It boggles the mind that so many conclusions are drawn without ever asking a single user.
There’s a gazillion alternative explanation for both situations, some of which do not boil down to users are stupid. Tiny screens that don’t allow you to easily tell which one’s the URL bar and which one’s the search bar. Laggy, confusing input. Touch widgets that aren’t fat enough. Good ol’ mistakes – have you honestly never pasted an ebay URL in the search box instead of the URL bar?
And without examining the frequency of these mistakes. The amazon search bar autocompletes give us very little indication of how often an entry has been seen (clearly https://google.com is more common than other URLs, but we have no idea how common it is as a fraction of all searches).
I see an implicit, glossed-over assumption that autocomplete is only powered by user input. What if autocomplete is also powered by product descriptions?
Yes, it’s pretty much the 60+ method in my impression. I hope kids these days know better.
But even when you know the difference, there is one more hurdle: My memory, at least, is not just case insensitive, but TLD insensitive: Was it .com, .org or .net again? Sometimes, I guess wrong, and find a shady spam site insetad. I need a TLD resolver, and I use both search engines and Wikipedia for that.
I really hate the TLD proliferation. Now you can’t even just assume a company is .com, now it might be .pizza. Or one of those godawful dots in the middle of the word. Those are the worst.
I’ve used search for things I was even quite confident of just because of that.
And then there’s google with its all-the-same icons per app. I’ve put location searches into the playstore app far too many times. Yeah it’s the same UI system, so you can use your existing knowledge. But I don’t want to accidentally insert stuff into the wrong app because its icons and UI are so similar.
It boggles the mind that so many conclusions are drawn without ever asking a single user.
There’s a gazillion alternative explanation for both situations, some of which do not boil down to users are stupid. Tiny screens that don’t allow you to easily tell which one’s the URL bar and which one’s the search bar. Laggy, confusing input. Touch widgets that aren’t fat enough. Good ol’ mistakes – have you honestly never pasted an ebay URL in the search box instead of the URL bar?
And without examining the frequency of these mistakes. The amazon search bar autocompletes give us very little indication of how often an entry has been seen (clearly https://google.com is more common than other URLs, but we have no idea how common it is as a fraction of all searches).
Seconded. Seems like blaming the users, instead of questioning the potential implications of the design mantra of simplifying everything, is easier.
I see an implicit, glossed-over assumption that autocomplete is only powered by user input. What if autocomplete is also powered by product descriptions?
I tried a whole bunch of prefixes to generate URLs and they all appear to be ones that appear in Amazon product descriptions.
It’s even worse. Most users are unable to input URL when prompted verbally. They use the search field on their home page.
Yes, it’s pretty much the 60+ method in my impression. I hope kids these days know better.
But even when you know the difference, there is one more hurdle: My memory, at least, is not just case insensitive, but TLD insensitive: Was it .com, .org or .net again? Sometimes, I guess wrong, and find a shady spam site insetad. I need a TLD resolver, and I use both search engines and Wikipedia for that.
High school computer science teacher here, and I can assure you the kids these days do not know better, unfortunately.
More like 50+, at least around me. They also love to share their passwords with me. :shrug:
I really hate the TLD proliferation. Now you can’t even just assume a company is .com, now it might be .pizza. Or one of those godawful dots in the middle of the word. Those are the worst.
I’ve used search for things I was even quite confident of just because of that.
And then there’s google with its all-the-same icons per app. I’ve put location searches into the playstore app far too many times. Yeah it’s the same UI system, so you can use your existing knowledge. But I don’t want to accidentally insert stuff into the wrong app because its icons and UI are so similar.
This happens with credit card numbers too. Advise filters and validations on human input for sensitive numbers in and around order placement.