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Education Operating Systems

Most People Have Never Heard of CTRL+F 567

Hugh Pickens writes "Google search anthropologist Dan Russell says that 90 percent of people in his studies don't know how to use CTRL/Command + F to find a word in a document or web page. 'I do these field studies and I can't tell you how many hours I've sat in somebody's house as they've read through a long document trying to find the result they're looking for,' says Russell, who has studied thousands of people on how they search for stuff. 'At the end I'll say to them, "Let me show one little trick here," and very often people will say, "I can't believe I've been wasting my life!"' Just like we learn to skim tables of content or look through an index or just skim chapter titles to find what we're looking for, we need to teach people about this CTRL+F thing, says Alexis Madrigal. 'I probably use that trick 20 times per day and yet the vast majority of people don't use it at all,' writes Madrigal. 'We're talking about the future of almost all knowledge acquisition and yet schools don't spend nearly as much time on this skill as they do on other equally important areas.'"
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Most People Have Never Heard of CTRL+F

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  • by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20, 2011 @08:37AM (#37152304)

    what is ctrl+V for?

    It installs Windows over your lonely little OS.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20, 2011 @08:42AM (#37152348)

    more or less, yes.

  • by WrongSizeGlass ( 838941 ) on Saturday August 20, 2011 @09:46AM (#37152794)

    In other words, some interactions with external systems are irreversible. But this can be worked around whenever the interactions can run as a batch as opposed to interactively. For example, an e-mail client can implement undo send by holding the message in the outbox for several minutes before actually sending it.

    Users who cannot grasp what "undo" does will be overwhelmed by the concepts of "batch processing" and "delayed email". Many already have enough trouble with "the trash is just another folder".

    When trying to see things from the average user's perspective just have someone kick you in the balls while you're sniffing glue. That should result in a relatively accurate POV.

Today is a good day for information-gathering. Read someone else's mail file.

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