You said:
Because I’ve seen users do thousands of things I would never have imagined, this makes perfect sense to me. I’ve gained enough experience to be able to “see” the web the way most typical users do. People outside the tech industry. People like your mother (or whoever is the perfect candidate for your “mother tests”).

This reminds me of something I saw on Steve Krug’s web site:
“If you really want to know if your Web site works, ask your next door neighbor to try using it, while you watch. (You bring the beer.)”

He says next door neighbor, you say “mother”.

Good post - thanks for passing on this nugget.

Based on my experiences, lots of people search for a website by typing its name into a search engine. Sometimes the full domain name goes into the search engine.

One person I’ve spoken with believes an e-mail address is what you use to get to a website, so when they want to find a website, they type an e-mail address into a browser’s address field. Then they get confused when a list of search results appear rather than the website that they were expecting. This, however, doesn’t change their behaviour.

Much of these problems come from the default behaviour of web browsers which search when they cannot locate the given address. Browsers and indeed all applications should strive to subtly educate their users.

We’re taught to give users choices, multiple methods of doing the same thing so they can choose the most efficient method for the situation. So we have search, Favorites/Bookmarks, the address bar, and File – Open all to get to a web page. That’s often okay, but we shouldn’t expect all users to use all methods as we’ve designed.

There’s a an insidious cost to learning multiple methods compared to having a single sufficing method. For each new method, the users have to learn it and the rules specific to it (e.g., you don’t have to type “http://”, but you do have type “.com” and sometimes “www.”, except sometimes you can hit Ctrl-Enter). Multiplying that effort, users also have to learn the rules for how to decide between the new method and each known method (Do I know the correct address? Is that really an address I know or just the name? Can I guess it? What’s the form of a proper address anyway?). Then each time they want to do something they have to stop and apply these rules to _decide_ on the method. That slows the users down and distracts them from the task (e.g., see how the Red Sox are doing).

For many users, it is easier to just know one method and use it automatically no matter what

Or sometimes it’s just as easy as for some reason the designer of the search tool has programmed it to steal the cursor-focus.

A lot of search engines do this, and the searchers are not aware of it or not thinking about it (no matter how often they use the site). And they automatically just punch in the website name thinking the cursor is in the browsers URL field when it fact it has been “stolen” and they are writing their website address in the searchbox of the current site.

One lesson to be learned here is that we can’t assume users will adapt to the apps we build. Obviously some users will continually repeat what we perceive as “incorrect” behavior. There have been many occasions where I have heard developers or management say “it is a training issue.” The fact that things can be learned doesn’t mean they will. So as designers of these apps we need to ask ourselves “Are we making inaccurate assumptions about the end user’s desire to learn to do it our way?” The reality is the apps we build should support the way the users think and act. In this case, showing the user something different than a results page with not results would be better. Something like “Google can’t search our intranet. But if you would like to search enter it below”. This would inform the user of his “mistake” while letting him continue on with what he intended to do.

Users fascinate me ;)

On a related note, I hear this particular user activity actually generates a lot of revenue$ for MSFT because it defaults users to their live search. So nice of them to be thinking of their users like that…