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.'"
Learn your AVC's (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Learn your AVC's (Score:5, Insightful)
Except the modern office suite software has made Ctrl-V useless and annoying, copying styles that have nothing to do with your paste target and often messing it up in the process. So instead you have to either click through menus or find a far more awkward key combo to "paste without formatting."
Re:Learn your AVC's (Score:3, Insightful)
I have been trying this on Windows 2008 servers the last few weeks to copy-paste files in Explorer - CTRL+c and CTRL+v doesn't seem to work reliably.
Then there is the headache that various specialty programs seemingly implement CRTL+f differently (Outlook? - Forward instead of Find) or simply not at all.
So "Study finds people have not heard of CTRL+f" could just as well be "Study finds people stop relying on unreliable keyboard short-cuts due to developer inconsistencies".
Fundamentally (Score:5, Insightful)
Fundamentally people need to be taught that mindless repetitive tasks are something that the computer can do for them. That the computers are the slaves.
Most people don't know shit (Score:4, Insightful)
Look, I don't want to get off on a rant here, but most people don't know their ass from... hey, what's that in the ground over there? When they go to perform a new task their first question isn't "how easy is this?" but "why are you trying to hard to read that word? are you a fag?" Most people are not aware of too many things, but they know what they know, and aren't remotely interested in learning anything outside of their world view.
Some people are different. They want to learn for the sake of learning. We call them geeks, or nerds. Or, when they are coming on all superior to some non-nerd, they are called an asshole.
Maybe applications need to find a less obtrusive way of popping up hints, because most users need them; they won't go looking. Shit, it took me months to get my lady, who is quite intelligent, to take the windows tour. Once she did, much was revealed that was formerly opaque.
Finally, have you ever noticed how many people don't even have the basic computer skills in their job description? I've found this to be especially egregious in academia. Explaining basic Office functions to a counselor for the 23523312th time is tiring, to say the least. Isn't this a school? Aren't there classes for this crap that you could take for free? Whoever is pretending to manage these assholes needs to fuck off immediately.
Re:iPads (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Stable user interface ? (Score:4, Insightful)
In other crude terms, there is a lot of idiots out there.
Re:1/2 (Score:5, Insightful)
No, half the population is NOT necessarily below average; that's only true when there's a normal distribution.
Hint: Most people have an above-average number of legs.
this is why I want out of IT (Score:5, Insightful)
Hell, most people can't tell the difference between a crookedly scanned all-image PDF and a Word document.
Then there are the clients who have shit fits when I tell them I can't make a 50 page fax that's obviously a print-out of an Excel or Word document go *bloop* into a database and that I need the actual file emailed to me otherwise I'll have to give them a data entry charge.
Yes, I've heard of OCR. I haven't heard of OCR that works well enough.
Re:Undo send (Score:5, Insightful)
Users who cannot grasp what "undo" does will be overwhelmed by the concepts of "batch processing" and "delayed email".
I guess this is one of the problems with the desktop metaphor in the post-paper era: people who haven't worked with paper have no reference point for the metaphors. For example, people who have never worked a desk job in the paper era don't know what an outbox is because they've never seen one.
Better skills (Score:4, Insightful)
A better skill to teach is menu exploration. Find, Select All, Undo, Replace, and a zillion application-specific gems are in the menus, together with their shortcuts. An even better meta-skill is generic program exploration, with an emphasis on not screwing things up. When I encounter a new program for the first time, I always find the Settings/Preferences/Options and at least glance through them. If it's a type of program I'm not familiar with I definitely look through the menus. I right click places that might be right-clickable and explore the ensuing context menus, I try double clicking, I sometimes try control-clicking, and I generally see what the program does in response to standard inputs. Some people seem to think I have magical abilities when they watch me run a program I've never encountered before, but they just miss the conventions and tests that I don't. Most people are capable of picking up on these skills pretty quickly if they're given some examples and told what's going on.
Conclusion (Score:5, Insightful)
We live around 90% slouches who would rather waste thousand of hours in the future than take 10 minutes now to learn to use a piece software correctly. The same applies to touch typing, but also eating junk, shopping with a 20% APY credit, etc. High time preference leads to social decay. Now stay out of my lawn.
Re:Better skills (Score:4, Insightful)
Or just paste this handy graphic [xkcd.com] on the wall and just mutely point to it when Luser has a question.