much attention to the former while ignoring the latter. For example, command line options for Unix programs are not intuitive at all, but they are very easy to discover via a standard mechanism that most system users are familiar with (man).
Good interfaces communicate thing to the user. "Natural" interfaces only use things that have already been communicated or otherwise learned, which makes them much less flexible.
We have the menu bar up top. The problem is people not knowing they can search, not that they don't know the shortcut for it. If people can't get it from the menu bar, I don't see how this would help.
> Negatory. We need to improve our UI metaphors. In the case of finding something, holding down one key while pressing another has no parallel to real life searching.
I rather strongly disagree. You're essentially saying: we should limiting the capabilities of tools (regardless of whether they are electronic or not) to things that already have a direct and obvious parallel to previously existing things that are wholly obvious.
That essentially means: we should stop all progress. Absolutely not. Human beings are tool users, and tool _makers_. We make new tools to serve new problems. We learn how to use them. Via this mechanism, we advance.
The fact that many developers are surprised by this, or think this is a bad thing, shows why so much software is so poorly designed for use by nontechnical people.
The really interesting point is that people don't seem to put any thought into what should be possible with a computer.
Intuitively, people with a decent mental model of how text is processed by computers would expect that the computer could search through that text, and look for a command in the program to do that. But many people's mental model is that they are looking through a sheet of paper displayed on the screen.
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[ 2389 ms ] story [ 2389 ms ] threadOr holding Shift or Ctrl to select multiple items (eg files to delete).
They always(!) lighten up and smile when I show them (no hyperbole!).
I think most people know Edit->Find
Do 90% of people not know what a keyboard shortcut is? Yeah, I believe that.
That doesn't really mesh with the quote, which was, "I do these field studies and I can't tell you how many hours I've sat in somebody's house as they've read through a long document trying to find the result they're looking for."
On the other hand, the Wrench menu (not the standard Mac menu on top) has a single 'Find...' option with the Command-F shortcut label next to it.
That was my impression anyway after doing about four years of IT and lab support for student government and activity groups at a large UC in the '90s.
The ones who did were bound for engineering or science, or were simply practically curious.
Somewhere there is a discussion group where people can't believe people don't know you can wear something other than geeky looking clothes. They can't believe someone would wear baggy jeans, a baggy t-shirt they got free at a conference, and white sneakers.
To say other people don't care is accurate, but doesn't do justice to the diversity of interests out there.
They have other priorities.
Yes, some are lazy or daft, but while you figured out how to use ctrl-f other people were learning to ski, climbing a mountain, jumping out of a plane, learning to dress fashionably, picking up girls, picking up guys, teaching their kids piano, etc. Even the lazy ones probably enjoyed being lazy and don't care about streamlining their searches. And the daft ones, well, if they have a learning disability or something like that, that's their story.
Viewing people having other interests as something to learn from and celebrate makes the world a different place. The humility that comes with it leads to much more learning about the world.
Yah, I don't mean "they don't care" as a judgement statement. You're absolutely right about this.
They don't care, but the lack of caring is getting to the point where it's more like they don't care how to use a shower (wow I can't believe I've been taking ice-cold showers all this time!) or drive a car, etc.
Half my friends don't know or care how to drive a car. I'm 32, don't have a licenses, and can probably count on my fingers the number of times I've genuinely wished I had one. Just because something is vital to you and your social circle doesn't make it universally true.
None of this addresses my point, which is that computing is an essential skill. Are you disputing that as well?
My first example of something people do that some make a priority and learn to do well was wearing clothing and being stylish. Members of this community have ready access to dress stylishly but I'd wager few do. Somewhere some stylish people can't believe they do that in the same way many people here are suprised people don't know ctrl-f.
Different priorities.
That 90% of people don't know about 'Find' functions (^F/⌘F)? Boggles.
Incremental search changes the way you navigate text beyond using it for searches. Want to move to particular place in the text file quickly without using the mouse? Pick the most unique string near it and incremental search to move near it, then use regular keyboard movement commands to get to it (if the unique string itself wasn't where you wanted to be).
Particularly if I end up using the trackpad at an angle so a vertical (to me) swipe is more of a diagonal on the trackpad.
i guess the programmer (Braam?) who said vim changes your efficiency habits was right...
Other examples are all the keyboard shortcuts in Google's web apps: http://www.google.com/support/reader/bin/answer.py?answer=69... or having to type the name of an application to use it in Ubuntu Unity or Gnome 3, or Wikipedia's syntax, which excludes most users from contributing: http://calacanis.com/2007/02/20/technological-obscurificatio...
My rule of thumb generally is to pretend I am designing for an 8th grader. That may still be overshooting a bit though.
[edit]
Oops, you said ctrl-shift-f, not cmd-shift-f. My bad!
I constantly catch myself chanting, "Ctrl F, Ctrl F, Ctrl F" in frustration as I search for a lost item or try to find a keyboard shortcut on a quick reference sheet that's printed.
"Aw crap, that's not how I spell my last name." * finger twitch *
All the damn time.
> cd /usr/bin/
> grep grep grep
Binary file grep matches
It's nice to know that there is indeed a grep in grep when you grep grep for grep.
[10:37 PM] 97Mb$ strings `which grep`|grep grep `egrep' means `grep -E'. `fgrep' means `grep -F'. Direct invocation as either `egrep' or `fgrep' is deprecated. egrep fgrep bug-grep@gnu.org GNU grep http://www.gnu.org/software/grep/ others, see <http://git.sv.gnu.org/cgit/grep.git/tree/AUTHORS>;
This highlights a few important facts. First, you can't write good software without being out in the "field" and really observing how your users use your product. It's very easy to get in the pattern of writing software for other techies. Second, something very simple as learning how to use Cntrl-F can drastically improve someone's quality of life. You don't need to build a fancy new algorithm, but you definitely do need to design a great intuitive user experience.
I've just acquired a new mac with Lion and a Mighty Mouse, and the number of functions built into that apparently-buttonless mouse is slightly overwhelming. I don't think I've discovered them all yet.
It's okay for me, but I can easily imagine your mother accidentally doing a two-finger horizontal swipe, winding up on another workspace, and being entirely confused about how to get back.
* This was at the point that they were going to give up and buy a new computer anyway due to OEM bloatware, so no harm in trying a new OS.
He also regularly "checks" spreadsheets with a handheld calculator... Sometimes going as far as not using formulas at all.
I find this amazing, as the Find feature in a browser is my most common fallback. Too lazy to keep looking for something on a long page? Just use Find. Hell, they should teach it to you at school. It makes internet research much easier.
In programs used by the general public I have a hard time finding when C-f(cmd-f for mac users) is not the standard for search.
Schools should have a class on finding data. When I was in school we had to have at least one electronic source in our papers. This was supposed to help kids learn how to look up data electronically. They should take one day every year to teach kids how to mine that data with google, and things like c-f. This would allow the kids to find the data they need much faster, and may actually make them enjoy finding and learning more.
In college I worked as a T.A. for in intro programming class for non majors. For some the course started out teaching the students to use Nano as a text editor and assumed that they would choose a more full featured editor whenever they saw fit. Now Nano is a really bare bones editor, it doesn't even have line numbers. And not having line numbers is a serious problem when you're trying to debug c++ compiler errors that reference lines by number. I kid you not I saw kids counting down 100s of lines from the top of the file to get to the listing of the errors.
Now the thing about this situation is: these were perfectly electronically literate people. They all knew about Ctrl-F. And could easily be taught more tricks. The problem is they'd never grasped the philosophy of computers. Specifically that when a task that's so simply stated is taking too long there's normally a better way to do it. Or if there isn't it's an opportunity for you to make a better way to do it.
All of the students simply assumed that if there was a trick they'd have been told about it already so no one inquired further.
First thing you should teach in a class like that is to teach them to fish for tricks in the manpages/docs rather handing them individual tricks throughout.
My favorite thing about nano is that the commands are always at the bottom of the window for you-- no remembering needed. ^C and ^W are right there ;)
In terms of this particular feature, I love CTRL+F and I use it on a daily basis.
Negatory. We need to improve our UI metaphors. In the case of finding something, holding down one key while pressing another has no parallel to real life searching.
Let me tell you a story about my mum trying to view a slideshow on a mac. She double clicked on one of the photos (double clicking didn't come natural for her, but that's another story). Then she tried using the left and right arrows. Nothing. I noticed that Preview was only loading up the photo she clicked on, so there was only one photo in the slideshow. I helped her by selecting all the photos and dragging them onto the preview application.
But select-all and drag onto an icon had no real life metaphor for my mum and I didn't even bother trying to explain why it worked. (Maybe if there was some image of a slide projector and she could drag each image into a slot...but then again, I've got a terrible UI brain...)
tl;dr: if the UI is broken, fix the UI, not the end user.
Ok, so you would recommend what? A single key? But remember, it needs to work in a text editor where you're actually typing stuff.
Of course, searching is such a fundamental verb that there probably should be a dedicated key on keyboards for it. In fact, on android phones, one of the four standard hardware buttons is for search. But the designers of most software have to work in the absence of such sensible input devices.
I hate to be the guy, but the "/" key definitely works to find something on firefox (and lots of programs), and definitely works in at least one text editor I know of...
Like it or not, the vast majority of the world uses a keyboard layout closer to that of the US than of Sweden.
Pushing peddles, turning a wheel, and shifting a stick into different positions didn't have many parallels to real-life actions before the automobile was invented, but people learned that UI regardless.
Giving some basics is not an unreasonable way to get people into the 21st century. People can take it from there.
...of course, perhaps the problem with the above is the assumption that they've had a chance to watch someone drive!
But there's also a lot of shallow knowledge among the digital natives -- kids who've grown up in a world where there have always been computers, GUIs, Google, YouTube, or now, even Facebook and other social networks.
They know the basics, they're not afraid of them, but unless they've either been taught or are self-motivated to explore, discover, and learn, they are rote users, not informed users.
Yeah, but having a device instantly find something for you among a stack of 100 pages also has no parallel to real-life searching. The parallel to real life searching is paging through pages one by one, or browsing an index - precisely the things we're trying to get away from.
If you stretch your search for metaphors too far you end up with outdated ones nobody knows about - like for searching it'd be the old library card catalog. Heck even today, I bet a majority of computer uses have never used a filing cabinet with documents in folders.
At some point we have to create new metaphors, when the digital realm create opportunities that never existed in the real world
It's time we started using technology like adults, instead of children. The UI may be far from perfect, but the end user is the bottleneck here.
The ctrl-F issue is a perfect example: the problem is not that people don't know the key combination or that the UI is bad, the problem is the they can not imagine such blatantly obvious functionality would be there in the first place. If they did, they would have found the damn keys/icons/gestures, no matter how obscure.
Imagine instead that you are viewing an image in a photo viewer that has some text. Would you think to ctrl+f that? I wouldn't. The end-user you're referring to doesn't know the difference between the two scenarios.
Not very obvious. I just can't remember this one.
My point is that software offers possibilities that go way beyond our real-life experience; there might not always exist a good real-world metaphor for all useful operations, at which point education becomes crucial.
I think being "intuitive" and being easily discoverable are not the same thing for UI, and designers pay too much attention to the former while ignoring the latter. For example, command line options for Unix programs are not intuitive at all, but they are very easy to discover via a standard mechanism that most system users are familiar with (man).
Good interfaces communicate thing to the user. "Natural" interfaces only use things that have already been communicated or otherwise learned, which makes them much less flexible.
I rather strongly disagree. You're essentially saying: we should limiting the capabilities of tools (regardless of whether they are electronic or not) to things that already have a direct and obvious parallel to previously existing things that are wholly obvious.
That essentially means: we should stop all progress. Absolutely not. Human beings are tool users, and tool _makers_. We make new tools to serve new problems. We learn how to use them. Via this mechanism, we advance.
Intuitively, people with a decent mental model of how text is processed by computers would expect that the computer could search through that text, and look for a command in the program to do that. But many people's mental model is that they are looking through a sheet of paper displayed on the screen.
How to change this is going to be difficult.
He's not a programmer, but still. Wow.