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SCALE: Understanding UnitySCALE: Understanding UnityPosted Mar 5, 2011 16:49 UTC (Sat) by Tet (subscriber, #5433)Parent article: SCALE: Understanding Unity He expressed surprise at some of the questions, most of all the concern about using search to launch applications, instead of a menu, saying that he thought Google had conditioned everyone to search for things as the default way to access content. I'm genuinely staggered by this. How can anyone honestly believe that searching for things should be a default way to access them? You search if you don't know where they are. You're prepared to accept the overhead of doing so, because the benefits of finding what you want are high. But to suggest that searching should be the default way to access content? Yeesh. If I want to read LWN, I enter lwn.net into my location bar, I don't add an extra layer of indirection by searching for LWN on google first. Looks like I won't be using Ubuntu on the desktop, then.
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SCALE: Understanding Unity Posted Mar 5, 2011 19:04 UTC (Sat) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link]
I was about to agree with you, except I realised that to access lwn I actually type "lw<down><enter>" and slashdot as "sl<down><enter>". Which I guess amounts to searching.
I wouldn't mind a search thing for applications. I indeed have the problem listed, I know the name of the app but can't find it in the menu. System > Preferences doesn't even fit on the screen. I know MacOSX has something called spotlight, that always looked cool when people used.
SCALE: Understanding Unity Posted Mar 6, 2011 4:33 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
What we really need isn't searching, per se: it's incremental searching, s you don't need to type in more than a couple of letters of the search term. Thankfully a sort of crude crippled isearch has caught on in web browsers in recent years and is percolating slowly into other programs. (It still is a very, very long way from real isearch, but it's better than nothing.)
SCALE: Understanding Unity Posted Mar 8, 2011 13:13 UTC (Tue) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link] I was about to agree with you, except I realised that to access lwn I actually type "lw<down><enter>" and slashdot as "sl<down><enter>". Which I guess amounts to searching. I wouldn't mind a search thing for applications. Take this further and I believe you get to what the Mozilla people called Ubiquity, which was itself based on a product called Enso.
SCALE: Understanding Unity Posted Mar 5, 2011 23:24 UTC (Sat) by andrel (subscriber, #5166) [Link] When you want a directory listing, do you type "/usr/bin/ls", or do you just type "ls" and let the shell search for the appropriate executable? Most of us already use search to launch applications.
SCALE: Understanding Unity Posted Mar 8, 2011 1:09 UTC (Tue) by raof (subscriber, #57409) [Link] It looks like a lot of users don't use URLs to access websites. Witness the time when ReadWriteWeb happened to percolate up to the top Google result for Facebook. Starting with comment 3, practically all the comments are how do I log in to this new Facebook interface? Why is it red? JUST LET ME IN!. So much so that they updated the article to put a big, bold paragraph directing people to facebook.com.It wouldn't surprise me at all if user-testing found that users will do this with applications when you give them the opportunity.
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