29 ms·

Every search bar looks like a URL bar to users

360 points by edent 5y ago

krono 5y ago
Those closing lines are applicable to so many other things, I like it! - [Users/Drivers/Students] don't really understand [interfaces/traffic/life] - [Computers/infrastructure/schools] don't really understand [users/drivers/students] - [Big Data/City Planners/Education Dept.] assumes that [users/drivers/students] are behaving in semi-rational manner
- Gigachad 5y ago
  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.
  - krono 5y ago
    Indeed, and come to think of it, this not just limits itself to humans, but also ant colonies or even the universe if you want to get really deep. It is like the most meta description of how things are that I believe anyone has ever come up with!
Wowfunhappy 5y ago
I wonder if this is entirely what it seems. If I type www.i, I get links to specific products on Ikea.com. I assume what's happening is, someone finds a product on Ikea and wants to see if it's on Amazon, and instead of searching for the product name, they just copy and paste the URL.
picture 5y ago
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.
- booleandilemma 5y ago
  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.
  - Torwald 5y ago
    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.
  - JadeNB 5y ago
    > 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.)
- ocdtrekkie 5y ago
  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.
- dylan604 5y ago
  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.
judge2020 5y ago
The amazon.com results are only slightly different compared to co.uk: https://i.judge.sh/verifiable/Glimglam/chrome_LrAiLBZiPM.png https://i.judge.sh/verifiable/Glimglam/chrome_LrAiLBZiPM.png
vadfa 5y ago
What I find more troubling is that amazon allows unmoderated user input to appear as suggestions.
- buu700 5y ago
  Seems fine as long as no one tells 4chan.
  - anotheraccount9 5y ago
    kek
  - rootsudo 5y ago
    Whoops. But also, interesting.
- marginalia_nu 5y ago
  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.
  - jikbd 5y ago
    They were probably trying to post spam and thought your search bar was a comment input field.
    - marginalia_nu 5y ago
      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.
grayfaced 5y ago
https://catpics.foo https://catpics.foo
- djrockstar1 5y ago
  I feel like I just failed some security test by clicking on a random standalone link because I believed it would lead to cat pics.
  - Noumenon72 5y ago
    What does it lead to?
    - lowlevel 5y ago
      Disappointment.
marginalia_nu 5y ago
We mostly learn by trial and error. So do users need to be shielded from making mistakes?
- dylan604 5y ago
  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.
athenot 5y ago
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.
- reayn 5y ago
  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.
  - llaolleh 5y ago
    Chrome rolled out that update on mobile but for whatever reason they rolled it back. It's a much better design choice imo when you get used to it.
  - Semaphor 5y ago
    What does it do better than Firefox Mobile? It has all settings, URL bar, and tabs at the bottom as well.
    - reayn 5y ago
      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. I also love the icon :P 0. https://hyperweb.app https://hyperweb.app
    - causi 5y ago
      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.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
phkahler 5y ago
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.
- mfext 5y ago
  Actually it was Mozilla
  - nathancahill 5y ago
    Firefox 3. The "AwesomeBar". https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/a-little-something-awesome-about-firefox-3/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/a-little-something-aweso... 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-bar.html https://www.userchrome.org/megabar-styling-firefox-address-b...
    - lowlevel 5y ago
      I think this is because AwesomeBar had a design goal of helping end users instead of total global search domination. Just a hunch.
- londons_explore 5y ago
  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. For me, zero results.
  - phkahler 5y ago
justusthane 5y ago
Alternatively, "Every URL bar looks like a search bar to users."
- zo1 5y ago
  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.
  - thrower123 5y ago
    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.
    - dylan604 5y ago
      my favorite least favorite is hiding everything but the domain. clearly, nothing useful can come from displaying anything after the TLD.
      - denton-scratch 5y ago
        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.
    - Miraste 5y ago
      Ah, but users know they're not connected through ftp because we deleted it from the browser!
- JohnWhigham 5y ago
ltbarcly3 5y ago
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.
- ziggus 5y ago
  https://www.karger.com/Article/Fulltext/339104 https://www.karger.com/Article/Fulltext/339104
  - ltbarcly3 5y ago
    Did you read the article? 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.
- coldtea 5y ago
  >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.
  - rchaud 5y ago
    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
swayvil 5y ago
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.
- josefx 5y ago
  > Search bar is superclass of url bar? 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.
balozi 5y ago
This is bound to happen when you do away with UI controls labels.
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
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.
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  Worth remembering is that Amazon has the metrics to know how useful this change was to end-users. I'd be willing to wager that a scan of their search logs for how often "http:// http://" shows up in them is a non-negligible amount.
- dhosek 5y ago
  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).
  - Tostino 5y ago
    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.
rosseloh 5y ago
On phone support calls I usually can't even get people who know what a URL, URL bar, or even a search bar, is in the first place. "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...
- 3np 5y ago
  > I'm computer illiterate, I can't learn any of this fancy tech stuff. 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.
  - thrashh 5y ago
    Pretty much everyone is like this somewhere though. Not many people eagerly learn in every domain.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - JohnWhigham 5y ago
    People get old and obstinate. It's sad but at the end of the day, they choose to be like this.
    - jabroni_salad 5y ago
      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. https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-direc...
tobr 5y ago
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.
- philote 5y ago
  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.
- rudian 5y ago
  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.
  - oAlbe 5y ago
    > three-dimensionally 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.
gingerlime 5y ago
Interesting though that Amazon keeps (suggests?) https://ebay.co.uk https://ebay.co.uk ;-)
- mavhc 5y ago
  that's nothing: https://imgur.com/a/cobItWw https://imgur.com/a/cobItWw
marstall 5y ago
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.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
asow92 5y ago
https://isthismyinternetbar.com/?thisIsAJoke=true https://isthismyinternetbar.com/?thisIsAJoke=true
simpleguitar 5y ago
> Every search bar looks like a URL bar to users 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.
WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
file:// results indicate iPhone users ref: https://i.postimg.cc/GmKmd2GH/amazonsearch.jpg https://i.postimg.cc/GmKmd2GH/amazonsearch.jpg edit: then there's this clue https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R28STJLEYYUTF https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R28STJLEYYUTF
karaterobot 5y ago
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.
- judge2020 5y ago
  amzn.to is the shortdomain for affiliate links, so perhaps the autocomplete was a poisoned entry by whoever made that url :)
SubiculumCode 5y ago
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.
EEMac 5y ago
"My search engine is Safari." - My dad
Mikeb85 5y ago
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.
- bantunes 5y ago
  You're not in the percentage of users that has a problem with it (that I'd put in the high 70s or 80s).
  - Mikeb85 5y ago
    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.
  - Adrig 5y ago
    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.
  - google234123 5y ago
    I'd put in the high 0.70s or 0.80s
cletus 5y ago
This is a good example of making the mistake of conflating implementation details and user interface design. Firefox always had two boxes: URL bar and search. One of the big changes Chrome made when it was born was to have the Omnibar, being of course one bar that does both. If you think about this as an engineer, Firefox's design decision makes sense. You don't want to accidentally leak things to a search engine. URLs and search bars are just different. There are also corner cases where you're not sure if something is a URL or a search term, mostly to do with intranets (eg "go/foo" can be a URL internally). But users don't care about any of that. Users don't have the mental model to differentiate search terms and a URL. Chrome's decision was correct. It's surprising how long Firefox stuck with their bad (IMHO) design. Here's another example of this: IIRC one of the most frequently searched terms on Google is "facebook". Tech-savvy people will just type "facebook.com" but users will just search for "facebook" and click on the (hopefully) first result. That happens a ton. So the lesson is don't leak technical and implementation details into interface design. Your users don't care about any of that. Think like a user, not an engineer.
- samsolomon 5y ago
  This is is an unpopular opinion on a place like Hacker News, but it is correct. Users want access to the information they are looking for as quickly and frictionlessly as possible—the omni bar does just that.
  - megous 5y ago
    ctrl+k and I know I'll be searching in a web search engine ctrl+l and I know I'll be opening an URL and if the domain doesn't exist it will fail I can't really count anymore how often omnibar just searched for some local domain I tried to type in, in a search engine, instead of just telling me that domain doesn't exist because I made a typo or whatever. Having to type https:// https:// in front of every URL is also not very pleasant, especially on mobile phones. Also browsers assuming that anything outside of PSL is to be searched in a search engine right away instead of resolved as a domain, is another annoyance for this user. At least the browser could be less stupid and consider local search domains part of PSL, but no. So whether omnibar is more of a hindrance than help depends on the user/use case. I also kinda like the distinction that ctrl+l is only searching locally in bookmarks/history and ctrl+k is public search.
pepegascon 5y ago
estic super en contra de tot això
silisili 5y ago
Am I the only one more thoroughly confused by Amazon's double search bars on the orders page? Specifically mobile web, I think. When you click orders, you essentially have three inputs - URL bar, Amazon search, and Amazon search orders. More than 50% of the time I go to search something in my orders, I end up typing it in the Amazon search bar and kicking off a new search. So, count me as a statistic of someone dumb enough to be confused by text inputs.
elgernon 5y ago
I always use search for url lookup, it's way more forgiving ( with spellcheck etc) it's nothing to do with tech literacy, it just allows for faster finding of what you need
stayux 5y ago
Long time ago (2006) I had a client who wanted their educational web-site (Provider of e-signature) to be created with user centric design first approach. I had a vast interest in the topic due to my exposure to Nielsen Norman Group teachings and research based UX. In one of the test I introduced a big search field positioned in the top of the screen with clear contrast as a starting UX point. The test failed miserably. People rejected the notion that they must type, mostly of _fear_ of making a mistake. As a result all the data suggested that the targeted audience will feel comfortable with "precompiled" list of important topics as a UX starting point. After carefully creating adequate structure I introduced 9 starting points and solved the problem. /Warning: Cyrillic / Retro UI/ (https://web.archive.org/web/20080820012158/http://www.b-trust.org/index.php https://web.archive.org/web/20080820012158/http://www.b-trus...) This was in the time when most of the users associated Internet with the blue "e" icon of Internet Explorer. I think that this mindset is still present. Users in general are in the same space. Facebook icon replaced the IE icon successfully.
ROARosen 5y ago
> And, yes, I used an incognito browser so it wouldn't be polluted with my own demented midnight searches for corrugated iron flavoured pogo sticks. Yeah right! Since when does 'using Incognito' prevent Amazon from tracking you in thousand different ways?
MarkLowenstein 5y ago
How many of us have had the inverse of this problem? We go to a browser's URL & search bar, and we paste in what we think is a URL...but then we failed to copy the "h" at the beginning so it regards the whole thing as a Google search for the remainder of our URL? I'm sure tons of internal, proprietary URLs have been exposed this way.
CmdrKrool 5y ago
It's desperately out of fashion now, but remember having one's toolbar in the mode of "icons and text"? Giving you both the buttons, and a little label under each like "New", "Open", "Save", etc. Why not just have that in this case, ie. a little "URL" label under the address bar and a "Search" label under the other one. Even if a phrase like "URL" is jargon to a newbie, once they've seen it up there for long enough in context with actual URLs they'll pick up a feel for it. That's how straightforward user education used to work. We all had to be shown and told, that this thing is called this, and that thing is called that, at some point. Finally when these aids are no longer needed, and one cares to shave a few pixels off their toolbar, they just right-click -> "Show icons only", and carry on in new-found independence and style. How did this simple sequence of learning get so deprecated.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  > Why not just have that in this case, ie. a little "URL" label under the address bar and a "Search" label under the other one. Even if a phrase like "URL" is jargon to a newbie... So in stead of putting a little "URL" label under the address bar, let's put a little "Address" label under the URL bar.
elzbardico 5y ago
I believe that a lot of those mistakes are also caused by flat designs. Sometimes is very difficult to visually see the difference between the page and browser UI. Enable compact layout on Safari and Open Hacker News. What is HN? What is Chrome? It all looks the friggin' same. No clear hints other than spacing and position.
syngrog66 5y ago
classic trade-off between security/privacy and convenience
bo1024 5y ago
I think what's happening is people not understanding what http:// http:// means. They think it's a magic invocation that one uses to tell computers "take me to the following". Maybe. Anyway, I disagree with some other responses here -- good UI should help teach users what they need to know to navigate effectively. Things should be as simple as possible, but not simpler. If you believe it's possible to effectively use the web without knowing what a web site is or which web site you're on at any moment, then yes, you might design the omnibar and you might hide the URL details in the address bar. (Or if you benefit financially from people's ignorance.) But if you think users should know these things to effectively and safely navigate the web, then ideally your UI should not only empower knowledgeable users but help inform non-knowledgeable ones.
Tagbert 5y ago
The YouTube app on iOS (and I assume Android) extends this. If you have a url to a YouTube video that you want to open in the app, you past it in the search bar and it returns the associated video.
KingMachiavelli 5y ago
Well it is a nice feature of most applications that they will accept their app/domain URLs as an alternative to having it passed as a parameter by the OS. I think it is discord that supports this. One app that doesn't is Zoom which makes you extract the meeting ID and password from the URL manually. But in the OPs case I think the issue is users have alternative search engines and somehow URLs occasionally are 'prefetched' using incorrect search providers.
gumby 5y ago
> Computers would be so much better if they never had to deal with users, amirite?!!? The rot goes deeper. I/O sucks. My beautiful code ends up being sullied by some shitty in code that is smaller, buggier, and takes longer to write. The best programs should not need to do any I/O.
musicale 5y ago
Maybe we should use simpler pathnames in web browsers. I'd be fine with something logical like: /com/ycombinator/news/every-search-bar-looks-like-a-url-bar-to-users.html That would be closer to Linux/macOS/Windows pathnames, which many users will have encountered before. For new paths you could use an incremental lookup scheme to reduce data leakage via typos, and previously used prefixes could be cached for speed. Personally I'd be fine if search entries required an explicit '?' and if search autocompletion was turned off by default.
remram 5y ago
Mistakes happen. What am I supposed to deduce from the fact that Amazon engineers didn't remove those URLs from the suggestion data? That Amazon engineers can't differentiate search from URL either? This seems like a very quick conclusion from the author. You don't know how many people have typed `https://www.amazon.co.uk https://www.amazon.co.uk`. Obviously typing the `https://www.a https://www.a` would only show those possible completions, but how many times has it been entered really? Not that I think most users are particularly computer literate, this just seems like a very weird anecdote to use as basis for a "ah! see???" blog post.
gorgoiler 5y ago
Reminds me of Ed Balls Day: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Balls#Ed_Balls_Day https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Balls#Ed_Balls_Day In 2011 [celebrity UK politician] Balls accidentally entered his intended search term in the wrong box and sent a tweet reading only "Ed Balls". The tweet was retweeted by thousands and has never been deleted.
alex_young 5y ago
I'm not convinced by this explanation of Amazon's search suggestions. Are we really saying that there are lots of users who not only confuse the Amazon interface for a browser, but also enter URLs replete with https:// https:// at the beginning? It seems much more likely that Amazon includes their product URLs in their suggestion set.
godDLL 5y ago
Yeah, that really happens. And it's not like there hasn't been enough time for a whole new generation to come up having those things around them from the start. So it's not about education. People don't care to know the difference, even if they come up to the limits of their understanding of things. They much rather find someone with better understanding, and let them mediate. Those people can't be helped with the tools of UX/UI. They can somewhat be aided by good IA, but that too is limited. There will always be a portion of users that need a mediator, periodically. That's OK.

360 points by edent 5y ago

Those closing lines are applicable to so many other things, I like it! - [Users/Drivers/Students] don't really understand [interfaces/traffic/life] - [Computers/infrastructure/schools] don't really understand [users/drivers/students] - [Big Data/City Planners/Education Dept.] assumes that [users/drivers/students] are behaving in semi-rational manner

Gigachad 5y ago
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.
- krono 5y ago
  Indeed, and come to think of it, this not just limits itself to humans, but also ant colonies or even the universe if you want to get really deep. It is like the most meta description of how things are that I believe anyone has ever come up with!

Wowfunhappy 5y ago

I wonder if this is entirely what it seems. If I type www.i, I get links to specific products on Ikea.com. I assume what's happening is, someone finds a product on Ikea and wants to see if it's on Amazon, and instead of searching for the product name, they just copy and paste the URL.

picture 5y ago

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.

booleandilemma 5y ago
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.
- Torwald 5y ago
  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.
- JadeNB 5y ago
  > 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.)
ocdtrekkie 5y ago
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.
dylan604 5y ago
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.

judge2020 5y ago

The amazon.com results are only slightly different compared to co.uk: https://i.judge.sh/verifiable/Glimglam/chrome_LrAiLBZiPM.png https://i.judge.sh/verifiable/Glimglam/chrome_LrAiLBZiPM.png

vadfa 5y ago

What I find more troubling is that amazon allows unmoderated user input to appear as suggestions.

buu700 5y ago
Seems fine as long as no one tells 4chan.
- anotheraccount9 5y ago
  kek
- rootsudo 5y ago
  Whoops. But also, interesting.
marginalia_nu 5y ago
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.
- jikbd 5y ago
  They were probably trying to post spam and thought your search bar was a comment input field.
  - marginalia_nu 5y ago
    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.

grayfaced 5y ago

https://catpics.foo https://catpics.foo

djrockstar1 5y ago
I feel like I just failed some security test by clicking on a random standalone link because I believed it would lead to cat pics.
- Noumenon72 5y ago
  What does it lead to?
  - lowlevel 5y ago
    Disappointment.

marginalia_nu 5y ago

We mostly learn by trial and error. So do users need to be shielded from making mistakes?

dylan604 5y ago
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.

athenot 5y ago

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.

reayn 5y ago
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.
- llaolleh 5y ago
  Chrome rolled out that update on mobile but for whatever reason they rolled it back. It's a much better design choice imo when you get used to it.
- Semaphor 5y ago
  What does it do better than Firefox Mobile? It has all settings, URL bar, and tabs at the bottom as well.
  - reayn 5y ago
    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. I also love the icon :P 0. https://hyperweb.app https://hyperweb.app
  - causi 5y ago
    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.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

phkahler 5y ago

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.

mfext 5y ago
Actually it was Mozilla
- nathancahill 5y ago
  Firefox 3. The "AwesomeBar". https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/a-little-something-awesome-about-firefox-3/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/a-little-something-aweso... 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-bar.html https://www.userchrome.org/megabar-styling-firefox-address-b...
  - lowlevel 5y ago
    I think this is because AwesomeBar had a design goal of helping end users instead of total global search domination. Just a hunch.
londons_explore 5y ago
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. For me, zero results.
- phkahler 5y ago

justusthane 5y ago

Alternatively, "Every URL bar looks like a search bar to users."

zo1 5y ago
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.
- thrower123 5y ago
  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.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    my favorite least favorite is hiding everything but the domain. clearly, nothing useful can come from displaying anything after the TLD.
    - denton-scratch 5y ago
      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.
  - Miraste 5y ago
    Ah, but users know they're not connected through ftp because we deleted it from the browser!
JohnWhigham 5y ago

ltbarcly3 5y ago

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.

ziggus 5y ago
https://www.karger.com/Article/Fulltext/339104 https://www.karger.com/Article/Fulltext/339104
- ltbarcly3 5y ago
  Did you read the article? 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.
coldtea 5y ago
>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.
- rchaud 5y ago
  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

swayvil 5y ago

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.

josefx 5y ago
> Search bar is superclass of url bar? 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.

balozi 5y ago

This is bound to happen when you do away with UI controls labels.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

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.

shadowgovt 5y ago
Worth remembering is that Amazon has the metrics to know how useful this change was to end-users. I'd be willing to wager that a scan of their search logs for how often "http:// http://" shows up in them is a non-negligible amount.
dhosek 5y ago
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).
- Tostino 5y ago
  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.

rosseloh 5y ago

On phone support calls I usually can't even get people who know what a URL, URL bar, or even a search bar, is in the first place. "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...

3np 5y ago
> I'm computer illiterate, I can't learn any of this fancy tech stuff. 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.
- thrashh 5y ago
  Pretty much everyone is like this somewhere though. Not many people eagerly learn in every domain.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- JohnWhigham 5y ago
  People get old and obstinate. It's sad but at the end of the day, they choose to be like this.
  - jabroni_salad 5y ago
    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. https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-direc...

tobr 5y ago

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.

philote 5y ago
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.
rudian 5y ago
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.
- oAlbe 5y ago
  > three-dimensionally 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.

gingerlime 5y ago

Interesting though that Amazon keeps (suggests?) https://ebay.co.uk https://ebay.co.uk ;-)

mavhc 5y ago
that's nothing: https://imgur.com/a/cobItWw https://imgur.com/a/cobItWw

marstall 5y ago

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.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

asow92 5y ago

https://isthismyinternetbar.com/?thisIsAJoke=true https://isthismyinternetbar.com/?thisIsAJoke=true

simpleguitar 5y ago

> Every search bar looks like a URL bar to users 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.

WarOnPrivacy 5y ago

file:// results indicate iPhone users ref: https://i.postimg.cc/GmKmd2GH/amazonsearch.jpg https://i.postimg.cc/GmKmd2GH/amazonsearch.jpg edit: then there's this clue https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R28STJLEYYUTF https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R28STJLEYYUTF

karaterobot 5y ago

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.

judge2020 5y ago
amzn.to is the shortdomain for affiliate links, so perhaps the autocomplete was a poisoned entry by whoever made that url :)

SubiculumCode 5y ago

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.

EEMac 5y ago

"My search engine is Safari." - My dad

Mikeb85 5y ago

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.

bantunes 5y ago
You're not in the percentage of users that has a problem with it (that I'd put in the high 70s or 80s).
- Mikeb85 5y ago
  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.
- Adrig 5y ago
  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.
- google234123 5y ago
  I'd put in the high 0.70s or 0.80s

cletus 5y ago

This is a good example of making the mistake of conflating implementation details and user interface design. Firefox always had two boxes: URL bar and search. One of the big changes Chrome made when it was born was to have the Omnibar, being of course one bar that does both. If you think about this as an engineer, Firefox's design decision makes sense. You don't want to accidentally leak things to a search engine. URLs and search bars are just different. There are also corner cases where you're not sure if something is a URL or a search term, mostly to do with intranets (eg "go/foo" can be a URL internally). But users don't care about any of that. Users don't have the mental model to differentiate search terms and a URL. Chrome's decision was correct. It's surprising how long Firefox stuck with their bad (IMHO) design. Here's another example of this: IIRC one of the most frequently searched terms on Google is "facebook". Tech-savvy people will just type "facebook.com" but users will just search for "facebook" and click on the (hopefully) first result. That happens a ton. So the lesson is don't leak technical and implementation details into interface design. Your users don't care about any of that. Think like a user, not an engineer.

samsolomon 5y ago
This is is an unpopular opinion on a place like Hacker News, but it is correct. Users want access to the information they are looking for as quickly and frictionlessly as possible—the omni bar does just that.
- megous 5y ago
  ctrl+k and I know I'll be searching in a web search engine ctrl+l and I know I'll be opening an URL and if the domain doesn't exist it will fail I can't really count anymore how often omnibar just searched for some local domain I tried to type in, in a search engine, instead of just telling me that domain doesn't exist because I made a typo or whatever. Having to type https:// https:// in front of every URL is also not very pleasant, especially on mobile phones. Also browsers assuming that anything outside of PSL is to be searched in a search engine right away instead of resolved as a domain, is another annoyance for this user. At least the browser could be less stupid and consider local search domains part of PSL, but no. So whether omnibar is more of a hindrance than help depends on the user/use case. I also kinda like the distinction that ctrl+l is only searching locally in bookmarks/history and ctrl+k is public search.

pepegascon 5y ago

estic super en contra de tot això

silisili 5y ago

Am I the only one more thoroughly confused by Amazon's double search bars on the orders page? Specifically mobile web, I think. When you click orders, you essentially have three inputs - URL bar, Amazon search, and Amazon search orders. More than 50% of the time I go to search something in my orders, I end up typing it in the Amazon search bar and kicking off a new search. So, count me as a statistic of someone dumb enough to be confused by text inputs.

elgernon 5y ago

I always use search for url lookup, it's way more forgiving ( with spellcheck etc) it's nothing to do with tech literacy, it just allows for faster finding of what you need

stayux 5y ago

Long time ago (2006) I had a client who wanted their educational web-site (Provider of e-signature) to be created with user centric design first approach. I had a vast interest in the topic due to my exposure to Nielsen Norman Group teachings and research based UX. In one of the test I introduced a big search field positioned in the top of the screen with clear contrast as a starting UX point. The test failed miserably. People rejected the notion that they must type, mostly of _fear_ of making a mistake. As a result all the data suggested that the targeted audience will feel comfortable with "precompiled" list of important topics as a UX starting point. After carefully creating adequate structure I introduced 9 starting points and solved the problem. /Warning: Cyrillic / Retro UI/ (https://web.archive.org/web/20080820012158/http://www.b-trust.org/index.php https://web.archive.org/web/20080820012158/http://www.b-trus...) This was in the time when most of the users associated Internet with the blue "e" icon of Internet Explorer. I think that this mindset is still present. Users in general are in the same space. Facebook icon replaced the IE icon successfully.

ROARosen 5y ago

> And, yes, I used an incognito browser so it wouldn't be polluted with my own demented midnight searches for corrugated iron flavoured pogo sticks. Yeah right! Since when does 'using Incognito' prevent Amazon from tracking you in thousand different ways?

MarkLowenstein 5y ago

How many of us have had the inverse of this problem? We go to a browser's URL & search bar, and we paste in what we think is a URL...but then we failed to copy the "h" at the beginning so it regards the whole thing as a Google search for the remainder of our URL? I'm sure tons of internal, proprietary URLs have been exposed this way.

CmdrKrool 5y ago

It's desperately out of fashion now, but remember having one's toolbar in the mode of "icons and text"? Giving you both the buttons, and a little label under each like "New", "Open", "Save", etc. Why not just have that in this case, ie. a little "URL" label under the address bar and a "Search" label under the other one. Even if a phrase like "URL" is jargon to a newbie, once they've seen it up there for long enough in context with actual URLs they'll pick up a feel for it. That's how straightforward user education used to work. We all had to be shown and told, that this thing is called this, and that thing is called that, at some point. Finally when these aids are no longer needed, and one cares to shave a few pixels off their toolbar, they just right-click -> "Show icons only", and carry on in new-found independence and style. How did this simple sequence of learning get so deprecated.

CRConrad 5y ago
> Why not just have that in this case, ie. a little "URL" label under the address bar and a "Search" label under the other one. Even if a phrase like "URL" is jargon to a newbie... So in stead of putting a little "URL" label under the address bar, let's put a little "Address" label under the URL bar.

elzbardico 5y ago

I believe that a lot of those mistakes are also caused by flat designs. Sometimes is very difficult to visually see the difference between the page and browser UI. Enable compact layout on Safari and Open Hacker News. What is HN? What is Chrome? It all looks the friggin' same. No clear hints other than spacing and position.

syngrog66 5y ago

classic trade-off between security/privacy and convenience

bo1024 5y ago

I think what's happening is people not understanding what http:// http:// means. They think it's a magic invocation that one uses to tell computers "take me to the following". Maybe. Anyway, I disagree with some other responses here -- good UI should help teach users what they need to know to navigate effectively. Things should be as simple as possible, but not simpler. If you believe it's possible to effectively use the web without knowing what a web site is or which web site you're on at any moment, then yes, you might design the omnibar and you might hide the URL details in the address bar. (Or if you benefit financially from people's ignorance.) But if you think users should know these things to effectively and safely navigate the web, then ideally your UI should not only empower knowledgeable users but help inform non-knowledgeable ones.

Tagbert 5y ago

The YouTube app on iOS (and I assume Android) extends this. If you have a url to a YouTube video that you want to open in the app, you past it in the search bar and it returns the associated video.

KingMachiavelli 5y ago

Well it is a nice feature of most applications that they will accept their app/domain URLs as an alternative to having it passed as a parameter by the OS. I think it is discord that supports this. One app that doesn't is Zoom which makes you extract the meeting ID and password from the URL manually. But in the OPs case I think the issue is users have alternative search engines and somehow URLs occasionally are 'prefetched' using incorrect search providers.

gumby 5y ago

> Computers would be so much better if they never had to deal with users, amirite?!!? The rot goes deeper. I/O sucks. My beautiful code ends up being sullied by some shitty in code that is smaller, buggier, and takes longer to write. The best programs should not need to do any I/O.

musicale 5y ago

Maybe we should use simpler pathnames in web browsers. I'd be fine with something logical like: /com/ycombinator/news/every-search-bar-looks-like-a-url-bar-to-users.html That would be closer to Linux/macOS/Windows pathnames, which many users will have encountered before. For new paths you could use an incremental lookup scheme to reduce data leakage via typos, and previously used prefixes could be cached for speed. Personally I'd be fine if search entries required an explicit '?' and if search autocompletion was turned off by default.

remram 5y ago

Mistakes happen. What am I supposed to deduce from the fact that Amazon engineers didn't remove those URLs from the suggestion data? That Amazon engineers can't differentiate search from URL either? This seems like a very quick conclusion from the author. You don't know how many people have typed `https://www.amazon.co.uk https://www.amazon.co.uk`. Obviously typing the `https://www.a https://www.a` would only show those possible completions, but how many times has it been entered really? Not that I think most users are particularly computer literate, this just seems like a very weird anecdote to use as basis for a "ah! see???" blog post.

gorgoiler 5y ago

Reminds me of Ed Balls Day: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Balls#Ed_Balls_Day https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Balls#Ed_Balls_Day In 2011 [celebrity UK politician] Balls accidentally entered his intended search term in the wrong box and sent a tweet reading only "Ed Balls". The tweet was retweeted by thousands and has never been deleted.

alex_young 5y ago

I'm not convinced by this explanation of Amazon's search suggestions. Are we really saying that there are lots of users who not only confuse the Amazon interface for a browser, but also enter URLs replete with https:// https:// at the beginning? It seems much more likely that Amazon includes their product URLs in their suggestion set.

godDLL 5y ago

Yeah, that really happens. And it's not like there hasn't been enough time for a whole new generation to come up having those things around them from the start. So it's not about education. People don't care to know the difference, even if they come up to the limits of their understanding of things. They much rather find someone with better understanding, and let them mediate. Those people can't be helped with the tools of UX/UI. They can somewhat be aided by good IA, but that too is limited. There will always be a portion of users that need a mediator, periodically. That's OK.