Can’t find Google? You are not alone
Here is an interesting piece of data via Jakob Nielson:
If you thought it’s easy to get to Google, think again. In our current round of usability research, only 76% of users who expressed a desire to run a Google search were successful. In other words, 1/4 of users who wanted to use Google couldn’t do so. (Instead, they either completely failed to get to any search engine or ended up running their query on a different search engine — usually whatever type-in field happened to be at hand.)
I think this is a good reminder for the tech savvy among us that a lot of the things we take for granted are actually pretty hard on a lot of people.
I used to work with a guy who would enter ‘google’ into the search field of the AOL homepage to search for Google, then click on the link and finally search on google. The idea that he could type in the URL directly had never occurred to him.
This is also important in the context of many of the discussions we are having these days. Take comment fragmentation, for example. Sure, its a huge issue for those of us who ‘produce content’ on the web, but lets remember that 99% of web users never even think of leaving a comment and that 25% of those would probably not be able to figure out how to do it if they wanted to.
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