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From a UX point of view, what would be the downsides of just rendering a plain text file of 1 number per line in alphanumeric order? Does this really need any

From a UX point of view, what would be the downsides of just rendering a plain text file of 1 number per line in alphanumeric order? Does this really need any more UI than the browser’s chrome? Not every web user knows “ctrl+f” or “find in page” on their phone, but those that don’t, do still know how to scroll 74,000 lines of ordered numbers (which is surprisingly easy and fast - i just tried scrolling 74k lines in excel on mobile). The one use case i’m thinking might be confounded is a screen reader for the visually impaired or blind but even then, i’m thinking this use case is probably covered?

ghusbands 5y ago
The typical user, faced with a huge sorted list of phone numbers and asked to just look through it, will not know how to find a number of interest and will quite possibly be quite flustered or irritated. It's not technologically hard to implement a search, so I don't see a reason to only show a big list. Having all the numbers visible in the page would certainly help it show up in web-search results for those phone numbers, though.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  True. Overassessment of general literacy (the reading kind, not computer or maths literacy) is exceedingly common in technical fields. Averag computer skills are abysmal. About 5% of computer users have "advanced" literacy, defined as "Some navigation across pages and applications is required to solve the problem. The use of tools (e.g. a sort function) is required to make progress towards the solution. The task may involve multiple steps and operators. The goal of the problem may have to be defined by the respondent, and the criteria to be met may or may not be explicit" Scheduling a meeting room, or determining "what percentage of the emails sent by John Smith last month were about sustainability" are examples of level-3 tasks. A quarter of the adult population cannot use computers at all, 14% are at "below level-1" skills, and 30% can only perform very basic level-1 tasks, for a total of 70% of the population which has only very basic skills ... or less. It's easy to over-estimate the general literacy and numeracy of the population, especially if you yourself are college-educated and work in and/or with information technology. The United States performs one of the most comprehensive assessments of adult literacy. *The key lesson for me is just how limited it is.* https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179/index.asp https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179/index.asp The findings correspond highly to a study of adult computer literacy amongst 20 countries by the OECD: "Skills Matter: Further Results from the Survey of Adult Skills" http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264258051-en http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264258051-en Computer usability expert Jacob Nielsen has a discussion of this as well: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/ I've discussed this as "The Tyranny of the Minimum Viable User", which both notes that much of the population has very basic skills, and that this also hampers the very small minority who do. https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/69wk8y/the_tyranny_of_the_minimum_viable_user/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/69wk8y/the_tyr...
rhn_mk1 5y ago
Rendering files megabytes in size is quite bad in a browser. I'm not sure of the reason, but it fires up slowly, and I suspect memory usage is also quite bad.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  > and I suspect memory usage is also quite bad. For a text file? Why?? Wouldn't the worst case be the size of the file?
  - rhn_mk1 5y ago
    The browser isn't optimized for text files though, but for documents and applications. I've noticed some flickering while scrolling longer pages before, and from that I expect that there's some caching of the rendered content of the page. The text file also gets transformed into a html document with DOM (inspect one in Firefox to see), which likely has its own caching tricks for performance.
orf 5y ago
> From a UX point of view, what would be the downsides of just rendering a plain text file of 1 number per line in alphanumeric order? It surprises me that you need to ask that
hallway_monitor 5y ago
I made an unrequested but useful internal web app recently and added a 'Search' link. Clicking the link popped dialog that said 'Press Control-F to search'
- danuker 5y ago
  I imagine once you get a bug report for the search feature, it's going to be hard to fix :)

ghusbands 5y ago

The typical user, faced with a huge sorted list of phone numbers and asked to just look through it, will not know how to find a number of interest and will quite possibly be quite flustered or irritated. It's not technologically hard to implement a search, so I don't see a reason to only show a big list. Having all the numbers visible in the page would certainly help it show up in web-search results for those phone numbers, though.

dredmorbius 5y ago
True. Overassessment of general literacy (the reading kind, not computer or maths literacy) is exceedingly common in technical fields. Averag computer skills are abysmal. About 5% of computer users have "advanced" literacy, defined as "Some navigation across pages and applications is required to solve the problem. The use of tools (e.g. a sort function) is required to make progress towards the solution. The task may involve multiple steps and operators. The goal of the problem may have to be defined by the respondent, and the criteria to be met may or may not be explicit" Scheduling a meeting room, or determining "what percentage of the emails sent by John Smith last month were about sustainability" are examples of level-3 tasks. A quarter of the adult population cannot use computers at all, 14% are at "below level-1" skills, and 30% can only perform very basic level-1 tasks, for a total of 70% of the population which has only very basic skills ... or less. It's easy to over-estimate the general literacy and numeracy of the population, especially if you yourself are college-educated and work in and/or with information technology. The United States performs one of the most comprehensive assessments of adult literacy. *The key lesson for me is just how limited it is.* https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179/index.asp https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179/index.asp The findings correspond highly to a study of adult computer literacy amongst 20 countries by the OECD: "Skills Matter: Further Results from the Survey of Adult Skills" http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264258051-en http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264258051-en Computer usability expert Jacob Nielsen has a discussion of this as well: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/ I've discussed this as "The Tyranny of the Minimum Viable User", which both notes that much of the population has very basic skills, and that this also hampers the very small minority who do. https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/69wk8y/the_tyranny_of_the_minimum_viable_user/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/69wk8y/the_tyr...

rhn_mk1 5y ago

Rendering files megabytes in size is quite bad in a browser. I'm not sure of the reason, but it fires up slowly, and I suspect memory usage is also quite bad.

thaumasiotes 5y ago
> and I suspect memory usage is also quite bad. For a text file? Why?? Wouldn't the worst case be the size of the file?
- rhn_mk1 5y ago
  The browser isn't optimized for text files though, but for documents and applications. I've noticed some flickering while scrolling longer pages before, and from that I expect that there's some caching of the rendered content of the page. The text file also gets transformed into a html document with DOM (inspect one in Firefox to see), which likely has its own caching tricks for performance.

orf 5y ago

> From a UX point of view, what would be the downsides of just rendering a plain text file of 1 number per line in alphanumeric order? It surprises me that you need to ask that

hallway_monitor 5y ago

I made an unrequested but useful internal web app recently and added a 'Search' link. Clicking the link popped dialog that said 'Press Control-F to search'

danuker 5y ago
I imagine once you get a bug report for the search feature, it's going to be hard to fix :)