8 ms·

I am going to disagree since I believe that people should have a basic knowledge of the tools they are using. I am not saying that the bar should be particular

by II2II 5y ago

I am going to disagree since I believe that people should have a basic knowledge of the tools they are using. I am not saying that the bar should be particularly high, but being able to differentiate where something is and searching for something is a realistic expectation. That being said, I think developers have made some things more difficult to understand than they should be. While people understand what an address is, calling it a URL adds an extra layer to learn (even if it is just terminology). URLs would also be easier to understand if they were more consistent from the end user's perspective, much like someone's mailing address, rather than an engineer's perspective. I would also argue that the omnibar is designed from the engineer's perspective rather than the end user's perspective. The engineer said something to the effect of, "we can differentiate an address from a search query based upon the format of the input". It sounds good on paper. It sounds like it makes things easier for the user. Yet all that it really accomplishes is creating confusion for the end user since it fails to differentiate two concepts.

sly010 5y ago
There is always a tradeoff between making something better for power users and making it bullet proof for (ab)users. Indeed, chrome strikes a pretty good balance. Also > bar should be particularly high hehe
unsui 5y ago
> believe that people should have a basic knowledge of the tools they are using The whole point of intuitive design is to realize that you shouldn't make your users "think", insofar as making effortful cognition (i.e., Kahneman's "Type 2" thinking). Good design should leverage built-in assumptions of how the world, per users' intuitive mental models, to create affordances that guide users to the desired interaction and behavior. If a design promotes incoherent behavior, it's not the user that's wrong; getting users to change intuitive behavior requires training and cognitive effort. Sadly, why vim and emacs are still difficult for newbies to pick up. Yes, the learning curve is (arguably) minimal; that's not the point. It's that there is a learning curve at all.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  > The whole point of intuitive design is to realize that you shouldn't make your users "think", insofar as making effortful cognition (i.e., Kahneman's "Type 2" thinking). Defined like this, this makes "intuitive design" a very destructive trend. There's only so far you can go trying to "leverage built-in assumptions of how the world, per users' intuitive mental models". Computing world is not like everyday experience in many important ways, and trying to pretend it is only burdens the user with inconsistent mental models that don't allow them to navigate and grow their intuition. The way I see it, it is the failure of UX design that it tries to hide the nature of computers - instead of making it apparent, so that the users can learn and internalize the important axioms of this different world. Intuition needs to be calibrated to the underlying reality for it to be useful. > Yes, the learning curve is (arguably) minimal; that's not the point. It's that there is a learning curve at all. There's few things in the world that have no learning curve. Almost everything is learned. Almost everything that's important in life is learned either through direct training, or picked up over time from exposure. This is where every UX designer inventing their own "simplifying" abstractions is hurting users: nobody is training them, but software is so inconsistent nowadays that they don't get to learn from exposure either.
  - unsui 5y ago
    You're thinking like a HN reader, rather than the intended audience for the chrome omnibar (i.e., non-specialists) They don't want the abstraction punctured to see the inner workings... Anything less than that creates a Norman Door conflict, whereby their inner mental models conflict with the intended interaction, where they want to pull the door, when the door only works by pushing (yet the door handle basically beckons to be pulled)... Whether it's a good thing or not is besides the point. It's how people work, if you want to reach them at scale.
    - TeMPOraL 5y ago
      > They don't want the abstraction punctured to see the inner workings... > Anything less than that creates a Norman Door conflict, whereby their inner mental models conflict with the intended interaction (...) Here I disagree, because the underlying assumption is that those "intuitive" interfaces are exploiting an existing mental model of the users, like door handles in the physical world. This is not true, because computing is new, and there is no obvious preexisting mental model shared by non-specialists. Part of the job of UI is to enable the users to build correct mental models in the first place - and to the extent they introduce bad abstractions, they fail at this job, leaving users with bad mental models that don't correspond to reality, and don't let them make sensible predictions. Note: I don't disagree with Norman. I disagree with how his work is used to justify current UX design trends.
8ytecoder 5y ago
Why can't we teach this in schools? My high school curriculum covered the basics of the UI elements - window, menu bar, URL and such - in addition to OpenOffice and the basics about internet (this was 1998)
- solveit 5y ago
  To a first approximation, school can't teach anything. Most of your high school class don't remember what DNS is.
  - HWR_14 5y ago
    DNS? Is that a high school level subject?
    - solveit 5y ago
      I was going to say something about how you needed to know what DNS is to know how URLs work and how all this is easily teachable at the high school level, but I realized I'm just out of touch. Amend my comment to say that the previous poster's classmates can't tell apart a search bar and a URL bar either.
      - HWR_14 5y ago
        I also question if you need to know what DNS is to know how URLs work. "This name is how your computer finds the website you are looking for" is sufficient for some level of knowing what a URL is and how it works. And URLs, canonically, don't require DNS to function.
  - moonbug 5y ago
    To a first approximation, you are talking out of your arse.
- jhanschoo 5y ago
  Why should the Internet be accessible only to people who have undergone a high school curriculum that teaches it? That already excludes a large portion of the population.
micromacrofoot 5y ago
They should have basic knowledge, but they won't. The majority of people in the world can barely use computers well at all, and we need to work with this reality. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/
- southerntofu 5y ago
  They can barely use computers because: - computers are uselessly complex even for simple tasks - UI changes are pushed by vendors every other year or so, despite providing zero interesting features for users - there's no IT education, and when there is it's focused on writing a CV on Microsoft Word and sending email, nothing more All three points could be addressed. And having a proper UX that empowers users with ease can help. I don't think all web users need to know what "URL" means or even what's http:// http://, but they could certainly understand the difference between "location" and "search criteria" if UI was good. Even a simple help box could help: "If you know the address you're going to, type it here. Otherwise, click the search button". The kind of UX that's similar enough to phonebooks and maps so users aren't confused.
  - micromacrofoot 5y ago
    It's not remotely as simple as you make it out to be. People have spent decades trying to make this stuff easier.
    - southerntofu 5y ago
      I'm not saying it's simple. I'm merely pointing out that industry players have other interests at heart than those of their users. They are worried about their position and income, not about empowering people.
cletus 5y ago
> I believe that people should have a basic knowledge of the tools they are using. I strongly disagree with this. Does anyone remember what connecting to Wifi looked like? I'm talking 15+ years ago. Here's how it would go: 1. Click a network 2. Choose an option from WEP, WPA, WPA-PSK, WPA2 and WPA-PSK 3. Be prompted with a either a password, a key selection or a box that generates a bunch of keys. Enter what you think the password is somewhere; 4. If it doesn't work, return to (2) and try something else. 5. If it works, you win. That was literally how it worked. And then Apple came along and just prompted you for password. Why? Because the OS can figure out the rest so why ask the user? You can argue "the user should have basic knowledge of the tools they're using". After all, if they're connecting to a WEP network, they should be aware it's not secure. But users don't care about any of that so there's no point in asking them. You're just forcing users to make decisions they don't care about, don't need to know it and aren't interested in. For what? That's what great product design and interface design is. Let's also refer to Joel Spolsky's classic "Choices" [1] where he quotes: > Every time you provide an option, you’re asking the user to make a decision. and then goes on to (correctly) say: > That means they will have to think about something and decide about it. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but, in general, you should always try to minimize the number of decisions that people have to make. [1]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/12/choices/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/12/choices/
- Jiro 5y ago
  >You can argue "the user should have basic knowledge of the tools they're using". After all, if they're connecting to a WEP network, they should be aware it's not secure. >But users don't care about any of that so there's no point in asking them. You're just forcing users to make decisions they don't care about, don't need to know it and aren't interested in. For what? Because if it's not secure, and the lack of security results in someone stealing the user's password and wiping their account, the user will indeed care about it. The user does in fact care about the consequences of the thing he "doesn't care" about; he's just incapable of connecting those. It's like a user not caring about whether there's gas in his car because he knows nothing about cars. He'll care about it when the car stops running.
teemab 5y ago
Why should people have a basic knowledge of their tools? The world would be a better place?
- tremon 5y ago
  What's the alternative? You want soldiers that don't know how to reload their gun? Drivers that don't understand how to use the steering wheel? Writers that don't know what a pencil sharpener is for?
andai 5y ago
We learned about URLs in my grade school, about 20 years ago.
Too 5y ago
Amazing that something as simple as a hierarchical address can be so complicated at the same time. Like why is the domain big endian and the path small endian? Leads to endless confusion and has been a source of many fraud attacks. On the other hand a post address is equally unnatural. Street name-> street Number-> Postcode is not in consecutive order of significance. Yet everybody handles such without problem. A big factor is also unreadable query strings like ?q= instead of simple paths like /search/.
curryst 5y ago
> That being said, I think developers have made some things more difficult to understand than they should be. While people understand what an address is, calling it a URL adds an extra layer to learn (even if it is just terminology). URLs would also be easier to understand if they were more consistent from the end user's perspective, much like someone's mailing address, rather than an engineer's perspective. I really don't think they're more difficult than they need to be to be functional. Users' mental model of "an address" is incoherent and often context dependent. Both a URL and an email address are an "address" to most users. The really lost ones will refer to the search terms they use to get to a web page as the "address". I don't really see URLs as different from addresses. Their in descending size order rather than ascending like physical addresses, but the rest of it is fairly consistent. Most people spend drastically less time thinking about URLs than physical addresses though. We teach children how to break down physical addresses, and we do not teach them to break down URLs. It's entirely unsurprising URLs are more confusing. > It sounds like it makes things easier for the user. Yet all that it really accomplishes is creating confusion for the end user since it fails to differentiate two concepts. Phrased differently, it frees them from the requirement to be able to differentiate those two concepts. Much like how my calculator can give me the square root of a number without me needing to know how to actually calculate that.

by II2II 5y ago

sly010 5y ago

There is always a tradeoff between making something better for power users and making it bullet proof for (ab)users. Indeed, chrome strikes a pretty good balance. Also > bar should be particularly high hehe

unsui 5y ago

> believe that people should have a basic knowledge of the tools they are using The whole point of intuitive design is to realize that you shouldn't make your users "think", insofar as making effortful cognition (i.e., Kahneman's "Type 2" thinking). Good design should leverage built-in assumptions of how the world, per users' intuitive mental models, to create affordances that guide users to the desired interaction and behavior. If a design promotes incoherent behavior, it's not the user that's wrong; getting users to change intuitive behavior requires training and cognitive effort. Sadly, why vim and emacs are still difficult for newbies to pick up. Yes, the learning curve is (arguably) minimal; that's not the point. It's that there is a learning curve at all.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
TeMPOraL 5y ago
> The whole point of intuitive design is to realize that you shouldn't make your users "think", insofar as making effortful cognition (i.e., Kahneman's "Type 2" thinking). Defined like this, this makes "intuitive design" a very destructive trend. There's only so far you can go trying to "leverage built-in assumptions of how the world, per users' intuitive mental models". Computing world is not like everyday experience in many important ways, and trying to pretend it is only burdens the user with inconsistent mental models that don't allow them to navigate and grow their intuition. The way I see it, it is the failure of UX design that it tries to hide the nature of computers - instead of making it apparent, so that the users can learn and internalize the important axioms of this different world. Intuition needs to be calibrated to the underlying reality for it to be useful. > Yes, the learning curve is (arguably) minimal; that's not the point. It's that there is a learning curve at all. There's few things in the world that have no learning curve. Almost everything is learned. Almost everything that's important in life is learned either through direct training, or picked up over time from exposure. This is where every UX designer inventing their own "simplifying" abstractions is hurting users: nobody is training them, but software is so inconsistent nowadays that they don't get to learn from exposure either.
- unsui 5y ago
  You're thinking like a HN reader, rather than the intended audience for the chrome omnibar (i.e., non-specialists) They don't want the abstraction punctured to see the inner workings... Anything less than that creates a Norman Door conflict, whereby their inner mental models conflict with the intended interaction, where they want to pull the door, when the door only works by pushing (yet the door handle basically beckons to be pulled)... Whether it's a good thing or not is besides the point. It's how people work, if you want to reach them at scale.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    > They don't want the abstraction punctured to see the inner workings... > Anything less than that creates a Norman Door conflict, whereby their inner mental models conflict with the intended interaction (...) Here I disagree, because the underlying assumption is that those "intuitive" interfaces are exploiting an existing mental model of the users, like door handles in the physical world. This is not true, because computing is new, and there is no obvious preexisting mental model shared by non-specialists. Part of the job of UI is to enable the users to build correct mental models in the first place - and to the extent they introduce bad abstractions, they fail at this job, leaving users with bad mental models that don't correspond to reality, and don't let them make sensible predictions. Note: I don't disagree with Norman. I disagree with how his work is used to justify current UX design trends.

8ytecoder 5y ago

Why can't we teach this in schools? My high school curriculum covered the basics of the UI elements - window, menu bar, URL and such - in addition to OpenOffice and the basics about internet (this was 1998)

solveit 5y ago
To a first approximation, school can't teach anything. Most of your high school class don't remember what DNS is.
- HWR_14 5y ago
  DNS? Is that a high school level subject?
  - solveit 5y ago
    I was going to say something about how you needed to know what DNS is to know how URLs work and how all this is easily teachable at the high school level, but I realized I'm just out of touch. Amend my comment to say that the previous poster's classmates can't tell apart a search bar and a URL bar either.
    - HWR_14 5y ago
      I also question if you need to know what DNS is to know how URLs work. "This name is how your computer finds the website you are looking for" is sufficient for some level of knowing what a URL is and how it works. And URLs, canonically, don't require DNS to function.
- moonbug 5y ago
  To a first approximation, you are talking out of your arse.
jhanschoo 5y ago
Why should the Internet be accessible only to people who have undergone a high school curriculum that teaches it? That already excludes a large portion of the population.

micromacrofoot 5y ago

They should have basic knowledge, but they won't. The majority of people in the world can barely use computers well at all, and we need to work with this reality. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/

southerntofu 5y ago
They can barely use computers because: - computers are uselessly complex even for simple tasks - UI changes are pushed by vendors every other year or so, despite providing zero interesting features for users - there's no IT education, and when there is it's focused on writing a CV on Microsoft Word and sending email, nothing more All three points could be addressed. And having a proper UX that empowers users with ease can help. I don't think all web users need to know what "URL" means or even what's http:// http://, but they could certainly understand the difference between "location" and "search criteria" if UI was good. Even a simple help box could help: "If you know the address you're going to, type it here. Otherwise, click the search button". The kind of UX that's similar enough to phonebooks and maps so users aren't confused.
- micromacrofoot 5y ago
  It's not remotely as simple as you make it out to be. People have spent decades trying to make this stuff easier.
  - southerntofu 5y ago
    I'm not saying it's simple. I'm merely pointing out that industry players have other interests at heart than those of their users. They are worried about their position and income, not about empowering people.

cletus 5y ago

> I believe that people should have a basic knowledge of the tools they are using. I strongly disagree with this. Does anyone remember what connecting to Wifi looked like? I'm talking 15+ years ago. Here's how it would go: 1. Click a network 2. Choose an option from WEP, WPA, WPA-PSK, WPA2 and WPA-PSK 3. Be prompted with a either a password, a key selection or a box that generates a bunch of keys. Enter what you think the password is somewhere; 4. If it doesn't work, return to (2) and try something else. 5. If it works, you win. That was literally how it worked. And then Apple came along and just prompted you for password. Why? Because the OS can figure out the rest so why ask the user? You can argue "the user should have basic knowledge of the tools they're using". After all, if they're connecting to a WEP network, they should be aware it's not secure. But users don't care about any of that so there's no point in asking them. You're just forcing users to make decisions they don't care about, don't need to know it and aren't interested in. For what? That's what great product design and interface design is. Let's also refer to Joel Spolsky's classic "Choices" [1] where he quotes: > Every time you provide an option, you’re asking the user to make a decision. and then goes on to (correctly) say: > That means they will have to think about something and decide about it. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but, in general, you should always try to minimize the number of decisions that people have to make. [1]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/12/choices/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/12/choices/

Jiro 5y ago
>You can argue "the user should have basic knowledge of the tools they're using". After all, if they're connecting to a WEP network, they should be aware it's not secure. >But users don't care about any of that so there's no point in asking them. You're just forcing users to make decisions they don't care about, don't need to know it and aren't interested in. For what? Because if it's not secure, and the lack of security results in someone stealing the user's password and wiping their account, the user will indeed care about it. The user does in fact care about the consequences of the thing he "doesn't care" about; he's just incapable of connecting those. It's like a user not caring about whether there's gas in his car because he knows nothing about cars. He'll care about it when the car stops running.

teemab 5y ago

Why should people have a basic knowledge of their tools? The world would be a better place?

tremon 5y ago
What's the alternative? You want soldiers that don't know how to reload their gun? Drivers that don't understand how to use the steering wheel? Writers that don't know what a pencil sharpener is for?

andai 5y ago

We learned about URLs in my grade school, about 20 years ago.

Too 5y ago

Amazing that something as simple as a hierarchical address can be so complicated at the same time. Like why is the domain big endian and the path small endian? Leads to endless confusion and has been a source of many fraud attacks. On the other hand a post address is equally unnatural. Street name-> street Number-> Postcode is not in consecutive order of significance. Yet everybody handles such without problem. A big factor is also unreadable query strings like ?q= instead of simple paths like /search/.

curryst 5y ago

> That being said, I think developers have made some things more difficult to understand than they should be. While people understand what an address is, calling it a URL adds an extra layer to learn (even if it is just terminology). URLs would also be easier to understand if they were more consistent from the end user's perspective, much like someone's mailing address, rather than an engineer's perspective. I really don't think they're more difficult than they need to be to be functional. Users' mental model of "an address" is incoherent and often context dependent. Both a URL and an email address are an "address" to most users. The really lost ones will refer to the search terms they use to get to a web page as the "address". I don't really see URLs as different from addresses. Their in descending size order rather than ascending like physical addresses, but the rest of it is fairly consistent. Most people spend drastically less time thinking about URLs than physical addresses though. We teach children how to break down physical addresses, and we do not teach them to break down URLs. It's entirely unsurprising URLs are more confusing. > It sounds like it makes things easier for the user. Yet all that it really accomplishes is creating confusion for the end user since it fails to differentiate two concepts. Phrased differently, it frees them from the requirement to be able to differentiate those two concepts. Much like how my calculator can give me the square root of a number without me needing to know how to actually calculate that.