
Some People Can’t Read URLs - bpung
http://jonoscript.wordpress.com/2010/02/18/some-people-cant-read-urls/
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telemachos
I'm completely torn about this issue.

On the one hand, I know very well just how incompetent many people are with
computers. A random example: last week I nearly bit off my own hand while
watching someone use a browser while giving a presentation. Every time she
wanted to go to a different webpage, she would fumble around for a minute, get
confused and then _quit the browser_. After restarting and letting it load her
homepage (not Google), she would use the search bar to look for her goal.

So, ok, computers are tricky. Programmers are unhelpful and unkind. Designers
focus on flash and not helpful visual cues. Blah, blah blah. But c'mon, why
would anyone think that you need to quit the application to get somewhere
else? You don't quit your email program to read or write another email. You
don't leave your house to visit another room. You don't unplug the
refrigerator (or even close the damn door) to find a the cheese when you
already have the mustard.

Sometimes I feel sympathetic, but often I think people are just stupid and
lazy.

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elblanco
You know, if this is so common, it would seem to me to be an opportunity to
setup a common keyword search system for major sites. If everybody is typing
in "Facebook login" with the intended semantics meaning "taking me to the
facebook login page" then it might make sense to use this information. Tailor
the systems to the user's semantics instead of making the users learn new
semantics.

> The idea of navigating by URL is so fundamental to how the Web works that
> it’s hard to imagine abstracting it away.

I have to disagree. For a very long time people got around quite nicely on AOL
with nothing more than instructions to type "go facebook" and they'd be taken
to the appropriate content. There's no reason that browsers couldn't be
configured to point to a similar service by default. Typing the name of a
popular site is unambiguous and it should redirect the user to that site.

Kinda like a meta-DNS.

~~~
samdk
_"Typing the name of a popular site is unambiguous and it should redirect the
user to that site."_

Firefox has done this for a very long time. It uses Google. Most other modern
web browsers behave similarly.

~~~
elblanco
The problem the post (and the post this one references) is making is that
google is an ambiguous solution. A search for "Facebook login" _likely_ brings
up the login page for Facebook as the first hit, but it's not guaranteed. If,
for some reason, the rankings change, and something else happens to end up at
the top of the rankings, that's where it goes to.

The users (and you) are behaving as if the semantics of that behavior patterns
mean "take me to the Facebook page". Firefox & Google on the other hand uses
the semantics of this to mean "go to the first ranked result of the search".

It's like going to a vending machine to get a candy bar (Snickers). The one
you want happens to be at "a1". So you insert your money and hit the buttons
for "a1". For a year you get the the Snickers bar you wanted. The semantics of
"a1" mean "Snickers" to you, and the rest of the office, by this point -- but
to the machine "a1" always means "a1".

Now, Joe, the vending machine guy decides to restock the machine one day and
just so happen to put the Snickers at "b4" and the Pork Rinds at "a1". So the
next day you come in to get your mid-afternoon Snickers and you dutifully hit
"a1" just as you've trained yourself to do. Because remember, to you "a1"
means "Snickers". The machine sees "a1" and thinks to itself "retrieve
whatever item is at a1" not "retrieve the Snickers for samdk". You start to
eat your Snickers, thinking to yourself "wow Mars Corporation really changed
the packaging." You take your first bite and spit it out "WTF!!!! These
Snickers are _horrible_!!!".

What I'm proposing is that if Joe the Vending machine guy sees that everyone
equates "a1" with "Snickers" then instead of mapping keycodes to positions in
the machine, he maps them to particular products. "A1" will always be
"Snickers". So even if he moves it to "b4" inside the machine, the mapping of
"a1" to "Snickers" still holds and the machine give you what you mean, not
what it means.

