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Comment by thewebguyd

7 days ago

> Your smoking gun is to not use the app in the most intuitive and obvious way?

Search isn't the most intuitive and obvious way to everyone. Just adding a search function also isn't an excuse to just totally ignore good UX design and information hierarchy.

I've been a sysadmin my entire career, and still do end-user support occasionally. You'd be surprised how few people use the search function, for anything, on their computers. Just opening the windows start menu and showing them they can search there is like black magic to a frighteningly large amount of people.

I've met fellow Mac users that don't even know spotlight exists, and navigate through the OS and every app via mouse and clicking around.

So yeah, just throwing a search box in your app as an excuse for ignoring the experience of navigating it any other way is bad UX design.

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thewebguyd

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BoorishBears  7 days ago

There's a search bar in the System Settings app, you don't need to know what Spotlight is.

I'm staying with family and just handed my 64 year old mother who has never used a Mac my Macbook Pro with the settings app open, and after explaining the concept of default browser in non-leading language (not mentioning the word default), her first thought was to click Display.

When nothing familiar was there her next thought was to click Search and then type in Browser and she made the connection of "Default Browser" to the concept I mentioned immediately.

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Non-techies are not going to learn the groupings for OS settings any easier than they'll figure out a UX pattern that's been widely accepted for decades: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/search-visible-and-simple/

Of course, who don't know anything about UX tend to assume personal anecdotes map to a much larger sample size than they actually do.

abraxas  5 days ago

yeah, I'm one of those who usually ignores any built in search option. I just default to assuming that it's an adware infested trap that will provide no value, only "engagement". Windows and Google conditioned this behaviour in me over the years.

grishka  7 days ago

By the way, macOS has a super useful search field under "help" in the menu bar. It searches among all menu items in the current app and even shows you where they are. Very non-obvious, but once you try it, you don't understand how you lived without it.